Huntington Acquires Works By Shaw, Indiana, And Breughel

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Huntington, a cultural institution in the Los Angeles area encompassing an art museum, library, and botanical garden, has announced its 2026 art collection gifts funded by the Huntington's Art Collectors' Council.

Each year, the council selects works for acquisition based on recommendations from the museum's curators. The five pieces acquired through the Art Collectors' Council span the 16th to the 21st centuries and include a variety of media. These new additions complement the museum's existing collections and forge connections with its library and garden.

The earliest acquisition is a 16th-century majolica plate produced in Deruta, Italy, a major center for majolica ceramics since the Renaissance. This dish is one of only 10 known Deruta pieces featuring verses by Italian poet Francesco Petrarch and aligns with the library's rare editions of Petrarch's works. The collection also includes a nearly 10-foot-long hanging scroll painted by Chinese artist Zhang Chenglong around the turn of the 17th century. This work depicts Mount Tai, one of China's Five Sacred Mountains, guiding the viewer's eye along pilgrimage routes to its summit. Such traditional landscape paintings inspired the Huntington's Chinese Garden, and the scroll will be central to a planned exhibition of Chinese garden paintings in 2029.

A still life by Jan Breughel the Elder, son of Flemish Renaissance painter Peter Breughel the Elder, created around 1620, marks the first European floral still life to join the Huntington's collection. Featuring a circlet of flowers alongside imported luxury items such as a string of pearls and a Japanese lacquer box, it connects clearly to the institution's celebrated botanical garden. Another addition is a 1933 copper and gilt sculpture by California modernist artist Sargent Claude Johnson. Drawing on West African traditional masks, this work is one of many by Johnson that celebrate Black American life and beauty. It will join two other pieces by Johnson already in the Huntington's collection, as well as works from the Harlem Renaissance by artists like Charles White and Romare Bearden. Johnson was the subject of an exhibition at the Huntington in 2024.

The fifth work, Raqib Shaw's Space Between Dreams – The Pragmatic Pessimist ( 2022–23 ), portrays the Kashmiri British artist in a vast frozen landscape, burning books for warmth. This piece, inspired partly by Mughal miniature painting, also draws from the Huntington's collection of 18th-century Beauvais tapestries. This gift reunites it with its companion work, Space Between Dreams – The Perseverant Prophet, which the Huntington acquired in 2025. Additionally, the Huntington received several other significant gifts in 2026 beyond those from the Art Collectors' Council, including a version of Robert Indiana's iconic LOVE sculpture, a collection of watercolors by American modernists like Joseph Stella and John Marin, and a pair of photograms by Abstract Expressionist artist Theodore Roszak.

Source: ARTnews

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