A Curator’s Declaration of Independence : Josine Ianco-Starrels works to give a unified vision to the visual arts of L.A. Festival

The 1990 Los Angeles Festival is barely under way and already the word on the street is that its visual arts component was something of an afterthought and a stepchild, scattered and underfunded, even though curated by the respected Josine Ianco-Starrels.

Noted Los Angeles dealer Rosumund Felsen commented: “I got this ridiculous, illegible (festival)) brochure in the mail and assumed it was all about the performing arts. I don’t like the idea of the (visual) arts stuck in there as a token kind of thing.”

Artist Peter Alexander praised the performing arts aspect of the festival while regretting the fate of the visual arts. “It’s an incredible idea to tap all the ignored resources that exist here, but why include the visual arts in a minor way as a gesture? There are too many shows out there anyway.”

None of the criticism was directed to Ianco-Starrels, who has spent a quarter-century concentrating on Southland art. County Museum of Art senior curator Maurice Tuchman said, “Josine is a professional. If she is involved the results will be of interest.”

Ianco-Starrels thinks the visual arts are worth including, even in a secondary way, “because they exist. I admire (festival director) Peter Sellars and the spirit of the theater people. He said, ‘We’re not out for success because we know what that looks like. It looks like Burger King. We’re going to do this this way because it needs to be done, not because it’s going to be perfect.’ Those are my sentiments exactly.”

Festival executive director Judith Luther responded to critics by pointing out that the festival has had a full-time arts coordinator from the beginning in Mary Hamilton, and that the visual arts kitty rose to some 4% of the total $5 million budget--from an initial $50,000 to about $200,000--as the general budget increased.

“I hope in future years we can do more.” Luther said. “Los Angeles has been too long perceived as a place just for the performing arts. We want to do more to assert the importance of the (visual) arts and literature here.”

The festival picked an appropriate booster in Ianco-Starrels, whose career started at the long-defunct Lytton Center for the Visual Arts in 1961. She moved on to teach and run the Gallery at Cal State L.A. and then the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. She recently resigned as chief curator of the Long Beach Museum of Art.

She specialized in art and artists of the overlooked and undervalued sort, from ignored avant-gardists to black women and puppet collectors. Now, she is at it again as an independent curator jiggering together an ethnic hors d’oeuvre tray of festival exhibitions centered on the Pacific Rim. A couple of dozen shows on the official list include nine devoted to Asian and Asian-American art, six to the Latino sensibility, two to Afro-Americans, two to L.A. artists and one each to women, AIDS victims and artists from Seattle and New Zealand.

Ianco-Starrels lives in a rustic house tucked away on one of the myriad lanes that wind off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. She looks a trifle care-worn and admits to nervousness about talking to the press even though she compiled The Times’ art news column for a number of years. She then goes on to make a characteristically enthusiastic case for the shows.

“Judith Luther called last November and asked me to work as a consultant. I tried to find galleries that would be empty at the time of the festival and came up with places like the Woman’s Building, Angel’s Gate Cultural Center and the Long Beach Art Assn. Almost none of them have any money. Then I asked artists about their plans and tried to match them to galleries. Some festival exhibitions are shows that were already planned that happen to fit the festival’s theme such as UCLA’s Latino show, ‘CARA.’

“Our part of the festival isn’t confined to traditional gallery shows. Every RTD car and Blue Line trolley will show parts of a series of bus cards by 13 artists. The Patrick Media billboard company offered three big outdoor boards, (which) will carry works by John Baldessari, Sandra Rowe and Erica Rothenberg.

“The most expensive single project was $20,000 to outfit two large trucks as galleries that will visit public school yards during their after-school programs. We picked schools with the lowest testing scores because they have absolutely no enrichment programs.

“This festival shines a different spotlight. It’s not on the area of high art but on different systems people invented to make sense out of life. It’s about getting back to manifestations of art in the lives of everyday people--what UCLA calls ‘cultural history.’

“We live in a world that no longer recognizes only fine art as represented by the world’s museums. Museums are now associated with what’s being called the ‘elitist’ issue of quality. But everyone knows there are second-rate talents by the thousands among both educated and grass-roots artists. Real talent will shine through in both areas. African art used to be regarded as a curiosity. But by the time the Museum of Modern Art did its ‘Primitivism and 20th-Century Art’ exhibition, the show was a back-door admission that the tribal arts had contributed a blood transfusion to late 19th-Century European art that it badly needed. I think it’s time to pay some of that back.”

Ianco-Starrels’ credentials as one of art’s great populists are impeccable. At Lytton in 1967, she started showing unknown artists. Her ongoing series of “Newcomers” exhibitions gave an opening wedge to artists as disparate as Barry Le Va and Donald Lagerberg, Peter Alexander and Jon Swihart. In 1968, she organized the first exhibition of art by women in California, including works by Betye Saar, Helen Lundeberg, Joyce Treiman, Vija Celmins and others. When Lytton folded in 1969, collector Joseph H. Hirshhorn offered Ianco-Starrels a job at his glossy new museum under construction in Washington. She opted for an offer to teach and direct the gallery at Cal State L.A., not wanting to uproot her two young children.

“I’ve tended to avoid worldly success,” she says. “The tactic helps preserve privacy and allows you to do your own thing.”

She looked at CSLA’s ethnically mixed student body and decided it was her audience. In 1970, she organized “Four Chicano Artists,” another first. She happily schlepped art in her station wagon to eke enough from the budget to print modest catalogues. The art world only gives credence to shows with catalogues.

At the Muni--her longest and happiest gig--she did a staggering 16 exhibitions annually including the 1979 “Multi-Cultural Focus,” intended to draw artists from L.A.’s minority communities. “We were getting no submissions whatsoever until we had the idea to appoint a racially mixed jury of 12, three each of black, Latino, Asian and white jurors. Artists entered once they felt there was someone on the jury who might be on their side.”

Given such a track record, it is no surprise Ianco-Starrels agreed to do the festival. What is a mystery is how, with her background, she became a populist at all.

She was born in Bucharest to one of art’s aristocrats, Marcel Janco, a founding member of the group of now-legendary artists and writers who started the anarchic Dada movement in Zurich in 1916. (German art historians changed the original spelling of his name to “Janco.”) He was a successful artist, architect and gentleman landowner. Long before Ianco-Starrels learned English from Frank Sinatra records, she spoke Romanian, German and French, and read Latin.

When the Nazis moved into Romania and confiscated all Jewish property, the Janco family was forced to flee to Palestine. Like many other Jews, they were beggared by the escape.

“The visa to cross Turkey alone cost a quarter-million dollars.” Ianco-Starrels recalls.

Installed in Tel-Aviv, her admired father continued to intimidate her. “He would tell me I was hopelessly middle-class because I liked a beautiful sunset,” she said, “But I couldn’t stay hurt because he was so handsome. He gave me a taste for beautiful men.”

And beautiful men responded. The renowned photographer Robert Capa spotted Ianco-Starrels looking rather like a teen-aged Linda Darnell and begged her to run away to Paris with him.

“I wanted to but I told him, ‘No, because one afternoon you will leave the hotel for cigarettes and never come back. I couldn’t stand that. I’m not strong enough.’ He said, ‘In that case you are right to refuse me.’ ”

But she ended up in Paris eventually. As she was about to graduate from Tel-Aviv’s Balfour College, Janco jerked her out of school. “He said that learning should be pursued purely, for its own sake and not for some piece of paper. So I never got a college degree.”

The imperious, irresistible father agreed to send his daughter to Paris instead. She arrived with letters to Roberto Matta, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, Jean Arp and the rest of the Paris avant-garde, but few of them had much time for a green girl from Palestine.

So how did a girl bred to art’s purple wind up as earth-mother to L.A.’s aesthetic grass roots?

“(My father) was a populist from an elitist family. He defied them by marrying my mother. She was Catholic, illegitimate and poor but very beautiful.” She holds out old photos as proof.

“He designed ultra-modern houses but furnished them with folk art. In Israel he spent 40 years teaching. He founded the artists’ village of Einhod. He founded an atelier to translate artists’ paintings into tapestries. The workshop was run by a young Arab and women who did the embroidery.

“He believed in public art decades before the term existed. He said the development of easel painting in the Renaissance robbed the people of visual literacy by destroying the tradition of public sculpture and frescoes and made art into a private pleasure of the rich and powerful.”

In 1950 Ianco-Starrels bolted for independence, moving to New York and enrolling at the Art Students League. She also began getting married. First came a chap named Harold Manson. She says his good looks were shortly overbalanced by his fastidious tendency to be the world’s greatest gourmet on all subjects--a maven.

She divorced him and married Herbert Kline, a charismatic filmmaker 20 years her senior and father of her children. A classic lost-generation lefty, he made noted documentary films on World War II such as “Lights Out in Europe” and an award-winning study of the Mexican muralists, “Walls of Fire.” He had fought in the Spanish Civil War and was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. They came to L.A. and in 1961 he took a job with Bart Lytton--an old filmwriting crony who had gone on to become a savings-and-loan baron.

Lytton purchased a collection of archaic pre-cinema contraptions ranging from shadow figures to magic lantern slides and peep shows. He opened a gallery to show it in the S&L; building he’d built on the site of the legendary Sunset Boulevard movie-star bungalow court, The Garden of Allah. Kline was to be his curator but Ianco-Starrels wound up with the job because--incredibly--all the labels and documentation for the exotic collection were in Latin.

Meantime, the flashy, high-flying Lytton was involved with the new County Museum of Art where he had given half the money for its center building. With this leverage, he tried to tell the museum board it ought to show more California art. The board told him politely that such decisions were up to the professional staff. He withdrew his donation and decided to open his own art gallery for California art at Lytton Savings. Ianco-Starrels was named its curator and her career was accidentally launched.

Lytton’s intentions were better than his taste, and Ianco-Starrels had to fight a running battle to maintain professional artistic standards against a willful boss, setting a pattern that would dog her career. She was on a collision course with Lytton but his financial empire collapsed before it came to a head. Somewhere in the midst of all this, she and Kline divorced and she married Lytton executive Morrie Starrels. They separated in 1988.

Her CSLA job ended in 1975 when funding for the gallery dried up. “The president of the college suggested I just do student art shows. I suggested they clear the library of books and replace them with student papers. I resigned.”

In 1985--during her idyllic 12-year tenure at Municipal Art Gallery--Ianco-Starrels was awarded an honorary doctorate from Otis/Parsons School of Design. About the same time, she broke her ankle in a fall, which led to her departure after the city hired Fred Croton as general manager of the Cultural Arts Department.

“While I was convalescing, Croton hired a new curator and I was kicked upstairs. I was not a good bureaucrat. I didn’t kowtow to moves that were intended to make political hay for the gallery. When I was presented with slides proposing a show for the mother of an influential politician, I turned it down. I was not an obedient servant. Bosses don’t like that.”

She left the Muni in 1987. Croton was subsequently relieved of his post, having been accused by Mayor Tom Bradley and others of lying about his qualifications when he applied for the post. Ianco-Starrels was offered her job back, but felt it was too late.

She’d taken the chief curatorship at Long Beach. When the then-director, Stephen Garrett, resigned, she became acting director but, fearing the tentacles of administration, did not apply for the directorship. The museum appointed Harold B. Nelson.

“We had differences in perception about the program. Since I had turned down the directorship, I thought it was my turn to bow out.”

Now on her own, she is working on a show of L.A. realist artists for Tokyo’s Sezon (Seibu) Museum with fellow-independent Noriko Fujinami. There are other projects cooking.

How does she feel about freewheeling?

She smiles wryly and says, “I feel like a cavalryman without a horse.”