A monumental shame in so many ways

Americans don’t much like art. They never have. Art remains a minority interest, despite exponential growth in the size (and number) of museums and the market during the past 50 years.

That popular indifference pretty much explains the wanton destruction last week of one of the best public murals in Los Angeles. Between 1978 and 1987, Kent Twitchell painted a gigantic work on the north side of an older downtown office building at 1031 S. Hill St., near the intersection with Olympic Boulevard. (It’s half a dozen or so blocks from Staples Center.) “The Ed Ruscha Monument” was the most important painting by the noted muralist. Now it’s gone, painted over without authorization in a flat, putty-brown color, the way one might redecorate an unfashionable den.

The news is like hearing of the unexpected death of a casual friend. I’ve been bouncing around various stages of grief -- denial, bargaining, depression -- with acceptance nowhere in sight. Currently I’m stuck in anger: The blackguards who did this should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Precisely who ordered the vandalism -- and why -- is not yet known. But Twitchell, who was in the early steps of restoring the weather-worn work with conservator Nathan Zakheim, was not notified of the devastating plan.

Federal and state laws prohibit the intentional ruin of a work of art. The Visual Artists Rights Act was passed by Congress “to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature,” according to the 1990 bill. The precedent-setting California Art Preservation Act makes it a crime to “intentionally commit, or authorize the intentional commission of, any physical defacement, mutilation, alteration, or destruction of a work of fine art.”

Ironically the latter was signed into California law Aug. 1, 1979, not long after Twitchell began his arduous, nine-year odyssey in painting the six-story-tall “Ruscha” mural. It was the first major work he launched after finishing his master’s degree at Otis College of Art and Design. (His work was featured this spring in “Otis: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art,” a survey exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.)

Twitchell’s Otis thesis show also took the form of a mural -- “The Holy Trinity With the Virgin,” painted on the side of a building on the school’s former MacArthur Park campus. That ambitious wall painting established a format that Twitchell has employed many times since, including for the Ruscha image. Brightly illuminated figures, painted in an acute Realist style, are shown frontally, standing before a blank field and cropped at the shins. Iconic Pop art giants, they seem to emerge like a mirage from the surrounding landscape.

Christian themes are common in Twitchell’s art, and “The Holy Trinity With the Virgin” is a clear if rather jejune example. Its three figures are dressed in white laboratory coats, signaling the modern triumph of science over religion. Actors were chosen as models, and the 1950s television roles for which they became famous describe their new personae in the painting.

At the left is Jan Clayton, the sweet single mom in the original “Lassie,” who assumes the guise of Mary. Next to her is Clayton Moore -- God portrayed as the Lone Ranger, a heroic force for good but whose identity remains a mystery. At the right is Billy Gray, the young man who played Bud Anderson on “Father Knows Best” and was thus the son of the all-knowing patriarch.

Twitchell inserted the Holy Ghost between Father and Son, just as Masaccio, Botticelli and many other Italian Renaissance artists routinely did. While they used a dove to represent the spirit, in the Otis mural the symbolism assumes the nonfigurative form of contemporary abstraction: The Holy Ghost is an expanse of luminous white space, just large enough to accommodate a figure between the Lone Ranger and Bud Anderson.

“The Ed Ruscha Monument” employed a similar style and composition, but it dropped the coy and even somewhat irritating gamesmanship of the grad school exercise. (The Otis mural, by extension, obliquely transforms TV Guide into a Bible.) By 1978, Ruscha’s stature was such that he was routinely identified as the quintessential L.A. artist. He actually was a Pop art giant, and Twitchell’s monumental mural represented him as one.

The painting venerated that historic significance, and it did so while taking splendid advantage of the urban site. Part of the mural’s success came from the way it used the materiality of the huge wall and its physical surroundings, starting with its mode of address. Through scale and placement it spoke to an audience largely passing by in cars, rather than on foot.

Appropriately, the painting showed Ruscha at the western end of a vast horizontal expanse. The deep brown rectangular wall spread out behind him, like a cross between a billboard and a movie screen. The figure was bathed in strong light -- coming in at a sharp angle from the West, of course, rather than the East -- and it caused the figure to cast a big, stark shadow. Ruscha loomed above an actual parking lot of the type he so famously commemorated in his own radically influential art.

Given Twitchell’s penchant for Christian symbolism -- not to mention Ruscha’s own frequent and witty use of traditional Catholic iconography -- I’ve always thought of this exceptional mural as a depiction of the artist as a secular new Adam. He’s the first man, from whom all others follow.

“Sweetest Eve, where are we?” the puzzled man exclaimed in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 fantasy, “The New Adam and Eve,” as he looked around at the strange mystery of earthly life unfolding before him. “Methinks I do not recognize this place.” Welcome to L.A.

The mural is obliterated now. Early indications are that recovering it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. The loss is tragic.

The 1974 “Old Woman of the Freeway” was Twitchell’s most widely known work, because of its placement on a wall that faced the northbound lanes of the Hollywood Freeway. It suffered a similar fate, painted over in 1986 by a billboard company. Twitchell sued under the California Art Preservation Act, and a $175,000 settlement was reached the day before the case went to trial.

Adjusted for inflation that’s almost $250,000 today, for a smaller mural of more popular interest and less artistic significance than “The Ed Ruscha Monument.” The artist told The Times on Friday that he had contacted a lawyer and planned to sue again over the destruction of the Hill Street mural.

The law can’t bring back his lost masterpiece, but maybe a judgment will temporarily jolt other indifferent oafs into paying attention.

It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrators like art; some things are bigger than merely personal.