ART REVIEW : Simon’s Loan to LACMA Adds to Summer Bonanza

This summer has been a terrible disappointment to Southern California art aficionados who look forward to a two- or three-month respite from the relentless schedule of exhibitions that generally runs from September through May or June.

With such major attractions as Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski at the Museum of Contemporary Art, photographer Gustave le Gray and a stunning--if controversial--new acquisition of a classical Greek sculpture of Aphrodite at the J. Paul Getty Museum, a show of New York figurative expressionism at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and a display of California assemblage at four galleries, the faithful have had little time to go to the seashore.

Busily preparing for the September opening of its new Japanese pavilion, the County Museum of Art also has opened a half-dozen shows this summer. And now the museum is at it again, offering a reinstallation of contemporary art that includes new acquisitions and American works from the ‘50s and ‘60s on loan from the Norton Simon Museum.

Loans from Simon? The recent surprise announcement that the celebrated collector would lend 21 contemporary works to the county facility and at least 13 more to the MOCA (to be installed in late September) caused a stir in the art community. Simon’s decision reversed his longstanding no-loan policy and revived criticism of his handling of the contemporary art that he acquired in 1974 when he took over the Pasadena Art Museum.

Preferring to use his museum for his collections of historical European and Asian art, Simon has generally maintained one gallery for contemporary art and stored the rest of it.

But now some of the best pieces have come to the County Museum of Art, where they are shown to splendid advantage. Thanks to curator Stephanie Barron’s selections and a harmonious installation, the Simon pieces look as if they belong on the second floor of the Robert O. Anderson Building.

Filling three galleries, the Simon loan show begins with densely layered works that are nourished by material complexities and painterly nuances. Dated from 1948 to 1960, these pieces resonate with the idealistic notion of art that characterized Beat Generation assemblage and Abstract Expressionist painting.

Three vintage assemblages--George Herms’ “Librarian” and Bruce Connor’s “Couch” and “Homage to Minnie Mouse”--offer darkly poetic visions of form that gathers meaning as it deteriorates.

Sam Francis’ immense “Basel Mural” fills one wall with a spacious field of spatters, drips and coagulated pools of orange and blue pigment, while two abstract landscapes and a still life by Richard Diebenkorn corral a large, orderly view of light-filled form in a small format.

The mood changes in the second gallery where the cheekiness of Pop meets the gleam of Minimalism. A stack of Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes,” Tom Wesselmann’s “Great American Still Life No. 2” and Claes Oldenburg’s “Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle” broadcast the values and ironies of a consumerist society.

Exploiting the Pop mentality, Roy Lichtenstein’s boffo “Big Modern Painting (For Expo ‘67)” makes the most of commercial reproduction techniques while leading directly into the clean geometry that characterizes Carl Andre’s “144 Pieces of Aluminum” (arranged in a big square on the floor) and Ellsworth Kelly’s five-panel painting, “Red Orange White Green Blue” that equates color with shape.

Robert Morris’ untitled felt piece--a giant slab of thick, gray material with horizontal slits cut into it--droops handsomely on one wall. Exemplifying a Minimalist preference for nontraditional materials and reductive form, this starkly simple construction also happens to be quite beautiful.

The third gallery features a lively mixture of Larry Bell’s glass and mirror works, Color Field paintings by Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, an iris-motif canvas by Billy Al Bengston and one of Donald Judd’s stacked wall pieces made of stainless steel and blue plexiglass.

Disparate as they may be, these works play off each other effectively, pointing up an apparent clarity of form that harbors surprising subtleties.

Strolling through the rest of the second floor galleries, where the County Museum’s collections are on view, we find that such fixtures as Jonathan Borofsky’s towering “Hammering Man,” Edward Kienholz’s “The Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” Robert Graham’s “Retrospective Column” and a powerful trio of works by Frank Stella are still here.

But everything looks different because of rearrangements, temporary deletions and new additions.

Bengston’s dented metal painting, Oldenburg’s outsized pool balls and Kelly’s blue-on-blue wall piece command new attention because they relate to works in the Simon show. Others symbolize the generosity of private donors and the activities of museum support groups.

Tim Ebner’s “LAMCA Arrangement,” composed of 16 square painted panels and two wooden crates, is the first purchase of the Modern and Contemporary Art Council’s program called Art Here and Now (which has replaced the Young Talent Awards).

Ebner, whose work is a trenchant commentary on art as made-to-match decoration, was commissioned to produce a piece for the museum. True to form, he developed a color scheme that blends in with the museum, turned out a batch of plain and brushy panels, and provided a crate for moving them.

Other up-to-the-minute gifts include Robert Gober’s “Single Basin Sink,” a curiously appealing re-creation of the real thing; Jasper Johns’ 1987 suite of four prints, called “The Seasons”; a richly layered abstract oil by Gerhard Richter, and Leon Golub’s unstretched-canvas “Interrogation,” a hard-hitting political painting by the New York artist.

No definite closing date has been set for the Simon loan, but the artworks are expected to remain on display for about a year.