THE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART--AT 20, ALMOST GROWN UP

Twenty years ago today the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was christened and launched amid the tarpits of Hancock Park. Civic pomp om-pa-pa ed and florid fanfare flourished. Three gleaming white galleries by William L. Pereira & Associates glittered in reflecting pools and the local culturati felt the flush of appropriately restrained pride.

After all, when added to the recently unveiled Music Center complex, this $12-million edifice seemed to leave little doubt that Los Angeles had arrived, or was about to arrive, or soon would make an excellent approach to arriving at fully caparisoned civic civility and artistic maturity.

Now, two decades later, the museum has 68,000 members, making it second only to the Metropolitan in New York. There are 200,000 objects in the permanent collection, the best of them on view in 100,000 square feet of exhibition space parceled out in 52 galleries.

Last year, the turnstiles clicked in 1.3 million visitors. The place has raised more than $62 million, sprouted nine curatorial departments and has more volunteers, councils and programs than can be decently acknowledged.

And yet it is still crystal clear that Los Angeles is on the very brink of growing up. What is this? Is it truly true that Southern California and all of its creations are suspended in a state of perpetual adolescence?

A score of lovely springs have come and gone and LACMA is still getting ready. Instead of giving great galas and spreading fabulous gold-framed fare before our wondering eyes in celebration of its birthday, it looks like a construction site, because that is what it is.

The Wilshire Boulevard frontage is a mass of I-beams. In the backyard, ground has just been broken for a new pavilion to house a Japanese collection donated by Joe D. Price. So here we are all ready to party and the museum is digging holes while conducting business as unusual.

What is the matter with them?

Nothing. It is all a simple misunderstanding, a lapse in communication, a misperception of the facts.

Museums only look like inert buildings full of inanimate objects. Museums are, in poetic fact, living things. In this part of the world, living persons do not reach their majority until age 21.

It therefore follows with geometric logic that next year when the County Museum of Art finishes its buildings and attains the age of 21, it will be grown up.

What a relief.

In the meantime two decades is still a good time to take stock, neaten the linen closets of the past and peer myopically down the corridor of the future.

For a good, balanced view let’s position our camera at midpoint in 1975 and look both ways. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary the museum did give itself a party in the form of an exhibition called “A Decade of Collecting.” Subtextually, the show addressed the three challenges faced by the institution at Square One.

In the beginning, there were, of course, personality clashes, policy disagreements and public criticisms that are a virtually normal part of the shakedown process in such a prominent new institution. Founding director Richard F. Brown resigned in a huff not long after the opening. He charged that the trustees meddled in the museums professional operation. Such an ambiance was to linger but the truly substantive First Great Headache was the museum architecture. Despite pronouncements of official praise there was wide below-stairs consensus that the architectural design was visually flimsy, logistically difficult and only grudgingly hospitable to art.

By ’75 very little had been done to address the problem. Reflecting pools around the museum had been filled in to create a sculpture garden, mainly to house a welcome gift of 29 Rodin sculpture by B. Gerald Cantor. But the museum was concentrating on the Second Great Headache, namely where on earth would it ever find the art to fulfill its goal of becoming a substantial general history of art museum? At the outset a lot of smart money bet it could not be done.

Optimism, however, prevailed and staff and trustees set about the complex process of collecting collectors and ferreting out angels. Several generous folks behaved admirably. Loyalists such as the Ahmanson Foundation and Anna Bing Arnold were in for the long haul, but it was clear even to outsiders that the museum saw its Main Chance in the princely and growing collections of industrialist Norton Simon, one of the original backers of the Hancock Park treasure house.

By 1975 the dream of a permanent alliance with Simon’s art had already crumbled to dust. The collector had, of course, opened his own museum in Pasadena.

That is not precisely the sort of blow from which one recovers, since Simon’s holdings are virtually unrivaled in quality and rarity among collections made in recent decades.

LACMA, however, compensated handsomely. The Decade of Collecting exhibition acted as reminder that the museum had amassed great treasures in five 9th-Century Assyrian relief panels and in collections of Indian, Nepalese and Tibetian art that ranked them among the five leading museums of such art outside India. That status is not nearly as important as the charge of energy one feels on entering the Asian galleries or the splendid exhibitions organized by curator Pratapaditya Pal.

For those who stubbornly insisted on finding such art too esoteric, there was some sustenance. Armand Hammer had promised a rapidly improving collection of blue-chip names. The galleries housed a sprinkling of Old Master, traditional American and other more familiar genres. Still, to some it all felt a trifle thin.

What did not seem flimsy was the vexing Third Great Headache called, “What are we going to do with Contemporary Art?”

Remember, the museum was established in the heyday of the most creative, heady period ever sustained by American contemporary art. Blockbuster exhibitions of modern art helped set LACMA’s reputation as a player on the national and international scene. From the elegant “New York School . . . the First Generation” to the controversial Edward Keinholz retrospective to the trendy blockbuster, “American Sculpture of the ‘60s,” the hands-down curatorial superstar of the museum was Maurice Tuchman, the man in charge of the Mod-Squad.

So why was success a Headache? For a galaxy of reasons. The local contemporary community was in a permanent apoplectic snit over their perception that LACMA did not serve the indigenous constituency. Rumor had it that conservative board members just didn’t think obstreperous upstart art had any place in a dignified historical museum.

However motivated, the perception was father to the idea that LACMA could never do right by the art of the now until it had more space and therefore time to devote to the subject. One popular proposal was for a separate interlocking Institute for Contemporary Art. But by 1973 Tuchman complained in print that he was having trouble obtaining board approval for his exhibitions. For several years thereafter the modern program at LACMA took on a character of fallowness equaled only by the art world itself.

That was pretty much how it stood on LACMA’s 10th birthday. Things were respectable but a little stodgy. The then Times Art Critic Henry J. Seldis pronounced the museum “A national and international institution of note.” He ignited a brief firestorm of trustee indignation when he accused individual board members of not contributing enough to the museum, but basically he seemed to be saying that the place would just go on putting one foot in front of the next.

Cameraman, would you now swing around and focus on the present? Thanks.

In the quick pan you saw as we moved the equipment around, that was Kenneth Donahue, who retired as director to be succeeded by Earl (Rusty) Powell. That terrible black blur passing through 1978 was Proposition 13, which resulted in something like a 50% cut in public funds for the museum. If anything was going to be a disaster for LACMA, the tax revolt should have been it. Instead, through an astonishingly energetic and successful capital campaign, the museum has boosted itself into a new orbit.

Last year, it completed the first big chunk of a renovation that amounted to a resurrection--except the place wasn’t dead to start with. The Ahmanson Gallery for the permanent collection was expanded by about 35,000 square feet, given the formal character of a traditional museum with Post-Modern overtones and linked to the Hammer special exhibitions gallery, which got an escalator in the bargain.

A whole cornucopia of newly acquired collections ranging from powerful Pre-Columbian to precious glass was joined by medieval matters that had been in storage and Old Master art freshly hung in period style.

It was all a delightful flummox from which we are still recovering. There is some sense that the period rooms have been installed rather theatrically to distract us from gaps in the collection, but when you bumble across a Veronese here, a La Tour there and a Chardin across the way you feel better. You feel better still when scanning bibelots so enchanting you don’t care who they are by.

Lacunae are still obvious but a look into the predictable future is bracing. Traditional big-ticket master paintings will probably always be a problem because of their rarity and the ability of a mega-bucks museum like to Getty to outbid the County. Still, the museum is reasonably certain of receiving Mr. and Mrs. Edward Carter’s splendidly understated collection of 17th-Century Dutch landscape and still life painting and the traditional American collection put together by JoAnn and Julian Ganz among others.

Modern and contemporary art is still a problem. The collection is thin and the area still has the ability to send artists to the streets in protest, as happened in response to a 1981 show of 16 L.A. artists of the ‘60s.

But of course the Arco-backed Robert O. Anderson Gallery abuilding out front will be mainly devoted to the art of our times. The structure by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates is of a design that still has the community holding its breath. But if all goes well the building will do much to resolve the long-standing architectural Headache and give modern art a proper showcase. The department has already had its backbone strengthened by a new contemporary curator, Howard Fox, and the donation of Robert Gore Rifkind’s German Expressionist holdings and raised everyone’s morale rose with two of the finest modern exhibitions ever concocted, “The Avant-Garde in Russia” (1980) and “German Expressionist Sculpture” (1983).

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a workhorse. Among our glittering museums new and old, it is the only one that undertakes an historical spectrum of changing exhibitions. It is in a perfect position to be seen as never doing anything quite right or quite the right thing.

Since 1965 the museum has presented 413 special exhibitions. It’s impossible to put a value judgment on that, but I am nagged by the persistent impression that the special exhibitions program, while highly respectable at worst and occasionally brilliantly innovative, allows too many excellent traveling exhibitions to slip away to San Francisco or not visit California at all.

Like many living entities, the County Museum of Art may embody its greatest virtues and most lethal flaws in a single quality. It leaves a strong impression of wishing to be a big-league operation belonging to the same club as the Met or the National Gallery. The down side of that is that LACMA suffers rather wincingly in any head-on comparison to the collections of two of the world’s greatest museums.

The up side is that evidently it is impossible to get grand without great expectations and we will be darned if LACMA is not even today wearing the aura if not the mantle of a big-time museum. The operation feels evermore suave. It is treated with evermore serious respect in the professional community. It is capable of organizing an exhibition like “A Day in the Country” that moves on to impress the hard-nosed critics of Paris.

Nobody is perfect, but that is pretty good for a kid who won’t be grown up until next year.