MOCA vs. LACMA: Reports From the Eastern Front

“The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art may soon be the country’s best known unbuilt art museum,” Patricia Failing wrote three years ago in ArtNews magazine.

MOCA had already held that position for four years, according to Lewis MacAdams in California magazine: “Probably no museum has ever been as thoroughly dissected before it opened, or had pinned on it the artistic/aesthetic hopes of so many people, as has MOCA.”

Since then, no ink has been spared on MOCA--or on the larger phenomenon of Los Angeles’ growth as an art center.

During the summer of 1984, New York Times Art Critic John Russell spent some time here and predicted: “If all goes well, the greater Los Angeles area will be a place in which high art can be studied as advantageously as it can be studied today in New York, in Washington and in the greater Boston area.”

Ink is still flowing now that the first major, double-barreled phase of that development is complete. Early reactions to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the County Museum of Art’s Robert O. Anderson Building are generally favorable, while the concept that Los Angeles has become a cultural mecca remains in question.

In a New York Times Magazine cover story on contemporary art in Los Angeles, Grace Glueck allowed that the city “has come a long way” but defended Eastern superiority: “Los Angeles is still a far cry from New York, with its dense network of museums, foundations, dealers, galleries, alternative spaces, publications, research and educational facilities. The Eastern city remains the primary place where art is made, viewed, discussed, promoted, sold and resold. And it is still the habitation of choice for most of the country’s artists.”

Though local museum backers downplay competition between the County Museum of Art and the new building downtown, back-to-back openings and overlapping aesthetic territory have made the subject irresistible.

Writing about “Los Angeles museum wars” for Vanity Fair, Gregg Kilday noted that “social lines have been drawn” between supporters of the “neo-Babylonian edifice” designed for the county and the “neo-Egyptian conceit” planned for MOCA: “Traditionally, LACMA has attracted old-money types,” while “MOCA has drawn upon a younger, flashier set, many of them with Hollywood connections.”

Newsweek likened the museum double-header to “a pair of rival movie studios rushing two blockbusters out for the holidays.”

In this perceived competition, MOCA has been the media darling--partly because the institution is new and its Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, has been in the international limelight--but critics have voiced some reservations.

“The Los Angeles building . . . is an important event in American architecture more than it is a great museum building,” wrote New York Times Architecture Critic Paul Goldberger. “It is sympathetic to the art that is being displayed within it, but its gallery spaces are somewhat uneven in quality, and the experience of walking through them is not one of unbridled joy.”

He found “something disquieting about going down rather than up to enter a building that aspires to a certain monumental presence.” Goldberger praised Isozaki’s craftsmanship, colors and materials, but gave a mixed review to the skylights, a prominent architectural feature.

Finally, Goldberger attributed failings to “a situation whose complexity of program made certain compromises inevitable” and deemed the effort “worth it.”

Glueck thought “the Museum of Contemporary Art has bitten off more than it can chew.” She questioned the viability of future fund-raising and said the museum “has a long way to go” in building a collection.

Despite such digs, the general tone of MOCA reviews has been approving, sometimes almost reverential.

In a Newsweek piece on museum architecture, critic Douglas Davis praised Isozaki’s “impressive balancing act” of modesty and boldness.

“MOCA’s meticulously crafted building is full of spaces that leave you feeling very quiet and very content,” Jed Perl wrote in Vogue. “The stone is roughly cut and carefully detailed, so that you feel like walking up to the walls and touching them. . . . The first galleries you enter . . . bathe you in a white light that feels beatific, serene. Everywhere, you find gorgeous little touches that recall the inspired delicacy of Alvar Aalto. The little theater and the board room . . . have the jewel-box perfection of Josef Hoffmann interiors.”

Meantime, reviews of the County Museum of Art’s new addition have ranged from high praise to near damnation.

Davis predicted problems in a 1982 Newsweek article. Acknowledging the “daunting challenge” of adding “a fourth building to the trio of ungainly, pseudo-classical boxes,” he questioned the proposed solution of hiding “this hulking trio behind an Art Deco facade the length of a football field. The architects have tried to enliven this intimidating wall with strips of glass block, lit from within, but it seems sure--by size alone--to alienate the public.”

Shortly before the opening, Goldberger found the Anderson structure “not so much an addition to the original building as a subsuming of it; the Pereira buildings have met their conqueror, and they are vanquished.”

While finding nothing to recommend the old buildings, he faulted the architects for failing to relate the addition to the pre-existing structure. The Anderson Building is “so overbearing in its relationship to the older buildings that it manages to engender a certain amount of sympathy for them--suddenly these rather vulgar little buildings appear to be victims,” he wrote.

According to Goldberger, “The internal organization of the new wing is good, and the galleries are serviceable.” He also approved of turning the former plaza into a covered atrium, but concluded that the addition’s “misplaced monumentality” is “irrelevant to this building’s circumstance.”

Perl also found fault with the “big, splashy gesture of a facade” that “doesn’t do anything except announce its own importance.”

Benjamin Forgey was more circumspect in his Washington Post review. He said the new pieces stand “in uneasy union with the original buildings” but looked forward to the eventual sheathing of the old building in unifying material.

“The decision to push the museum forward with a high building wall flush to the sidewalk was a radical step but a good one,” he continued. “The move has two advantages: It gives the museum much greater presence and identity along the street, and it provides an opportunity to make a dramatic, bold entrance to the museum complex.”

Forgey cited a “lumpish quality in the design of the entrance itself” but said the entry “succeeds in its most important task: It pulls the visitor irresistibly to the heart of the complex.”

Inside, he rated the galleries “from good to superb” and said the Times Mirror Court has the potential of becoming “a joyfully animated place of almost unprecedented dimension--Piranesi without the gloom.”

In conclusion, Forgey compared the knife-edge angles of the Anderson Building and I.M. Pei’s wing of the National Gallery: “That marble edge has an almost shrinelike beauty: people touch it in ritual curiosity. In this Los Angeles edge, however, (glass brick) transparency replaces solidity; solemnity gives way to illusion.

“Still, there is no mistaking as an illusion the impressive surge of activity here: The County Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which complement each other so well, are substantial signs of the cultural vitality on the Pacific Coast. Los Angeles is an underdog no more.”