Sculptor Transforms the Neighborhood : Art: When James Wolfe moved from N.Y. to L.A., his work moved from inside onto yards on his street.

Can an artist’s eye transform his neighborhood? Director Tim Burton certainly thought so in “Edward Scissorhands,” when an otherworldly boy’s artistic soul made a whole tract development blossom, to say nothing of its people.

But what about the real world and a serious New York sculptor, a recent transplant whose medium wasn’t adorable topiary or pinked poodles but painted steel in abstract forms? How would an unexceptional south of Westwood neighborhood react when delicate steel artworks appeared on his front lawn, jutting up between the impatiens and the tree ferns?

If you guessed alarm and petitions you misjudge the people of Manning Avenue--and the appeal of the work of James Wolfe. In July, 1990, when Wolfe, his film-executive wife Sandra Ruch and their 7-year-old daughter Rowie moved from too-crowded Manhattan, their driveway was littered with Wolfe’s work, literally tons of it. That was before he found his shared south Inglewood studio or placed his more favorite works around the garden.

Intrigued, his new neighbors admired them aloud. Bemused and pleased, Wolfe offered to lend whomever was interested the pick of his studio for their front lawns. Longtime residents and new ones responded, although one of the street’s oldest inhabitants turned Wolfe down with the utmost courtesy, “since she was going to have company shortly.”

And so, seven pieces by a recognized American artist can be found in the front gardens of a wide range of houses between Olympic and Pico, in a neighborhood where two blocks away a Road Runner windmill turns giddily in a front lawn.

The nicest part of the idea is the innocence of it. It matters not one whit to all Manning Avenue that Wolfe’s works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, or the Boston and the Houston Museums of Fine Art, or that his New York gallery is Andre Emmerich, some of whose other artists are David Hockney and Helen Frankenthaler. They may not know it, and if they don’t, it’s a cinch that Jim Wolfe won’t tell them. These people have seen something they like, and they’re delighted to have a chance to live with it.

To talk to Wolfe, ginger-bearded, with full, shoulder-clearing hair and instant warmth, is to remember suddenly the qualities of the best teacher you ever had. Someone who educated without tipping his hand that teaching was going on. As we toured the seven disparate pieces, each looks strangely right in its surrounding.

“You get a different feel for them here than in the studio,” he says, appraisingly. “To see them this way gives me a huge thrill. It’s our great good fortune that we’re living on a block like this one. If we lived in Vermont we couldn’t do it. I think it’s California; I think it’s Los Angeles. In general in New York, you have a fortress where you put your precious things, and it’s sealed off from everything.”

“Here, you’re outdoors, you drop in on people. Here art is entertainment and things are temporary. Even gardens. You plant for five years, things get too big and you get rid of them. There, the aim is the 300-year-old tree.”

Wolfe’s pieces are big, some of them are heavy enough that he’s had to make new bases for them for the safety of children the age of his daughter who find them irresistible as jungle gyms. (Imagine, not a single museum guard to give the kids the fish eye and a lifelong fear of touching, smoothing, crawling through or making faces into an artwork.)

“I’m still for ‘plop art,’ ” Wolfe remarks. “For a while, if it wasn’t site-specific, it wasn’t any good. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. We can move Michelangelo. We can move Donatello.

“There is a theory in art circles, as collectors pursue the avant-garde, of trying to convince yourself that if it looks ugly, it has to be beautiful. By almost refusing to use their taste, they seem to think, ‘We’ll intellectualize our way through what we like or don’t like.’ The truth of the matter is that these (sculptures) have no political statement. We’re talking about just being allowed to go out and make things that are beautiful.”

At the time they came on a flatbed from New York, his works, some of whose lines have been described as calligraphic, were in colors congruent to their New York settings: grays, tans, taupes, black, a few pale lavenders.

Seeing them in the unending California sunshine, Wolfe found himself rethinking some of their colors; almost to his surprise choosing Rustoleum in tones of grass green or a purple as electric as the flower of a Princess plant. As for his own acclimatization, Wolfe tells this story. With a New Yorker’s caution about strangers, he mentioned to his next-door neighbor, Larry Rapoport, that, sometimes, walking the family dog at night on this street where every light is out by 10, the sight of someone “wrong looking” on the street made Wolfe nervous.

Rapoport roared. “But Jim, you’re the wrong-looking person on the block.”

Wolfe projects the image of an utterly unpretentious man who works hard and gets inordinate pleasure from what he does. He can also throw sparks as he talks about a sculptor’s highs.

“Sometimes, when I’m bending lines, the steel becomes alive, it becomes hemp or a river or a dancer. I want sculpture to be alive, not mechanical. And it has to be personal. . . . I find it’s better when I’m not stepping back from it, when I’m in it. You’re looking for an epiphany, a revelation. Getting to some place you didn’t know you could get to. You can also play different moods and feelings; you can do Bach, or Mozart . . . .”

“Or Wagner?” he’s asked.

“I think enough people do,” Wolfe says, just dryly enough.

It’s late afternoon as we walk down the street again and the pieces have a different feeling in the changed light. “Actually, sculpture’s a hard thing to place,” he muses.” ’It kills the grass,’ ‘It’s hard to mow around.’ The feeling is that no one wants what you make. There’s not a great demand for what I do, and I’m a ‘successful’ artist.

“This is one of the most pleasurable exhibitions I’ve had in my life, because it’s outside the context of art. These people have no reason to have art in their front yard. They haven’t looked at a raisonne . I could be an amateur, anyone.”

“In terms of being here in Los Angeles, I feel useful for the first time. Having that range of stuff, old work as well as new, is rewarding, even better than having a show where you have all the new pieces.”

“And,” he says fondly, “Rowie can see what I do.” At this moment Rowie Wolfe, with Caitlin Rapoport and Jennifer and Brian Sindell have swarmed to the top of the miraculously balanced work in Wolfe’s front yard in brilliant tones of fern green punctuated with two jots of tomato red.

“Just like Alice in Wonderland in Central Park,” he says, grinning.

What’s his hope when the art works leave his neighbors’ lawns, as they eventually must?

“I think it should be harder for them to live without it afterwards,” Wolfe says, after a quiet moment.