The Huntington expands

In a space previously used for storage, a five-room, 5,400-square-foot addition to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens will open to the public July 19, the museum announced Tuesday. The expanded Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art will showcase works from the country’s Colonial period to the mid-20th century, with nearly 100 new acquisitions of 20th century art.

Among the new pieces are Arthur Dove’s “Lattice and Awning,” an abstract oil on canvas from 1941, and George Bellows’ “Summer Fantasy,” an oil-on-canvas landscape created in 1924, a year before the artist’s death at age 42.

“We’re deeply committed to displaying and growing our collections of American art,” said Kevin Salatino, the Huntington’s director of Art Collections. “I’d like to think we are among the finest collections and most representative of American art on the West Coast.”

Of the Dove and Bellows paintings, Salatino said, “We’ve strengthened our collection dramatically with these acquisitions. We’ve been weak on early 20th century American modernism, and the Dove piece fills a big hole and acts as a sort of bridge to postwar abstraction.”

The Huntington is L.A.’s first public collection to own a piece of Dove’s work.

Bellows, Salatino said, “is one of the great American artists of the 20th century. ‘Summer Fantasy,’ I call it the masterpiece of his last years. It fills a localized gap, the lack of a Bellows landscape, which is what he is most brilliant at.”