THE LANNAN FOUNDATION MOVES QUARTERS TO L.A. : Annual $5 Million Expected to Be Dispensed to Nation’s Contemporary-Art Organizations

Joining a grand parade of art institutions currently marching to Los Angeles or beefing up operations here is a little-known foundation that is expected to pump $5 million annually into the field of contemporary art. The Lannan Foundation, endowed this year with $100 million from the estate of financier and art collector J. Patrick Lannan, is required by law to spend 5% of its total assets each year.

The 26-year-old foundation, formerly based in New York and Florida, recently shifted the center of its operations to Los Angeles, where it will administer a varied array of art projects. Beginning in 1988, when nascent programs are in place, foundation spokespeople say the organization will keep its finger on the pulse of forward-looking art by buying the best of it--particularly from emerging and unknown artists--making it available through exhibitions and loans, and by orchestrating auxiliary programs. A public announcement of foundation plans is expected to be made at a breakfast meeting Tuesday at the City restaurant on La Brea Avenue.

Lannan’s move to Los Angeles is but the latest event in a year when institutional support for modern and contemporary art finally established itself in Los Angeles. Against the backdrop of the J. Paul Getty Trust’s unprecedented expenditure on historical art and scholarship (amounting to about $110 million a year) is a dramatic explosion of showcases for 20th-Century art.

Openings of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s long-awaited edifice and the County Museum of Art’s wing for modern and contemporary art are imminent. The Frederick R. Weisman Collection is shaping plans for its projected home at the Greystone Mansion, and new galleries are springing up from the mid-Wilshire district to Santa Monica.

“We decided to move here because so many aspects of the art scene were attractive to us. The museums, galleries and art services available make it a very desirable city, advantageous to our operation,” said Bonnie Clearwater, the energetic, 29-year-old director of the Lannan Foundation, during a recent interview.

“But two things should be made very clear. One is that this is a national organization, based in Los Angeles.” The foundation’s move to Southern California does not indicate a preference for art that is made here, Clearwater said. The scope of the collection and other programs will continue to be national and even extend to Europe.

“The other point is that we also have chosen to stay in Florida, so that we can be a force in a developing art center,” she said. The foundation will continue to operate its small museum in Lake Worth, Fla. Lannan established the museum in 1981 in a renovated Art Deco movie theater near his palatial home in Palm Beach.

Lannan was a director of International Telephone and Telegraph for 36 years. The son of an Irish casket maker and a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, Lannan launched himself as an entrepreneur in Chicago and divided his time between New York and Florida. He began collecting art in the ‘50s and amassed 5,000 contemporary works before his death at 78 in 1983.

According to Clearwater, former director of the Rothko Foundation, the Lannan organization will concentrate its money and energy on the “unrecognized and underappreciated art of our time.” Though it eventually will administer a varied array of projects, the foundation will distinguish itself by acting as a lending source--and by not building a palace.

The foundation will dispense its fortune from leased space in an industrial park between Los Angeles International Airport and Marina del Rey.

“We want to get a lot of bang for the buck,” said J. Patrick Lannan Jr., the youngest son of J. Patrick Lannan and president of the foundation’s board of directors.

The younger Lannan said he remembers his father as a man who “loved new things” and didn’t mind shocking friends with purchases of adventurous artworks. He wouldn’t have wanted his legacy to get bogged down in “bureaucratic overload” or to have “a big edifice with a lot of guards,” Lannan said.

Clearwater and the board have been working for a year to develop goals and programs in keeping with the founder’s wish to avoid “the safe and solid.” Though some parts of the program are still in flux, four aspects are definite: acquisitions, exhibitions, grants and scholarship and criticism.

“The foundation will acquire art as a valid expression of the aesthetic beliefs and ideas of our time,” Clearwater said, noting a preference for emerging or little-known artists--though not to the exclusion of contemporary masters. “We also will acquire works that emphasize the unique character of J. Patrick Lannan’s original collection,” which includes early works by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland as well as more recently purchased paintings by David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo.

Clearwater plans to actively seek the works of new artists through professional channels and by visiting studios across the country. An advisory committee will consult with her on purchases. Committee chairman and art collector Gifford Phillips has chosen as fellow advisers John Elderfield, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Christopher Knight, art critic of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

To increase access to contemporary art, the foundation will stage shows from its collection at its museum in Florida (which is open to the public) and at the Los Angeles facility (to be open by appointment only to qualified professionals).

Clearwater also expects to host small exhibitions organized by other institutions. In addition to exhibition space, the 16,000-square-foot Los Angeles facility will contain “study storage” where curators, graduate students, artists and others in the field can examine works that are not on display.

“Basically we consider the foundation a museum without walls,” she explained. “We will buy art and make it available through traveling exhibitions originated by the foundation, by lending art to exhibitions originated by other institutions and by creating long-term loans. These loans may be cohesive groups of work for collections lacking in depth. They would be tailored to the institution’s collection to augment it or give it a different interpretation or deeper meaning.”

Grants will be awarded in contemporary visual art and in literature, poetry and art education. “We are still pinpointing what is needed and how to make a contribution,” Clearwater said.

Funding for visual art will be available for exhibitions, site-specific works, temporary installations and interdisciplinary activities, again with a focus on “emerging or under-recognized living artists.”

Among projects expected to secure foundation funds are those that extend exposure beyond an artist’s home base, those offering mid-career artists opportunities to experiment, and activities considered too controversial or experimental by other organizations. Clearwater also voiced a preference for activities accompanied by catalogues and scheduled to travel, and for projects that grant honoria to artists.

“We will not fund individuals. We think we can be of more help to artists by buying and exhibiting their work,” Clearwater continued. “Neither will we fund general operating expenses, juried exhibitions that require entry fees, unfocused survey exhibitions or the maintenance and conservation of projects we sponsor.”

To foster scholarship and criticism of contemporary art, the foundation will set up a study center in Los Angeles containing an archive of foundation correspondence with artists in the collection, a library of contemporary art and a photography archive of the collection.

“We may subsidize costs of color reproduction for magazines and books, and translations of important texts on contemporary art,” Clearwater noted. “We’re also thinking of organizing a biannual meeting on criticism, possibly modeled after the Aspen Institute and probably held in different parts of the country.”

Budgetary lines are still “flexible” and may remain so, according to Clearwater. “After we determine the operating budget, the rest will be divided between exhibitions and grants. If we don’t buy much one year, we will spend more on other things.”

A native of New York and a graduate of New York and Columbia universities, Clearwater declares herself an avid convert to the life style of Los Angeles. The foundation’s board, consisting primarily of family members, is scattered across the country, but Board President J. Patrick Lannan Jr. has lived in Los Angeles for 21 years.

He insists, however, that moving the foundation here had much less to do with his residence than with the city’s rising profile as an art center. “Locating the foundation in New York would be like taking coals to Newcastle, and Florida is too much on the outskirts,” he said. “Los Angeles was the absolutely logical choice. So much is happening here.”