A NEW ART SPOT--SANTA MONICA

Move aside, La Cienega. Step back, La Brea. Take notice, Robertson. Competition has arrived. Colorado Avenue and adjacent streets in Santa Monica have joined these established art gallery enclaves, transforming the seaside city into the county’s newest visual arts outpost.

By mid-September, nine gallery owners will have opened shop in Santa Monica in less than a year’s time, forming a cultural cluster five blocks long and half as many wide.

“In the last year, Santa Monica has become a major force in the art community for gallery viewing,” said Mary Jane Jacob, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s becoming a once-a-month ritual for me to have to spend an entire day in the galleries there to keep informed on what’s going on in L.A.”

Even officials of the esteemed multimillion-dollar Frederick R. Weisman Collection of modern and contemporary art are seriously considering permanently housing the collection in Santa Monica. The artworks have been traveling like a homeless minstrel from one art institution to the next for about 3 1/2 years, said Henry Hopkins, director of the collection.

Here’s a rundown of the gallery shift westward:

--Four blue-chip showrooms have moved into the same single-story complex on Colorado Avenue between 9th and 10th streets in the last eight months. In order of appearance came the BlumHelman, HoffmanBorman, Pence and Maloney galleries.

--Los Angeles gallery owner Roy Boyd relocated to 10th Street about one month ago, moving in about 50 yards from the Colorado quartet, and Shoshana Wayne, also owner of a Los Angeles showroom, moved about five blocks away to 5th Street where James Corcoran, owner of what is often cited as the county’s finest gallery, had immigrated from West Hollywood in November.

--Ruth Bachofner, who sells art on La Cienega Boulevard, plans to move into the Colorado Avenue complex by mid-September, and Dorothy Goldeen, who was co-director of one of San Francisco’s top showrooms, is scheduled to open her own space yards away on 9th Street.

(Other existing showrooms in Santa Monica and Venice include Tortue, Karl Bornstein, Merging One, Angles, Robert Berman, B-1 and L.A. Louver.)

But the growth spurt doesn’t stop here. Los Angeles art collectors Jeanie Meyers and Ruth Bloom intend to open a gallery at Broadway and 21st Street, about a mile from the Colorado cluster. And the modest, 10,000-square-foot Santa Monica Museum of Art, under construction farther west on Main Street, will tentatively open next spring, said Abby Sher, the museum’s founder.

Art dealers new to Santa Monica cite several reasons for the move, ranging from clean air to an abundance of large buildings with high ceilings at reasonable rents--which are generally lower near Colorado Avenue than near other Los Angeles gallery rows such as La Cienega Boulevard, said Liz Evans, director of Zugsmith and Associates, a local retail leasing company. Dealers also say proximity to one another drew them to the area, although the earliest tenants had no idea it would become so gallery rich.

James Corcoran, with a showroom on 5th Street, “didn’t move from West Hollywood to Santa Monica because he was predicting a shift or following a crowd,” said Sandra Starr, curator of the Corcoran Gallery, the pied piper of the pack. “We moved partly because Corcoran lives here and partly because it’s near many of his clients and the artists he represents.”

Indeed, since the ‘50s and ‘60s, hundreds of artists, including such well-known figures as Edward Kienholz, Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Moses and Claire Falkenstein, have had studios in Venice and Santa Monica. Also, most local art collectors live on the affluent Westside, in such areas as Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Malibu.

“We also got a more spacious building here, where we can go most of the day without any artificial light,” Starr said. “And the whole atmosphere and ambiance of Santa Monica is more congenial than West Hollywood--it’s just a lovely place to be.”

The gallery owners who occupy the Colorado Avenue edifice didn’t decide as a group to move there. However, opening a gallery within walking distance of several others, on and off the avenue, was decidedly attractive to them and many others.

“I didn’t know that the others would follow when I signed my lease,” said Irving Blum, owner of the BlumHelman Gallery, first to occupy a unit in the Colorado Avenue complex. “But I did know that Jim Corcoran had relocated out here.”

(Blum, who also owns a top-notch gallery in New York, ran the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in the early ‘60s. That seminal showroom was among several that established La Cienega as the site of Los Angeles’ first gallery row. Some observers say Blum’s return to the Southland symbolizes the current vitality of the local art scene.)

Michael Maloney, owner of a gallery near Blum’s that bears his name, said, “When I heard about the Colorado complex and the other galleries coming to the area, it made sense to move there. There’s also lots of free parking at the Colorado complex, it’s about 10 blocks from the beach and the freeway access is excellent” with the Santa Monica Freeway less than half a mile away.

The crowd on and near Colorado Avenue appealed to art dealer Roy Boyd too. Now on 9th Street, Boyd said he doesn’t regret leaving La Brea Avenue, where galleries continue to proliferate in the midst of a growth spurt that began about six years ago.

“There’s a lot of excitement and energy in Santa Monica right now,” Boyd said. “It’s great, because when Bachofner and Goldeen move in, you’ll be able to park the car once on Colorado Avenue and see seven galleries.”

The presence of new galleries in Santa Monica plus those already existing there and in Venice also captured the imagination of Weisman Collection director Hopkins, who remembers the “artwalk” of the 1960s when La Cienega galleries would stay open on Monday nights for a parade of art lovers.

“Artwalk was just a wonderful evening when buyers and non-buyers would come in the hundreds and do La Cienega Boulevard,” said Hopkins, adding that a permanent site for the collection will be chosen by the end of this year. “I went to Santa Monica the other evening to attend a reception for a new show at one gallery; many of the others were open late, people were out and around and you got the same feeling, that same flow of traffic.”

Christopher Ford, co-director of the Colorado Avenue Pence Gallery and a New York transplant, also attributed the cultural surge in Santa Monica to a declaration by its City Council that “the city wants to be ‘art friendly.’ ”

Santa Monica has attracted more cultural activity since the City Council created an Arts Commission in 1982 to fund such arts programs as the installation of public art and performance arts events, said Councilman Dennis Zane, and later developed a private, nonprofit Arts Foundation to raise private money for arts programs with local business leaders.

“Santa Monica’s pro-active arts programs, together with its physical beauty and the substantial concentration of artists in the community, has made the city a natural haven for galleries,” Zane said.