L.A. Art Museum Gets Picassos, Klees in Lazarof Gift, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the Los Angles Time, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art said it's been given a major collection of modern art, including 130 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and other 20th-century masters.

The collection was assembled over decades by composer Henri Lazarof and his wife, Janice. Henri Lazarof, 75, was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, trained in Israel and Rome, and served since 1959 on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is now an emeritus professor. Janice Lazarof is a daughter of the late Los Angeles banker and philanthropist Mark Taper.

The ``fractional and partial'' gift, in which title passes to the museum over a number of years, includes 20 paintings and drawings by Picasso, seven bronze sculptures and a painting by Alberto Giacometti, 11 drawings by Klee, two versions of ``Bird in Space'' by sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and late 19th-century works by Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.

``It's a sea change in terms of what we can present to the public,'' said Stephanie Barron, the museum's senior curator of modern art. Its current holdings of modern art are ``good but finite,'' she said.

The Lazarof collection gives the museum several firsts, including its first Brancusi, first Willem de Kooning and Barbara Hepworth sculptures and its first Lyonel Feininger and Giacometti paintings. Barron said she had watched the Lazarof collection evolve for 25 years.

``Each year it's a little more and a little more,'' she said. ``It's exciting. It's a culmination of years of hard work.''

She noted that the Bauhaus works by Kandinsky, Klee and others in the Lazarof collection are a good complement to the museum's already strong holdings in German expressionism.

The Lazarof collection will go on view at the museum beginning Jan. 13 and eventually will be installed as part of the museum's permanent collection.