The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art (LRMA) opens this week on St. Petersburg College's Tarpon Springs campus. Touring the facility left me genuinely excited, not just because of the technological innovations and potential for education, but mostly because of something quite simple.
I found myself turned on to Abraham Rattner's paintings in a way I hadn't been before. There's a vast difference between superficial seeing and internalizing the art experience in such a way that we come away with colors, emotional responses or cerebral cues that change something in us.
Credit Executive Director Lynn Whitelaw, former curator of Education at Tampa Museum of Art, an articulate and passionate spokesperson for the new museum and his subjects. Whitelaw has a firm grasp of how to make this museum work and be memorable.
Though the museum is named for two artists, it features three. The principals are famed figurative expressionist painter Abraham Rattner (1893-1978) and his stepson, Allen Leepa, whose mother was Rattner's second wife, artist Esther Gentle Rattner. Her art, some of it whimsical sculpture, completes the trio.
Longtime Tarpon Springs resident Allen Leepa and wife Isabelle are LRMA's prime movers. An abstract painter with substantial national and international exhibitions, Leepa, awarded a Columbia University doctorate in art and Fulbright Scholarship, was a University of Michigan fine arts faculty member for 38 years. In 1948 he authored The Challenge of Modern Art, now in its third printing. I was particularly fascinated by Leepa's painting, "Tree Landscape" (1940), where his brief contact with Hans Hoffman seems evident.
Abraham Rattner was a painter working through major 20th century styles from realism to cubism to surrealism, after an early preoccupation with the human figure. After World War II, he developed a passion for spiritual and humanist themes, at times contrary to art world critical voices interested in "new" art. He was an expatriate in Paris of the 1920s and '30s, and his final decades brought him tapestry, stained glass and architectural commissions from American synagogues. As LRMA's intelligently chosen and mounted exhibition demonstrates, he was a superb colorist when drips and angst dominated the American canvas.
In addition to reviving Rattner's well-deserved place in American art history, Whitelaw's mission is "viewing the 20th century from a 21st century perspective." Interactive galleries enable the viewer to understand art from a formal perspective and within its historical period. Permanent and changing galleries will showcase prominent local artists or other overlooked 20th century artists and will attract collectors and scholars.
The Rattner collection began its convoluted journey in the early 1990s. Former Tampa Museum of Art director Andy Maass, who understood and was committed to the collection's potential, remembers Leepa approaching him with the idea of donating 2,500 works, essentially creating "a museum within a museum." When Maass left, new director Emily Kass believed that placing such focus on single artists was contrary to the museum's generalist mission. After TMA mounted several major Rattner and Leepa exhibitions, they donated the collection to St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College) which had finalized an agreement with the Leepas.
Kass reports that the museum kept three works in a "pretty fluid agreement." Among these is "Clowns and Kings" (1944), an important Rattner painting now on loan to LRMA for the opening exhibition. Considering that it was a part of the Leepa's donated collection, I hope it will eventually be gifted to LRMA, perhaps with borrowing privileges extended to TMA.
In addition to donating their entire 6,000-piece collection, including works by such artists as Hans Hoffman, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, and Marc Chagall and Goya, the Leepas contributed $2.5-million, matched in part by the state of Florida. The aesthetic and scholarly bonanza comprises uncatalogued boxes and portfolios plus first-edition works by Rattner's close friend and collaborator, Henry Miller. It includes 3,000 Rattners, 1,500 Leepas and 500 Gentles. A recent anonymous donor contributed 1,500 prints, multiples by prominent contemporary artists and valued at $1.5-million. Along with these holdings, Whitelaw envisions building an endowment of $1.5-million.
By design, the unique triple focus (with six of the eight small galleries reserved for Rattner) is a slight deviation from recent single-artist theme institutions. But such museums (like the Dali) face continual challenges to stay fresh and maintain breadth. One solution is to mount contemporary exhibitions capable of luring the public and tourists for return visits.
In this respect, Whitelaw achieved a coup, requesting and receiving permission from the Picasso Foundation to create a full-scale digitally transferred reproduction of "Guernica," Picasso's powerful mural-size denunciation of fascists during the Spanish Civil War. It is considered one of Picasso's greatest achievements and one of the 20th century's most important works. LRMA is the only facility in the world to gain permission (through a five-year/$5,000 contract). Synchronized illumination will light the art during audio explanations.
LRMA seems intent from the outset to widen its scope and feature what its director unabashedly calls the "wow factor." This means anything from technological innovations (some awaiting funding) to occasional purple gallery walls (we'll reserve judgment here).
Situated on a Klosterman Road hilltop, an eighth of a mile west of U.S. 19's nonstop strip mall, the northern Pinellas County museum is highly accessible to Pinellas residents as well as Hillsborough and Pasco counties. Though geography is always critical, it will hardly determine the success of this new museum, which is likely to attract tourists. Tarpon Springs as been a culturally under-served area though its cultural center has done an admirable job of holding down the fort.
Tarpon Springs architect Edward C. Hoffman designed a ship's prow as curb-appeal motif for the multi-use 53,000–square-foot fine arts building housing the campus library, art studios, administrative offices and future gift shop. Only 9,000 square feet are dedicated to the museum and galleries. Interestingly, the museum entrance at the back is nearly obscured because the building coils in on itself, metamorphosing into a perfect counterpoint to the boldly stated sea-faring theme. As such, the surprisingly understated entrance is a fitting metaphor for Rattner, whose art had been very well known and which now deserves further art historical scholarship and attention.
Adrienne M. Golub can be reached by e-mail at adrienne.golub@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2002.