ART : Stop the Art World and Let 1990 Off

Armand Hammer opened a marble monument to himself in Westwood on Nov. 28, then died a scant 12 days later at the age of 92. There was a strange sense of tragic failure about the event, of aspirations to nobility sullied by an excess of ambition.

Had he remained a County Museum of Art loyalist and bequeathed his collection there as long promised, he would have been a hero. The act would have added a grace note of modesty to his colorful self-aggrandizement. The gesture would have said he realized his compendium, despite its bright patches, better served the community as part of the community.

Instead, like some minor Pharaoh, he built his private mastaba. At worst it will become a kind of landmark to an era of opulent egotism. Properly nurtured, it might yet serve Hammer’s philanthropic impulse. It has, after all, already brought us a rare retrospective of the art of Russian avant-garde pioneer Kazimir Malevich.

The Hammer scenario had larger reverberations. It somehow captured the spirit of the art world in 1990, glittering and guttering under the breath of mixed motives.

Generally speaking, years are like elevators going up in a 12-story building. At every floor the doors open and the climate in the box alters a bit as the mix of passengers changes. The muse of spring enters shyly smiling, then departs to make way for the ravishing beauty of summer. There is a certain regularity.

Then there was 1990.

The beginning of the end of the century was the most chaotic twelvemonth since the close of World War II. The entire planet rattled and fluxed. In the arts, the battle over censorship at the National Endowment for the Arts grated on like a car alarm at midnight. As the elevator stopped at every floor, there was a sense the new passenger was either Cotton Mather, Black Friday or a tornado.

Out, please.

This is all very exciting but it’s wearing me thin. I need to get out of the fray for a breather. Immersing one’s head in a museum, a good gallery or a nice art book helps get it back together. Art tends to nurture long thoughts.

Art remained a prescription for correcting one’s internal gyroscope. It seduced us with the reminder that humans can add to nature’s sheer visual beauty in County Museum of Art exhibitions of the Annenberg collection and “The Fauve Landscape.” The museum’s small, scholarly show of three versions of Chardin’s “Soap Bubbles” had nice things to say about how art rewards fine discrimination with nuances of meaning.

Pomona College did a keen little show called “The Art of the Forger,” which wound up being about the need for authenticity in an ersatz society. UC Irvine acted as host for a traveling exhibition of antiquities lovingly collected by Sigmund Freud. The ensemble showed the ancient way the hidden human spirit makes itself visible in its symbols.

Ah, good old art.

For those who take it seriously, art has long functioned as a kind of substitute religion. Going in, its votaries take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. But, like any religion that has to exist in the real world, the art cult is subject to adulteration. The edifice embraces factions from humble student monks doing their thing out of love to venal cardinals in it for pomp and power. 1990 was a kind of Baroque apogee of art as a spectacular cathedral of cynicism and greed.

The faithful did not like it when holy relics like Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” and Renoir’s “Au Moulin de la Galette” were transformed into symbols of luxurious avarice and sold at auction for $82.5 and $78.1 million, respectively.

It felt good when the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired Van Gogh’s “Irises,” refused to disclose the price and put the lovely, troubled thing back on public view where it belongs.

It felt better when the fall auction market took a dive. Maybe now works of art will stop being viewed as bedizened status symbols and go back to being merely priceless.

How can art be a religion and a business at the same time?

The same way televangelism can, I suppose.

As far as art biz was concerned it looked like a peak year. Galleries flocked to town faster than you could count them. People stopped asking if L.A. is an art center when it became self-evident. All the same, by year’s end rumors were rife that gallery business was sluggish.

Why wouldn’t it be sluggish? Every other day the news is that the country is in a recession.

Reality had a way of sticking its nose into the sacred precincts. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Art is not about escaping from life, it’s about understanding it.

Thanks to glasnost we have Malevich in Westwood. New York’s Metropolitan Museum showed the Russian taste for French painting in “From Poussin to Matisse.” Hebrew Union College presented “Tradition and Revolution,” a revelatory exhibition about a heretofore ignored Jewish avant-garde in Russia. USC’s Soviet underground show, “Keepers of the Flame,” provided more evidence of the great thaw, if not great quality. In Seattle, “Art Into Life” showed the revolutionary vigor of the original avant-garde while Tacoma presented the work of recent pre- glasnost Russian underground art in “Spring Into Summer.”

Japan grew as a world power and LACMA presented “A Primal Spirit.” Fascinating show. Contemporary Japanese sculptors working in large scale are blending traditional aesthetic involvement with materials and nature into the art of the international mainstream.

Next thing you know Tokyo’s Fuji Museum buys the entire photo collection of L.A. dealer Stephen White.

Germany headed for reunification. German painter Gerhard Richter promptly appeared at the Lannan Foundation. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented the first American survey of German painter Sigmar Polke. LACMA presented “Envisioning America,” a deeply engaging look at prints expressing Weimar Republic artists’ fantasies about the United States, followed by Die Brucke prints. (Early next year comes perhaps the most anticipated show ever originated in L.A., Stephanie Barron’s re-creation of Hitler’s notorious 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition.)

For better and for worse, 1990 was the year art was increasingly used to illustrate social and political themes and further their causes.

Sometimes this works well. The catalogue essay for “Monet in the ‘90s” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts exposed a lot of fascinating subtext about his relation to the politics and social trends of his times. But demonstrating relationships between art and reality don’t always work that well.

Nothing creates a greater ethical dilemma than finding two worthy sets of values at loggerheads. In a burgeoning multicultural society, previously muted voices want to be heard and should be. To this end, Washington’s Corcoran Gallery presented “Facing History,” an exhibition that purported to expose prejudice towards blacks in traditional American art.

UCLA chalked up sociologically bent shows with “Art/Artifact” and “CARA.” The first was a rather oblique look at the way African art is displayed. The second--a survey of Chicano art from 1965-85--had moments of touching and gritty excellence.

Each in its way had good intentions about exposing negative stereotyping or bringing attention to ignored artists. All to the good, but artistic questions must still be addressed.

The “quality” issue haunted the entire art sphere in 1990, from the Hammer Museum to the Mapplethorpe affair. Fostering quality in a disinterested way has been the goal of the arts across centuries and cultures. “Quality” doesn’t mean the slickest or the prettiest. It can mean the ugliest or the scariest. The most potent.

The only goal of the quest for quality is identifying expressive eloquence. Nobody rejects a Tiepolo ceiling as Catholic propaganda, a Michelangelo sculpture as homosexual advocacy or a winged Assyrian bull as absolutist art. Real art lovers would rather cut off their noses than spurn an eloquent work for any reason external to the thing in itself.

Had the quality issue remained further to the front it might have provided some detachment in the nasty battle over restricting the NEA. When the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition that kicked off the whole ominous controversy turned up at UC Berkeley, one thing came clear: The work can be attached to important issues of expressive freedom but artistically it is just not outstanding or original enough to rate all the fuss.

Surprisingly, in Los Angeles, a town that puts so much stock in being a now sort of place, the role of contemporary art was less a starring than a supporting one this year. One suspects this was due partly to the fact that aesthetic questions tended be outshouted by newsier real world issues.

Art played but a minor role in the Los Angeles Festival. The Laguna Art Museum presented “Turning the Tide,” which showed we are finally doing something about the history of modernism in L.A. before 1960. The Museum of Contemporary Art had already given a boost to local architectural history with its survey of the seminal Case Study Houses.

MOCA’s greatly anticipated retrospective of the influential John Baldessari found the artist intelligent, humorous and insightful, but unexpectedly thin and excessively accessible. The museum was disappointed by rather poor attendance figures for the reputedly popular figure. It is liable to not be disappointed by its current survey of Ed Ruscha’s art. The new black paintings represent a quantum leap in maturity and expressive gravity for an artist once seen as a hip L.A. entertainer.

Aside from that, contemporary museum shows largely failed to provide bellwether insights, other than reflecting the alternately esoteric and excessively media-oriented state of the art.

Curiously enough, the art events that provided the greatest sense of the present were about American art in the past. By coincidence, early in the year everyone was reading a new and controversial biography of Jackson Pollock as a retrospective of his mentor Thomas Hart Benton appeared at the County Museum of Art.

The confluence reminded everyone of the unruly, risky, rabid way real art gets made. The often-scorned Regionalist Benton suddenly looked both heroic and historically inevitable. Struggling for their art in Depression America, the pair provided radically contrasting exemplars of art that grows out of troubled times.

Well, if trouble is good aesthetic fertilizer, it looks like art should get better in 1991.