Finding the Magic in Art : Newport Harbor’s Associate Curator Looks to the Present With an Eye on the Past

Some people will chat obligingly about all sorts of things in a polite and careful way. But when their face lights up and their words grow animated, you know the conversation has settled on something close to the heart.

Deep into an interview at a Long Beach cafe, Lucinda Barnes, 38, Newport Harbor Art Museum’s new associate curator, suddenly recalled a recent trip to New York.

“I was in the Museum of Modern Art, and I was looking at the Cezannes, particularly the landscapes,” the art historian said, averting her eyes to visualize the moment over an untasted cup of coffee. “There was one, probably one of the ‘Mont Sainte Victoire’ landscapes. It did not have glass on it and you could see the ‘flesh’ of the canvas.

“I thought, ‘OK, I’m really gonna figure out this painting this time.’ I looked at it closely. I looked at the brush strokes. You know, you can see those little blocks of color and they way they intersect and the way they exchange with one another. Yes, I thought, I’ve got it figured out.

“And then I stood back--and it was magic! I knew how it goes on the canvas, I could analyze all of those aspects--but there is still some transformation in there that I never could pinpoint. That’s the glory, the fascination of an object, and you (can’t realize it from books or slides but) only standing in front of the real object.

“So that’s probably why I work in museums and put together exhibitions. I’m selfish! I want to spend time with the paintings. . . .”

Growing up in Ohio, Barnes was not immersed in art as a child, although her mother was an amateur historian and her mother’s three sisters were commercial artists. She is also a descendant of the celebrated early 19th-Century American sculptor and theoretician, Horatio Greenough. (“I haven’t traced this myself,” she cautioned, slipping into the scrupulous approach of art historians at work.)

She became interested in art during high school, entranced by reading about the lives of artists. Her new passion led her to Manhattan, where she majored in art history at New York University and was dazzled by the contents of the city’s great museums.

“I used to go to the Metropolitan (Museum of Art), the Museum of Modern Art, two, three, four times a week,” she said. “It was the most amazing process, to hear the (university) lectures, read the material and then go to the museums and see the flesh of those paintings--to see the way they worked.”

In 1978, after earning a master’s degree in the history of art from Williams College in Massachusetts, Barnes came out West. She laughs to recall how she made the move against the better judgment of her professors, who viewed California as little more than a cultural desert.

Before becoming curator of exhibitions at the Cal State Long Beach University Art Museum in 1985, she was a research assistant in the 20th-Century art department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and director of the Karl Bornstein Gallery in Santa Monica. She has also taught art history at Cal State Long Beach, Saddleback College, UC Irvine Extension and UCLA Extension.

At Newport--where Barnes starts her new job tomorrow--she already has a track record of teaching docent training classes and contributing to a major catalogue (“Action/Precision: The Direction in New York 1955-60”). Now she will be responsible chiefly for the Biennial and the New California Artists series, exhibits of work by “underexposed” or emerging California artists.

The museum’s first two biennials, in 1984 and 1986, dealt with contemporary art from Southern California and the Bay Area. The subject of the third biennial--postponed (probably to 1990) after former associate curator Anne Ayres left to become director of the Otis/Parsons Art Institute Gallery in Los Angeles--remains wide open.

Acknowledging that Newport lacks the staff to create an exhibition as far-ranging in scope as the Whitney Biennial, the most formidable U.S. contemporary art survey, Barnes still wants to enlarge the scope of the show beyond a single geographic region. But she says she has no particular ideological ax to grind.

“I try to be as objective as possible. I think that to follow a specific agenda as a curator is a wrong approach. One, you end up offering a very one-dimensional and limited point of view to the public, and two, you miss a lot.”

Pressed to reveal the kinds of contemporary art she likes and dislikes, Barnes demurred, stressing the breadth of her interests, which span the history of art as a whole. Among her special interests are Pre-Colombian art, conceptual art and the whole of Spanish art. (Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Southern California will be about a group of Spanish Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s.)

“You can be interested in the 17th Century and be interested in the most current work simultaneously, and they really don’t conflict with one another. What they do is inform each other.

“Sometimes I’ll put on my art historian’s hat and I’ll stand back from contemporary art and say, ‘Let’s give this a bit of time and see how it shapes in history.’ . . . For me to be, in one day, thinking about (contemporary painter) Jasper Johns and (Renaissance painter) Simone Martini--I think that helps me remain objective.”

The special “excitement” of dealing with contemporary art, Barnes says, is that “we have an understanding of this time that no one will ever have again. When you go back over an artist’s life from 200 years ago . . . you can find out all sorts of information, but you can never feel the way you could have at that time--you can never ask the artist questions.

” . . . I’d love to come back in 100 years with a list of names and see who’s still around and what work is being revived--what artists will be exhumed who we never really looked at. That would be fantastic! What did we miss? And what did we completely go overboard on?”

Choosing artists for the New California Artists series will mean paying more attention to the local scene than Barnes was able to do at the University Art Museum, where--because “we can’t get grants for exhibitions someone else is doing”--the programs focused on art that was not being shown in the greater Los Angeles area.

Among the exhibitions she curated at Long Beach, Barnes singled out as one of her favorites a 1986 show of “Year of the Drowned Dog” and “Floating Islands,” two portfolios of multiple-panel prints by New York figurative painter Eric Fischl that can be combined in different ways to produce different narratives.

Although Fischl’s sexually charged paintings were very much in the public eye at the time, Barnes said she thought the exhibit of new work in a different medium offered an extended look at a significant aspect of the artist’s thinking process. In fact, soon after the prints were published, Fischl transferred the multiple-panel idea to his paintings.

For another exhibit, Barnes asked Los Angeles artist George Stone to create a work specifically for the University Art Museum space. “It’s very important to include exhibitions that essentially invite experimentation,” she said. “I think one of the sides of the museum that’s important to keep alive is the laboratory side. It’s exciting for the museum, for the museum’s public and for the artist.”

When she looks at art, Barnes said: “I want to see someone else’s point of view. I think that’s why we read books, why we listen to music. Essentially, we’re saying . . . ‘Is this going to help me understand--not how to function from day to day, but to relate to the rest of the world?’

“In many ways we look to art to apprise us of political attitudes, attitudes about injustice. And there are some artists who create works of art that make you see a delight in the world, in objects, in notions you would never notice or think of on your own.

“When I’m working with one artist, I often grill them on what they read, what they listen to, what movies they see, and invariably I’ll run out and read the same books, see the same movies and see . . . what they found (in those sources). That’s a way I expand my world.

” . . . I think when you’re confronted with a painting or sculpture and you say, ‘I understand that; that’s exactly what this person’s telling me. OK, I’ve got it registered. Let’s go home’--then you forget it. It’s gone. (What matters is) the work of art, the novel, the film that haunts you.

” . . . In so many ways, we have so much control over our day-to-day lives. I think we’re always looking for something that addresses what we can’t know entirely, what’s a little bit beyond our control, a little mysterious. . . . Because I know the world of the visual arts, that’s where I find that (quality).”

Next to art, film is Barnes’ not-so-secret passion.

“In movies, I’ll see anything, just about anything,” she avers. “I love looking at pictures, and when they move it’s that much more engaging. . . . It’s so easy to take a block of two hours and lose yourself in this other world.

“I think that’s partly what the success of cinema is--that the viewer loses himself, herself in front of the screen. I like to think we can still do that in front of paintings, in front of sculpture. (But) it requires a lot more attention. Cinema is active and looking at art is much more passive, even though we’re seeing a lot more active art these days, which is terrific.”

Having moved from Laguna Beach to Pasadena a year ago, Barnes won’t be living in Orange County--at least, not for the time being. She says she views proximity to the University of Southern California, where she is finishing course work for her Ph.D., and to the Los Angeles art scene--prime territory for the New California Artists series--as major Los Angeles lures.

But that doesn’t mean she won’t be aware of art activities in Newport Harbor’s home communities. “At Newport I’ll be out more, looking at studios more,” she said. “I’m gonna be in my car a lot. And I know how to drive around Orange County!”