O.C. Museum Plans Racing Stripes for Birthday Show

For its 75th anniversary next year, Laguna Art Museum is developing an exhibit that will explore Southern California’s custom-car culture of the 1950s and ‘60s, an era known for racy, pin-striped hot rods, the bubble-topped “Beatnik Bandit,” and the rotund rodent “Ratfink.”

Tentatively titled “Custom Culture,” the planned exhibit will feature three leading figures of the genre, all of whom worked in Los Angeles or Orange Counties, museum director Charles Desmarais said.

Von Dutch, perhaps the granddaddy of the field, introduced the technique of pin-striping for car decoration. He also once created a bicycle fashioned from welded chains for “The Munsters” TV show and made cartoons and paintings believed never to have been shown publicly, Desmarais said.

Ed (Big Daddy) Roth designed custom hot rods that became classics of the era, including the “Beatnik Bandit,” his first and most famous car. He also designed T-shirts, tattoos, and the popular “Ratfink” cartoon character, reproduced in various two- and three-dimensional forms and distributed nationwide.

Robert Williams, who worked as an artist for Roth and went on to be a founder of the underground Zap Comix, was the only one of the three to cross over into the mainstream art world.

Heavily influenced by the others’ work, his wildly irreverent paintings are now on exhibit at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Laguna museum. They are part of a recent trend of so-called “low art,” which, in this case, draws on such areas of popular culture as surfing, hot rods, graffiti and underground comics.

“This is like a progression from raw, beatnik culture, a totally on-the-street kind of thing (represented by Dutch), to a more refined and commercial aspect (Roth), to (involvement in) the fine arts, with Williams,” Desmarais said.

Other mainstream contemporary artists--such as Billy Al Bengston and Peter Alexander--whose work was influenced or inspired by custom-car culture will be included, he added.

Planned for the summer of 1993, the exhibit would be one of the “major” exhibitions scheduled in conjunction with the museum’s 75th birthday, which comes in July but will be celebrated all year long, Desmarais said. “Custom Culture” works would be displayed in the museum’s main building and its South Coast Plaza annex.

A catalogue for the exhibit is planned.