BIGGER AND BETTER FAIR PLANNED FOR THE FALL

Los Angeles is gearing up for its second International Contemporary Art Fair. The Dec. 10-14 event will bring top contemporary art dealers to the Los Angeles Convention Center from around the world--and up the street--to show and sell their wares.

Fair director Brian Angel dropped in from London recently to pave the way for what he hopes will be a successful event. The fair suffered some teething pains when it debuted last December.

Several art fair veterans--dealers, collectors and critics--rated the quality of art at last year’s fair the best they had seen, Angel told The Times when the event concluded. And the fair drew about 14,200 visitors, which was “very satisfactory indeed for a first effort,” said Angel, who works for the London-based company of Andry-Montgomery.

But that attendance total wasn’t as high as expected by Angel, who generally blames bad timing: The inaugural fair coincided with the openings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Robert O. Anderson Building and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

“The euphoria about contemporary art set by the (two museums’ openings) did backfire because the art world was satiated,” Angel said. “There were seven days of MOCA openings (invitation-only parties to view the new museum) plus no less than 20 individual gallery openings at the same time.”

It wasn’t until the last two days of the fair, patterned after similar events in Paris, Madrid, London and Chicago, “that the word seemed to spread that something fairly wonderful was happening at the Convention Center,” Angel said.

In addition, some European dealers were also dissatisfied with the fair, because they “went back with their tuxedos still unwrapped,” Angel said, not having been invited to the week’s worth of opening parties at the two museums, especially MOCA.

MOCA Director Richard Koshalek, on this year’s fair advisory board, said recently that “at times it proved difficult to accommodate additional numbers of people” at those openings.

So this year, Angel said, MOCA’s Koshalek and LACMA Director Earl A. Powell are on the fair’s advisory board, and both museums, plus five others and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, will sponsor this year’s Dec. 9 opening night benefit gala--which was also poorly attended last year because of a party at MOCA. Proceeds from the gala will benefit the sponsoring institutions.

Some European dealers had other complaints. Eva Poll from Berlin was dissatisfied with the volume of her sales and told The Times in December that “Los Angeles does not know about European and German artists.”

“But Poll has rebooked,” Angel said, and will attend this year’s fair.

“It’s a question of familiarity,” he said. “The bulk of successful buying and selling involves the known galleries with the known artists. But galleries unfamiliar to the Los Angeles public that are returning to the fair are increasing their familiarity with the L.A. audience and their prospects of sales. This is the experience of other contemporary art fairs. We expect the European galleries will do better than the first time around.”

Angel said he does not know how many other European dealers plan to return this year, but that 90% of all dealers who attended the first are coming back. In all, he expects 150 galleries from 19 countries to attend, about 20 more galleries and 4 more countries than last year.

“The emerging sector of Australia, and the European avant-garde” will be represented, Angel said, as will Spain, Japan, Korea and other countries.

Other new programs designed to involve, rather than compete with, local institutions, include educational seminars and hospitality receptions for European and other dealers sponsored by museums, galleries and prominent members of the local art community. The fair’s name has been changed as well, to Art L.A. ’87.

BACK IN BUSINESS: Yaqui Indian artist Stan Padilla pays tribute to his tribe’s spiritual legacy with drawings, paintings and prints currently on view at the Southwest Museum’s Casa de Adobe annex.

Padilla, whose tribe lives in southern Arizona, received a master’s degree in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and, in addition to creating artworks, continues to make ceremonial objects in the tradition of his elders. “Deer Dancer: A Yaqui Legacy” remains on view through Oct. 25.

Casa de Adobe, a recreation of an early 19th-Century Mexican California ranch, is at 4605 N. Figueroa St. in Highland Park. It reopened in June after Southwest Museum officials closed it for three months in a cost-cutting measure.

LA PLUS CA CHANGE? : An upcoming exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum will explore how British sculpture in the last 20 years has changed and how it has stayed the same.

“A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965,” Friday to Oct. 4, features 50 works by six British artists who have attained prominence in the last two decades. The artists are Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, David Nash and Bill Woodrow.

Graham Beal, chief curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Mary Jane Jacob, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, curated the exhibit, organized jointly by their museums.

The artists’ work is “vitally connected to recent movements in the international art world,” says a museum statement, while it also continues to reflect a strong national tradition.

THERE’S MORE: The Newport Harbor Art Museum has recently acquired “A Tale of Two Cities,” an elaborate fantasy environment of two miniature cities caught in military combat, by conceptual artist Chris Burden.

Thousands of toys no larger than Tonka trucks make up an array of troops, weapons, military vehicles and fortifications. The two cities are situated amid living plants in an 800-square-foot desert landscape. The work will be exhibited in April.