LACMA GAINS PRIZED COLLECTION OF MEXICAN ART.

Byline: Reed Johnson and Valerie Kuklenski Daily News Staff Writers

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired one of the nation's largest and most important private collections of works by modern Mexican artists including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Jose Clemente Orozco.

The collection is being donated to LACMA by the Lewin family of Palm Springs, sources familiar with the arrangements said.

German-born Bernard Lewin, a Jewish refugee of Nazi Germany, is one of the world's preeminent collectors of modern Mexican artists. His personal collection reportedly includes hundreds of works by Tamayo, Orozco, Siqueiros, Carlos Merida and other Mexican artists, many of whom Bernard Lewin knew personally.

His collection of works by Tamayo (1899-1991), a painter, muralist and graphic artist who spent much of his career in New York and Paris, is considered particularly extensive and significant.

LACMA is expected to unveil selected works from the new collection at a press conference this morning presided over by LACMA's president and chief executive officer, Andrea Rich, its director, Graham Beal, and representatives of the Lewin family. Neither the number of works involved nor their approximate market value was revealed.

The fate of the Lewin collection has been a subject of much interest and speculation in Southland art circles in recent years. A number of museums, including LACMA, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Palm Springs Museum and the new Latin American Art Museum in Long Beach, have been courting the Lewin family in hopes of procuring some of its holdings.

``They (LACMA) are very, very fortunate to get his Tamayo collection,'' said Cynthia MacMullan, director of collections and special exhibitions at the Latin American Art Museum. ``He (Lewin) was one of the very first in the '50s who went to Mexico and began to recognize what was happening, what Tamayo's contribution was, and he was one of the first collectors in Los Angeles.''

MacMullan said the new collection will augment LACMA's existing holdings of Mexican and Latin American art, including some of Rivera's cubist paintings from early in his career.

``It's important that LACMA has a very good representational collection of Latin American art,'' MacMullan said. ``This will substantiate the pieces that they do have.''

Collectively, the four artists - along with Rivera's third wife, the iconoclastic painter Frida Kahlo - formed the core of Mexico's artistic renaissance of the early and mid-20th century. Stylistically, they bridged the traditions of European art with the folk art of Mexico's indigenous peoples. Tamayo was the least politically partisan; his three contemporaries all were actively committed socialists.

Orozco (1883-1949) began working as a political cartoonist during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. His early murals, which expressed solidarity with the peasant classes, were highly controversial; some were subsequently destroyed or altered. His later murals were monumental both in scale and content, sometimes contrasting idealized images of pre-Columbian utopias with those of modern capitalist purgatories.

Siqueiros (1896-1974) had an extensive and controversial association with Los Angeles. A dedicated union organizer and a militant communist, he was imprisoned for his political beliefs in 1930 in Mexico City. After his release from prison, he was placed under house arrest and two years later fled Mexico for Los Angeles.

While a resident here, he painted a number of striking portraits and three murals: ``Street Meeting'' at the Chouinard School of Art, which has since been destroyed; ``Portrait of Present-Day Mexico,'' at a private residence in Santa Monica; and ``American Tropical,'' painted on an Olvera Street meeting hall.

The latter mural's provocative imagery, of an American Indian being crucified beneath a screaming eagle possibly symbolizing the United States, so enraged Los Angeles government officials that they ordered it painted over. The 18-feet-by-80-feet mural is being restored by the Getty Conservation Institute.

Siqueiros also had his first solo exhibition in the United States at Los Angeles' Stendahl Ambassador Galleries. Director Josef von Sternberg and director-producer Dudley Murphy were among his celebrity patrons.

Rivera (1886-1957), a member of the Mexican Communist Party, studied painting in Europe from 1907 to 1921, where he familiarized himself with the cubist styles of Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. In 1921, he returned to Mexico and played a significant role in the revival of mural painting in projects sponsored by the government.

He was commissioned to paint a fresco in 1933 for the new RCA building in Rockefeller Center in New York, but the work was ordered destroyed because it featured a portrait of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

The new collection will be showcased in a special exhibition this fall at LACMA.