Paint ART/LA89 Busy as Dealers Offer a Gallery of the 20th Century

ART/LA89 is off and running--and gearing up for a busy weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center. About 160 dealers are offering their wares from noon to 8 p.m. through Monday.

Art shoppers at Los Angeles’ fourth international contemporary art fair will find a wide array of things to buy--from $15 sweat shirts to massive bronzes by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, selling for $100,000 to $600,000, and Andy Warhol’s $750,000 painting of Lenin. Artworks range from classic modern pieces by celebrated masters to up-to-the-minute mixed-media constructions by emerging artists.

For those who prefer names that were established in the early 20th Century, the Evelyn Aimis Gallery of Toronto offers drawings and prints by Pablo Picasso, Modernism of San Francisco has Russian Avant-Garde posters and Galerie Isy Brachot of Brussels has works by Belgian Surrealists Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux.

B-1 Gallery of Santa Monica, on the other hand, is showing recent political commentary by Los Angeles artists May Sun, Robbie Conal and Daniel Martinez. Bay Area artist Robert Arneson, whose ceramic portrait of San Francisco’s slain mayor George Moscone set off a raging controversy in the Bay Area several years ago, is among featured artists at Dorothy Goldeen’s booth. John Berggruen Gallery of San Francisco has a splashy painting by Sam Francis as its frontispiece.

Several foreign dealers--including a group from Cologne’s booming art center--have brought recently made art that is likely to be unfamiliar to Los Angeles viewers. Another provocative display, by the Lisson Gallery of London, includes Tony Cragg’s giant bronze “Fruit Bottles” that lie on the floor and Anish Kapoor’s mysterious blue, bell-like form that projects from a wall and seems to compel viewers to put their heads into it.

Korean artist Nam June Paik’s television-set sculptures are nearly ubiquitous in museums around the world, but that doesn’t stop crowds who stare at his TV screens programmed with computer-generated and photographic images. Seoul’s Hyundai Gallery has Paik’s “Benjamin Franklin,” a figure built of TVs, while Cincinnati’s Carl Solway Gallery displays television art in Oriental cabinets.

The fair got off to a successful start with a gala benefit preview on Wednesday night. About 2,600 dealers, collectors, artists and art patrons attended the $150-ticket event, which raised about $75,000 for the Los Angeles Pediatric AIDS Consortium, a network of medical centers and clinics for children and mothers with HIV infection.

Attendance at the gala was up from about 2,000 last year. Opening day attendance on Thursday fell to 3,560 from 8,000 last year, when the fair opened on a Saturday. The fair always attracts the largest crowds over the weekend, so organizers expect this year’s attendance to exceed 1988’s total of 30,000.

Los Angeles’ four-year-old art fair lags behind its longer-established counterparts in Basel, Paris and Chicago, most dealers say, largely because it is still struggling to attract the top galleries from around the world. While the 1989 fair has gained such prestigious galleries as James Corcoran of Santa Monica and persuaded Leo Castelli of New York to return, it lost Anthony d’Offay of London. L.A. Louver of Venice dropped out this year but plans to return next year.

On opening day, dealers generally seemed pleased that the fair is coming of age and that the uneven quality of previous years has leveled off and reached a respectable--often distinguished--level.

“I think the quality is higher that ever before,” Los Angeles dealer Marti Koplin said. Tobey Moss, also of Los Angeles, emphatically agreed.

Dealers reported lots of inquiries about their art and some early sales. Robert Berman at B-1 Gallery, for example, answered repeated questions about Keith Haring’s work and sold May Sun’s “The Chairman and the Colonel,” a painting for a soon-to-be-produced billboard that pairs an image of Mao Tse-tung with Colonel Sanders and Chinese student protesters.

G. Ray Hawkins of Los Angeles said that business in photography is booming. “I was on cloud nine after the preview. I did $100,000 worth of business Wednesday night,” he said. By the end of fair’s first public day he had totaled $150,000 in sales at the Convention Center and an additional $80,000 at the gallery on Melrose Avenue, he said.

Some of Hawkins’ regular clients and various new ones have stepped up to buy photographs by Man Ray, Andre Kertesz, Edward Steichen, Wynn Bullock, Judy Coleman and Herb Ritts. Others have asked him to hold works by Paul Outerbridge and Ansel Adams for possible purchase. Hawkins said he had doubled his booth space from 300 square feet to 600 square feet and will probably double it again next year.

Fashionable collectors perused art at the gala, followed by a more casually dressed crowd on Thursday. Maxfield’s owners Tommy and Anne-Marie Perse were seriously considering the purchase of Andy Warhol’s painting of Lenin from Achenbach Kunsthandel of Dusseldorf.

Los Angeles collectors Philip and Beatrice Gersh, whose collection is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, snapped up a small photo piece by British artists Gilbert & George, and measured Tony Cragg’s bronze “Fruit Bottles” to see if the sculpture would fit into their garden. (Gilbert & George, who received an International Art Fair Award for their support of AIDS victims, hadn’t expected that any of their work would be at the fair, but two examples turned up at the gala preview.)

Among special weekend programs at the fair are a lecture by New York artist Barbara Kruger today at 4 p.m. and a symposium on “Crimes of the Art: Censorship, Art Fraud and Consumer Protection” on Sunday at 6 p.m.