L.A.’S NEW MUSEUMS GO PUBLIC, AT LAST

Finally, after weeks of black-tie, invitation-only parties, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Robert O. Anderson Building and the Museum of Contemporary Art both opened their doors to the general public on a weekend for the first time Saturday.

By now it’s clear that the local art aficionados--the critics, scholars, collectors and city developers--like having the two new modern art meccas in Los Angeles. But what does the average museum-goer think?

“It’s excellent,” said Pamela Martins on Saturday, strolling through MOCA’s Richard and Geri Brawerman and the Firks Foundation Gallery. “I think the city is finally growing in the arts and catching up to New York.”

Over at LACMA’s Anderson, Patti Bernard, agreed: “It’s the best thing that’s happened to the city in a million years.”

Kate Foster, who’d been to both museums, thought so, too. “The city has come of age and it’s like we’re recognizing modern culture,” she said.

The appraisals seemed to sum up the sentiment of recent visitors to Los Angeles’ two most talked about buildings. The hubbub hasn’t been only talk either.

While attendance figures at both museums haven’t broken any records, MOCA’s mid-week opening last Wednesday drew about 1,440 people. That’s about 150 more than attended the museum’s Temporary Contemporary opening on a Sunday in 1983.

“It’s wonderful, people have been coming by the hordes,” said Randy Murphy, MOCA’s box officer manager. He said that more than 1,800 visited the museum on Saturday. “We are very pleased.”

Also, near the end of an aggressive campaign, MOCA membership has surged. Kerry Buckley, MOCA’s development director, said she expects membership to reach 30,000 by the end of December, ranking the museum second among the country’s modern and contemporary art institutions. New York’s Museum of Modern Art is first, with 56,000 members.

Attendance at LACMA has also been healthy. Figures since the Anderson opening don’t match those for the museum’s four-month King Tut blockbuster show (that drew 1.4 million fans in 1978), but they’re about double what they were around the same time last year. LACMA press officer Pamela Leavitt said about 82,000 people, including those invited to at least 20 preview parties, have visited the museum since Nov. 15.

“The numbers are very gratifying,” said Leavitt on Saturday, adding with a laugh, “particularly because the front of the museum has essentially been a construction site since January, 1984.”

Leavitt, who described the museum as a “mob scene” on the traditionally crowded Thanksgiving weekend, said LACMA’s 80,500 membership is the largest of any art museum in the country. About 6,700 new members joined this November, she said, compared to about 4,000 who joined last November.

Recent crowds at both buildings have been “breathable,” as one visitor put it. Only about two or three at a time waited on line to buy tickets mid-day Saturday. However, visitors talked elatedly about the new venues and the changing cultural scene.

“The Anderson is fantastic,” said script consultant David Freeman, after viewing the Anderson’s inaugural exhibition, “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985.” “I’ve always thought it was strange to be in a city with like 7 million people and not have any place to see modern art. It’s great to have both buildings.”

Gary Cohn, a Long Beach engineer, was gazing at the show’s wall-size, winding “Mulholland Drive,” by David Hockney. “I think (the two new buildings) are long overdue,” he said. “The artists have been here, but we needed some good architecture.”

Brandon Webster, a photography student at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, said: “L.A. is starting to become more of one of the centers for art, like New York, or Washington.”

Some had reservations about the new homes for modern art, however.

Trudy Picard sneered at Robert Irwin’s “Untitled” work at LACMA, which from across the room looks almost like a blank white canvas. “What’s this?” demanded the retired West Los Angeles resident, “they’re waiting for the exhibit or what?”

Marcia Burns, a psychiatric nurse pondering five bronze heads by Henri Matisse, echoed the idea: “Some contemporary art is quite beautiful, but some of it reminds me of MTV--it’s like someone’s nightmare put on canvas. And I think the people who are responsible for selecting the art need to take seriously the psychological effect of it.”

Burns’ colleague, Annette Berman, said: “I feel a lot of contemporary art is not art.”

AT MOCA, Violet Willheim, said the new buildings “may be a bit much.” Inspecting the museum’s inaugural show, “Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986,” she added, “I think people have to be educated for contemporary art.”

However, most MOCA-goers had only good things to say.

“I’ve been looking forward to coming here since before the building was under construction,” said Elizabeth Siegl, an architecture student at Cal Poly Pomona. “I think in a city as contemporary as L.A., they needed a space for contemporary art.”

Chester Herwitz, who flew from Wooster, Mass. to see both museums, said MOCA’s sky-lit gallery space designed by Arata Isozaki, “is absolutely spectacular. L.A. obviously has a real commitment to contemporary art.”

Herwitz’s son, Daniel, a professor of aesthetics at Cal State Los Angeles, praised the blossoming art scene, too. “I think that everyone’s beginning to see that L.A. is starting to become for contemporary art just like it what it was for the movies in the thirties.”

Kathleen Sullivan was glad about the elegant new edifice too. She lives in a retirement home on Bunker Hill near the museum.

“I don’t know anything about contemporary art,” the silverhaired Sullivan confessed, “but the museum makes the neighborhood a lot nicer. I think it will bring a better class of people here. When I moved in about five years ago, the area was all empty and it wasn’t very nice, it was just dirt.”