Graham Bronze of Duke Ellington at LACMA

After an eight-year red-tape runaround, the way finally looks clear for the installation of Robert Graham’s Duke Ellington monument in New York’s Central Park. Local audiences will see parts of the work before it’s sent East, however.

Commissioned by the Duke Ellington Memorial Fund, the grand-scale artwork involves three nude caryatids in several variations comprising 21 statues. On top of all this Graham will place a detailed sculpture of Ellington and his piano.

All the units that make up the bronze sculpture will be on view Tuesday through Oct. 23 at the County Museum of Art in “Robert Graham: The Duke Ellington Monument in Progress.”

Graham, a foremost sculptor of monumental civic work, discussed his bureaucratic battle the other day.

“New York has a lot of commissions--the parks commission, fine arts commission and the traffic department--all kinds of things whose jurisdiction this piece came under,” he said. “It’s been in a series of approvals in those bureaus for about eight years.”

The Los Angeles-based sculptor, who created the controversial Olympic Gateway monument for the 1984 Olympics held here, didn’t seem too perturbed, however. “Every city has a bureaucratic process--though it’s probably worse in New York.”

Despite the Ellington monument’s many figures in various sizes and poses, pushing it through the political process seems to have been a greater challenge than creating the complex piece itself.

Why? Modern technology had a lot to do with it. Graham is using a computer in place of the time- and labor-intensive “pointing” process used by most sculptors working in bronze.

Times Art Critic William Wilson recently visited Graham in his studio and described the sculptor’s state-of-the-art working process.

“After making his usual exquisitely detailed soul-trap renderings of the models, (Graham) had each laser-scanned, reducing all their contours to digital information on a floppy disk. The disc is then put into a lathe that can read the information and produce endless rough but workable copies of the original--in any size required--which Graham then varies and refines.

“The end products have absolutely no mechanical edge and are--if anything--fresher, more relaxed and flexible than anything he has done in years.”

Said Graham of his new method: “It’s a great timesaver and allowed me to be more ambitious with this particular project.”

The Ellington monument is scheduled to be unveiled in New York next spring. The local exhibit includes working casts, computer models and photographs of the artist’s studio.

UP, UP AND AWAY: Neither last year’s legendary stock market plunge nor the recent writers strike seems to have put a dent in Greater Los Angeles’ ever-expanding art gallery scene.

Breaking all records, 57 galleries are listed in this week’s Times art openings. Last year at the same time, the openings column, which includes museums, university, community and private galleries, contained a mere 52 entries.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Up for sale by the Southwest Museum will be more than 2,500 duplicate books from the institute’s Braun Research Library collection at the Second Annual Pan-American Indian Art Show and Sale to be held Saturday and next Sunday.

The museum-quality books, paperbacks and pamphlets cover such topics as Native American art, culture and tribal history, cowboy art and Western fiction.

More than $2 million worth of Native American and Latin American arts and artifacts are also to be sold at the event, held at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 300 E. Green St., from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Proceeds from the $5 admission will benefit the Southwest Museum. Information: (213) 221-2164.