Art in the Eighties : A Gilded Age : Art: Museum construction flourished, prices for artworks skyrocketed and artists got rich, but changes in tax law and NEA restrictions put a damper on progress in the ‘80s.

They were the Opulent ‘80s. The visual arts, a once-esoteric subculture, joined the real world, reflecting the Reagan era’s love of consumption, prestige and self-congratulation. We crowned ourselves in a frenzy of museum building and filled our cultural cathedrals with the booty of centuries. Artists joined the ranks of the rich and famous. Galleries flourished and auction prices ascended into the stratosphere.

It was gilded and grandiose, but in the end museum directors feared for the future of public showplaces. New York’s magisterial Metropolitan had a 1989 deficit of more than $4 million. Tax laws discouraged donations, and auction prices shut down institutional collecting. New art lost its way in a maze of cross-purposes, and all art was reduced to a commodity increasingly in the hands of private investors seeking status, profit or their very own private museums. Some boutique museums worked--like Houston’s smart, soulful Menil Museum--but hearts sank when Armand Hammer jerked his promised collection away from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build his own monument in Westwood.

It looked like the dawn of the Nasty ‘90s.

What happened? What went right? What went wrong?

Los Angeles matured into a meaningful art center and came to symbolize the whole caboodle as the home of the world’s richest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Trust. With an endowment well in excess of $3 billion, it has an annual income of about $150 million--a sum a Saudi prince would have trouble squandering. Among many acquisitions was one of the 10 most expensive works auctioned. It paid $35.2 million for Jacopo Pontormo’s “Halberdier,” but Van Gogh and Picasso dominated the Top 10.

Los Angeles mirrored a Euro-American cultural axis at the apex of Baroque splendor. It built museums with the enthusiasm of medieval worshipers. Art itself took on the aspect of a weird secular religion. True believers revered its relics. The powerful purchased piety through corporate indulgence. The artist Hans Haacke blew the whistle on them, the Ralph Nader of the art world.

Angeltown’s greening was signaled by the enchanted Olympic year of ’84 with its cosmopolitan arts festival. The fine arts had a small part in it, but the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s lovely Impressionist show, “A Day in the Country,” captured the mood.

The Museum of Contemporary Art went through birth traumas. Wrangles over architectural control and the loss of its superstar director Pontus Hulten had to play out before Richard Koshalek took charge. Now, Arata Isozaki’s pretty, witty building glitters on Bunker Hill.

In 1980, Earl A. (Rusty) Powell came from Washington to direct the steady-as-she-goes County Museum. Now the museum’s new Anderson Building by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and its Japanese Pavilion by Bruce Goff are as exotic as the town, but they echo a phenomenon that swept westward from the Berlin Wall to the Pacific Rim.

West Germany probably led the pack, capping its economic miracle with a blitz of building, adding nearly 30 new museums by decade’s end, including such masterworks as James Stirling’s muscular Stuttgart Neue Staatsgalerie and Hans Hollien’s lapidary Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, a burg of just 150,000 souls.

Paris gilded its lily with the grandiose art-unfriendly Musee d’Orsay, got it right when they housed the legacy of the rebellious Picasso in the 17th-Century Hotel Sale and surprised everybody when I. M. Pei’s new glass-pyramid entry for the Louvre turned out handsome and respectful of its august surroundings.

The real spirit of the era began with a national sigh of relief on Inauguration Day, 1981, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini released American hostages held in the Tehran embassy. Self-celebration followed. Art of all stripes acted as reassurance that the culture was still rich and powerful even as it felt rattled and unsure. The country became conservative and art held up the mirror in a revivalist rush into the past.

Art formed cliches of Post-Modernism accompanied by big nostalgic shows devoted to the American Renaissance, Louis Comfort Tiffany and decadent Vienna, 1900. A paraded pomp of bread-and-circus shows that started in the ‘70s with “The Treasures of Tuthankamun” lumbered on to pretty well culminate with the National Gallery’s “Treasure Houses of Great Britain” in 1985. By then, rising insurance costs and dwindling support had turned such shows, no matter how popular, into albino elephants. Some, like the fatuous “The Search for Alexander,” had been turkeys anyway.

A newer, more nourishing trend was already under way. Serious and revelatory surveys of master art proved the most passionate fruit of the decade. Even aficionados who had spent their days with noses glued to framing glass were astonished by the number of once-in-a-lifetime American exhibitions of great old master art: Watteau, Caravaggio, Poussin, Zurbaran, Hals, Velazquez. As history moved closer, it focused on the towering figure of Cezanne, the heart-stopping testament of Van Gogh, the unavoidable stylishness and exoticism of Gauguin.

For Los Angeles viewers, such marvels were both revelation and aggravation because witnessing any of them required pilgrimage to Manhattan’s Metropolitan and Museum of Modern Art and Washington’s National Gallery. Los Angeles came a long way, but baby we still got a long way to go.

We did better--even astonishingly better--when it came to totting up the short list of the decade’s finest modern exhibitions. The originality of a revived modern-art program at LACMA ran neck-and-neck with the classicism of the Museum of Modern Art. MOMA’s great Picasso retrospective, her “Primitivism and 20th Century Art” plus “Picasso and Braque,” added up to a thoughtful probing of fixed tradition. LACMA talked about the present and future in exhibitions devoted to near-forgotten, newly relevant movements like the Russian avant-garde and Stephanie Barron’s German Expressionist sculpture and second-generation shows. Maurice Tuchman had the gumption to say that modern art had soul in “The Spiritual and Art.” The museum reintroduced the dense mastery of Max Beckmann in a retrospective no New York museum had the brains to book.

Then there was contemporary art.

Pluralism turns out to be code for “one fine mess.” The art of the moment became a chaotic tower of Babel with everybody speaking every conceivable language but his own. Babylon babbled on in the accents of fashion, entertainment, politics and economics, but it was a rare day when there was a sign in the window reading “Man Spricht Kunst” or “On Parle Art.” In the end, art was deemed more interesting if it attached to a current issue like perestroika , AIDS or Japan than because it was good.

The Museum of Contemporary Art became the West Coast flagship of the Now. Not fully launched until 1986, it made great strides, buying its core collection from Milan’s Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo for $11 million and receiving bequests from the estates of Barry Lowen and Taft Schreiber. Everyone wished MOCA well, but as the artificial curtain came down on the ‘80s, the museum seemed not to have gained traction. A sense of trying to do too many things at once echoed the disarray of the larger world of contemporary art.

Bogus movements succeeded one another like mannequins parading down a ramp: Neo-Expressionism, the Transavantgardia, New Images, Neo-Geo, Appropriation, Deconstructivism. Art was reinternationalized and, for what it’s worth, a local institution exercised broad influence. A generation of Young Turks from CalArts under the guruship of John Baldessari spearheaded art that deals in word-associated images and social parody via The Media.

The new power of the press to intervene in shaping popular artistic taste was never clearer than in the hot, slow summer of ‘86, when Time and Newsweek carried cover stories about the supposed discovery of a cache of supposedly secret paintings by Andrew Wyeth. All depicted his longtime model, Helga Testorf. The subtextual implication that the grand old conservative of American painting had had an affair was enough to ensure the popularity of a museum tour. It had nothing to do with art. It was about the yarn.

International bellwether exhibitions proved there are more artists working than anybody can keep track of--or wants to. Germany’s Documenta and the Venice Biennale suffered from inbreeding and hollow giantism. After 10 years, only a handful of such artists stick in the mind: Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Richard Long, Jonathan Borofsky, Christian Boltanski--to name a few of the few. Local examples with talent and apparent staying power are as rare as Jill Giegerich.

Last summer, Paris’ Pompidou Center organized “Magicians of the Earth.” It mixed a sprawling melange of jet-set regulars like Nam June Paik with unknown Third World folk-style artists and may have been the worst, most incoherent circus of the epoch.

Superstar artists flaired and fizzled. A trio of Italians hot at the start were half forgotten by the end. Americans like David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and Robert Longo sold in six figures, but after Longo’s retrospective at LACMA a New York critic wondered if he was washed up with the decade. Green talents were launched before they were ready. Jean-Michel Basquiat died from it.

Truth to tell, the most memorable art of the ‘80s came from artists who predated it: Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, Lucien Freud, Ed Moses, Joe Goode and the artist’s architect, Frank Gehry. One of the nicest memories comes from ‘85, when Christo wrapped Paris’ ancient Seine bridge, the Pont Neuf. Seen at sunset swathed in dull golden fabric, it was like a liquefied cocktail of past and present existing in classic harmony.

What went wrong?

The culture went greedy, narcissistic, intensely confrontational, contentious and short on civility. Fracturing polarization symbolized by, say, the agonizing debate over abortion, signals a society that has lost the ability to make the distinctions necessary to arrive at a common set of values.

A French poet, I think it was Valery, when accused of being overly cultivated, replied that if civilization fails to become more refined it must become brutalized.

In the arts, the decade saw a breakdown of distinctions that breached the borders between the various arts, a cross-fertilization that revitalized architecture and design but impoverished fine art. Even artists who kept the faith found themselves confronted by an audience relieved of the burden of being attentive to pesky nuances. After all, it’s all the same in the end. It’s all collectibles .

Andy Warhol died, but his sardonically innocent insights about American culture proved true. Fame and money.

Public Art turned out to be code for vulgarization .

Vulgarity has the virtue of energy and the vice of self-satisfaction. Now that art is like everything else, everybody has a shot at it from John Q. Public to The Media and Sen. Klaghorn. The decade has shown where that gets us.

Remember the controversy up in the Bay over Robert Arneson’s bust of assassinated Mayor George Moscone? What about the wrangle over Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., or New York’s grinding battle around Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc,” which was finally removed to the artist’s anguish? Around here, there was Robert Graham’s Olympic Gateway. Critics out to weigh its aesthetic worth were surprised at public outrage over pubic specificity.

Remember when the city’s manager for cultural affairs, Fred Croton, left the post after it was discovered he had exaggerated his qualifications on his application? The Getty’s respected curator of antiquities, Jiri Frel, was allowed to resign quietly after he’d violated museum policies on acquisitions. Dreary business.

Gentlemanly John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum, must have been bemused by the number of times journalists and dealers besmirched his acqusitions as hot or fake. First they went after his Dieric Bouts, then his ancient Greek Kouros and a big Aphrodite. Thomas Hoving of Connoisseur magazine led the charge so many times it should have gotten funny. Never did.

It does not auger well that the lights go out on a year when the big news was a senatorial attack on the National Endowment for the Arts. Hard to forget that the Corcoran Gallery did the wrong thing by canceling an endowment-funded show of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Instead of avoiding controversy and political interference thereby, they increased it, incensed the art community and kicked off a chain of events that ended with legislation restricting endowment grants to “obscene or offensive” art, whatever that means.

Means trouble.

Nobody wants to leave a decade on such a sour note. Let’s go back to London, to the new Clore Gallery for the art of Joseph Mallord William Turner. There is a study room there where any citizen willing to wash his fingers can contemplate Turner’s glorious watercolors, holding them in his own hands.

That’s what it’s all about.

BUYING POWER

Major Acquisitions of the J. Paul Getty Museum in the 1980s

1980

“Allegory of Horse and Rider,” painting by Hans Holbein, price not disclosed.

1981

“Holy Family,” painting by Nicholas Poussin, $4 million, joint purchase with Norton Simon Museum.

“Study of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra,” drawing by Rembrandt, $380,000.

1982

Pair of 17th-Century coffers on stands made for Louis XIV by Andre-Charles Boulle.

1983

Irene and Peter Ludwig Collection of illuminated manuscripts, price not disclosed.

‘Dancer and Woman With Umbrella Waiting on a Bench,” pastel by Edgar Degas, $3.7 million, joint purchase with Norton Simon Museum.

1984

“Kouros,” 6th-Century BC Greek statue, price not disclosed.

Seven Old Master drawings from the Chatsworth Collection, $8.2 million.

18,000 photographs including the collections of Sam Wagstaff, Arnold Crane, Bischof Berger and Kahmen/Heusch, price not disclosed.

1985

‘Annunciation,” painting by Dieric Bouts, price not disclosed.

‘Adoration of the Magi,” painting by Andrea Mantegna, $10.45 million.

“Man With a Hoe,” painting by Jean-Francois Millet, price not disclosed.

“Griffin Attacking a Fallen Doe,” 4th-Century BC Greek table base, price not disclosed.

1986

“Fallen or Dying Youth,” bronze statuette, 5th-Century BC Greek, price not disclosed.

“Portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel,” painting by Anthony van Dyck, price not disclosed.

“Portrait of the Daughters of Joseph Bonaparte” and “Farewell to Telemachus and Eucharis,” paintings by Jacques-Louis David, price not disclosed.

Sheet of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, price not disclosed.

1987

“Entry of Christ Into Brussels,” painting by James Ensor, price not disclosed.

1988

“Aphrodite,” 5th-Century BC Greek statue, $20 million.

1989

“La Promenade,” painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, $17.7 million.

“Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici,” painting by Jacopo Pontormo, $35.2 million.

“Rue Mosnier With Flags,” painting by Edouard Manet, $26.4 million.