Ambitious Goals, Modest Results for Museum of California Art

The new Pasadena Museum of California Art has its public debut today with the opening of four modest exhibitions. The shows feature landscape paintings from 1905 to 1925, a distinctive variant on Surrealist art from the 1930s, geometric abstraction from the late 1950s to the early 1960s and, finally, a sliver of Conceptual art in the 1970s.

Together they suggest an extremely wide range of artistic production during California’s 20th century. Because artists working in Los Angeles since the 1980s have made the city an internationally acknowledged powerhouse for new art, think of these unassuming exhibitions as a bit of the back story.

Overall, though, the debut offers a classic good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that, for the first time, a museum in L.A. is making the exceptionally rich history of art produced in the region a centerpiece of its activities. The bad news is--well, pretty much the same thing. A legitimate need was identified, but it’s doubtful that this project will (or can) fulfill it.

There are five art museums of international stature in L.A. Art outside the United States and made before the 20th century is, with some notable exceptions, the great strength of three of them: the Getty, the Huntington and the Norton Simon Museum.

The other two are the natural homes for art made in California over the last 150 years. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has the nation’s most significant encyclopedic program west of the Mississippi. The same holds for the Museum of Contemporary Art in the field of postwar work. But despite some individual exhibitions and limited areas of collecting, neither LACMA nor MOCA has yet achieved anything close to critical mass in addressing the resonant artistic past and present of its own region. Accomplishing that requires smart, courageous, focused patronage.

If LACMA and MOCA haven’t done it, who will? Enter the Pasadena Museum of California Art--the PMCA--which was quietly founded by little-known collectors Robert and Arlene Oltman. (An architect, Robert Oltman made his fortune in the personal storage-unit business.) Their fledgling museum is a response to an obvious deficit. Though it’s certainly enthusiastic, little indicates that the response is adequate.

The museum is housed in a pleasant, unassuming new building at 490 E. Union St., just north of Colorado Boulevard and around the corner from the Pacific Asia Museum. Designed by Culver City’s MDA Johnson Favaro Architecture and Urban Design, the PMCA has just 8,000 square feet of mostly raw, warehouse-like exhibition space on its second floor. (The tall ground-floor parking garage is poised to become a comparably sized gallery at an unspecified point in the future.)

Specialty museums are often launched when a noteworthy art collection can’t find an appropriate existing home. This one, however, has no permanent collection to speak of. It opens less as a museum than as a Kunsthalle--a space for temporary art exhibitions.

The opening shows, each organized by a different independent curator, are loosely linked under the title “On-Ramps: Transitional Moments in California Art.” Each includes some strong work, although none is large enough to offer a definitive study of its subject. (Only one has a catalog, which at 48 pages is certainly modest.) They’re like preliminary sketches for exhibitions you might someday like to see fully realized.

The most substantial of them sports the most unwieldy title. “Post Surrealism: Genesis and Equilibrium/Pictures From the Cerebral World” was organized by critic Michael Duncan and is scheduled to travel to Utah State University in Logan in October. It brings together 45 paintings, drawings and prints by nine artists, as well as two cases of documentation and ephemera.

Post Surrealism was conceived by painters Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg in 1934 as a rational yet enigmatic retort to the emphasis on the irrational and the unconscious in European Surrealism. Courting Aristotle more than Freud, their symbol-laden pictures of eternal cycles of love and death are informed by montage techniques inspired by Hollywood.

Post Surrealism stands as the most compelling early movement in Modern L.A. art. Among other things, it’s distinctive for the central role played by women--Lundeberg and Grace Clements--which is a far cry from the common misogynist antics of their Parisian predecessors.

Yet nearly seven decades after its birth, the parameters, objectives, exhibition history, critical reception and other basic aspects of its history await full examination. (In last year’s catalog to “Made in California,” LACMA’s sprawling history of 20th century art in the state, the term “Post Surrealism” didn’t even rate a listing in the index.) Duncan has assembled a provocative group of paintings, including an especially good group by the underrated Danish expatriate Knud Merrild, while the slim catalog reprints some important early texts.

Hovering like ghosts in the conceptual background of these evocative paintings are Walter and Louise Arensberg, whose staggering collection of European Dada and Surrealist art was regularly open to visitors at their Hollywood home in the 1930s and after. (They also helped support artists hit hard by the Great Depression, including Merrild.) The Arensbergs’ famous patronage of Marcel Duchamp likewise comes to mind in another section of “On-Ramps.”

“Hard Edge to Finish Fetish,” organized by critic Peter Frank, assembles 10 paintings and seven sculptures in which clean, crisp color abstraction can yield a sleek look that gives eroticism an industrial glint. Duchamp’s mechanistic meditation on thwarted sexual consummation, “The Large Glass,” lurks in the ancestry of DeWain Valentine’s hot-pink sculpture, which is part overgrown child’s toy, part voluptuous android, and of Craig Kauffman’s slick painting on Plexiglas, where interlocking forms suggest a copulating machine.

Duchamp’s gamesmanship informs a pedestal sculpture by Judy Gerowitz (before she changed her last name to Chicago), in which six little triangles and six small square columns line up like soldiers on a board. Fabricated in clear, sterile plastic, the triangles and columns fuse sexual symbolism with a game of chess.

This section’s jolt of flashy glamour separates the two remaining shows, which are more austere. Three dozen old-fashioned landscape paintings by Edgar Payne, Granville Redmond, Guy Rose and other stalwarts of the genre are featured in “Light to Form,” a survey of California Impressionism and other mostly outdoor painting organized by art historian and dealer Nancy Moure. Adventurous, process-oriented art from the 1970s--where color seems to be nearly taboo--is assembled in “Beyond Boundaries: Bay Area Conceptual Art. “

Organized by curator and former gallerist Thomas Solomon, this last section is the only one that strays from Southern California. The 30 works range from Lynn Hershman’s classified ad, which surreptitiously seeks an unsuspecting art collaborator, to Paul Kos’ short, witty film of the artist’s failed attempt to lasso a chunk of landscape with a rope. Western art gets an odd new twist.

Except for “Post Surrealism,” these small, fragmentary shows do not come with catalogs or other documentation. Think of them as tasty samplers that, come September, will disappear back into the void. Their sketchy, ephemeral quality doesn’t alleviate the larger problem that the PMCA presumes to address--it is instead symptomatic of it.

True, it’s the Oltmans’ money, not mine. But the museum is also a tax-exempt public corporation, not a private project. So far, the PMCA has reportedly spent $5 million on real estate, building design, construction, staff salaries, insurance, opening shows and other requirements of institutional infrastructure that come with establishing a new museum. (There is no endowment.) That’s $5 million to duplicate what already exists elsewhere in town.

Most important, every dollar spent on institutional infrastructure is a dollar that cannot be spent on California art--which is the declared focus of this endeavor. Imagine the stellar art collection that amount of money could have bought, or the significant exhibitions it could have funded. It’s a shame the effort and expense in launching the PMCA, which appears unlikely ever to have a major profile, were not brought to bear on leveraging California art at LACMA and MOCA, which already do. There, the Oltmans might have made a substantial difference.

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Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., (626) 568-3665, through Sept. 1. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Adults, $5; seniors and students, $3; children under 12, free.