A Tour of a Not-So-Picturesque Art World : Gallery: A familiar figure on the county art scene says at various times she has ‘liked it, lumped it and left it--but never all the way.’

Wearing a vivid hand-embroidered vest and happily oblivious to a clump of hair standing in upright rebellion on her head, Phyllis Lutjeans paced up and down a Rancho Santiago College classroom on Monday to deliver a talk she titled “The Art World: Like it! Lump It! Or Leave It.”

Lutjeans, 61, is a familiar figure on the Orange County art scene. She worked at Newport Harbor Art Museum from 1968 to 1980, eventually becoming curator of education. A couple of years later she and two partners opened TLK Gallery in Costa Mesa, which closed in 1985. Since then, she has been at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, where she indoctrinates students into the mysteries of mounting exhibitions.

Her professional life began almost inadvertently. As a newly minted college graduate who majored in English, she answered a tiny newspaper ad (“Gallery aide wanted”) that turned out to be for an assistant in the textile department of the Art Institute of Chicago. During her subsequent 40 years in the business, which also included a stint at what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she has “liked it, lumped it and left it--but never all the way,” she asaid.

Mingling a genteel outlook--a throwback to an era when the commercial underpinning of art was not as frankly acknowledged as it is today--with a few gutsy asides, Lutjeans skipped merrily from topic to topic, sometimes losing her way altogether in a web of reminiscence.

There are really two “art worlds,” she explained. In one world, the artists tend to specialize in landscape or flowers or portraits. (“It’s wonderful for the artist, for the gallery and, I suspect, for the people who purchase the art.”) The other art world (“the one I’m involved in”) has a larger cast of players: the artist, the gallery, museums, critics and collectors with clout.

They are all involved in “a very symbiotic relationship,” Lutjeans said. Someone in the audience later asked if the relationship wasn’t incestuous. “Incestuous? Very incestuous,” she replied with a tinge of dismay. “I did use the word symbiotic. It’s a nicer word.”

There are other words she doesn’t like. Like career (“I hate to use that term”) and sell (she prefers to talk about placing works in certain collections).

Today, thousands of artists spawned by the colleges, universities and art schools “are all trying to say something, hopefully, or--it’s really quite disquieting--to ‘make it,’ ” she said. “I’m not saying artists shouldn’t try to make it. But when there’s a confusion between the work and making it, there’s something unwholesome. For me art still has a very metaphysical meaning.”

Still, there are certain tried-and-true methods of getting on the inside track. “How does an artist make contact with a gallery? You find yourself a person in the art world who thinks you’re as good as you think you are.”

One route, Lutjeans said, assuming you know your work is good, is to become a museum preparator (an all-purpose handyman or woman who does the dirty work involved in mounting an exhibit). Then you can ask the curator to take a look at your work. You don’t ask for a show, of course, just for the benefit of “the experience, the eye, the clout, the education.”

A certain delicacy is required in this matter, according to Lutjeans. You don’t get the job just because you want a curator to pay attention to your work: “That’s ugly.”

She suggested young artists also enter their work in juried shows, if the juror is well-regarded. (“Every artist says this is pointless,” she sighed.)

But maybe you’re a young artist who just wants to become affiliated with a commercial gallery? “Well, forget it.”

At TLK, Lutjeans said, every day the mailman brought in three, four, five sets of slides of artists’ work. She pantomimed a brief squint at a slide held up to the light. The volume of slides was just too great to pay much attention to them. And in any case, “you almost always can tell what you do not want by slides. But (whether they represent) what you do want is very hard to tell.”

The guiding principle of TLK was to handle a few young, local artists “who, we felt, had a special vision--without having ‘blue chip’ art in the back room. We didn’t want to sell Frank Stella lithographs or major Los Angles artists. We wanted to fully concentrate on young people.

“It didn’t work. In Orange County, even now, the collectors are not mature enough to purchase works of art that have not been validated by New York galleries or Los Angeles galleries.”

So TLK began a sideline in what they called “vintage California” art: early paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, work by fellow Bay Area artists Paul Wonner and David Park. “The only problem is that there isn’t a lot of that stuff around. There was not enough to sustain a gallery,” Lutjeans said.

Asked to comment on the cultural maturation of Orange County,” Lutjeans offered a less-than-rosy assessment.

“There will be artists in Orange County that will be very good and will leave Orange County and go to another place to receive recognition. At some point, yeah, we’ll have artists who’ll stay here. But it won’t be until (the county) builds a whole support system.”

Even museum growth in Orange County has come at a price, Lutjeans said, implying that larger boards of trustees tend to have a dampening effect on museum risk-taking. Yet in its modest beginnings, Newport Harbor Art Museum “never thought of itself as a provincial or small museum,” she said. Former director Tom Garver organized exhibits of Tom Wesselman, Robert Rauschenberg and other cutting-edge artists of the 1960s when there was very little money and little outside support.

“We had a lot of chutzpah,” Lutjeans said brightly. “You have to have a belief in yourself.”