A Coming-Out of Modern Art in New Home

It has been a long wait for the couple necking in the “Back Seat Dodge ’38.”

Twenty years ago when the lovers made their first appearance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the county Board of Supervisors called the artwork by Edward Kienholz scandalous and demanded its removal. In the display, a man, constructed of chicken wire, stretched across a woman lying in the back seat. Her lingerie was flung on the car’s hood and beer bottles were scattered about.

A compromise, however, was struck back then to keep the car, recalled Stephanie Barron, the museum’s curator of 20th-Century art. When children walked by, the door of the bright blue Dodge was shut.

But that was the last time the car was seen in public until the museum opened its new home for modern art, the Robert O. Anderson Building.

After a prelude of private parties, Sunday was the first day the general public was invited to the airy new setting to see the museum show off modern artwork, which will be permanently displayed in the building’s second and third stories. The disparate collection ranged from David Hockney’s brilliantly colored mural of Mulholland Drive to Andy Warhol’s “Kellogg’s Cornflake Boxes” to Cubist paintings by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

And this time, the door of the Dodge, which was attracting a lot of attention Sunday, stayed open. “It has a patina of respectability now,” Barron observed.

By the time the doors closed Sunday evening, more than 3,000 people had visited the museum. The off-the-cuff reviews given were decidedly good from the little boy mesmerized by a six-foot comb leaning in a corner to the elderly couple marveling at the Matisse cutouts, to the New York architect who said the Post-Modern building made the recent addition to the National Gallery in Washington look, in comparison, like a “bus terminal.”

“I think it’s really a coming-out of art to Los Angeles,” said Sharon Brown, a Burbank resident, who has been haunting museums since her parents took her as a little girl to see stuffed animals at Exposition Park in 1948. “We’ve always been considered kind of backward. People in New York turn their noses up at us.”