The Troubled Gift of Carlos Almaraz : Art: LACMA is showing the work of the late Chicano artist who was torn between social activism and the urge for individual artistic freedom.

The first significant museum exhibition of L.A. Chicano art was “Los Four,” held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. It was a breakthrough for the barrio sensibility. A quartet of young artists festooned the museum’s pristine galleries with scruffy spray-can murals, a big assemblage altar, the front end of a flawlessly finished, gorgeously garish lowrider.

The artists were Frank Romero, Beto de la Rocha, Gilbert Lujan and Carlos Almaraz. Almaraz, the most ideologically polarized of the group, contributed a big political-cartoon painting of United Farm Workers in a tense face-off with Teamsters and growers.

Almaraz, intense and bearded, responded to a question about the funky quality of Los Four art, saying: “Using quality as a basis for art benefits museums, collectors and investors. I now have $3 in my pocket borrowed from my grandmother. Too many artists arrive broke at their own opening.”

Now Almaraz’s work is once again on view at LACMA in “A Tribute to Carlos Almaraz: Selections From the Permanent Collection.” Today at 4:30 p.m. a public ceremony will be held at the museum, remembering the 48-year-old artist who died of AIDS in 1989. On hand will be such luminaries as Cesar Chavez, Cheech Marin, Luis Valdez, Edward James Olmos and Rosana De Soto.

The exhibition presents about 30 works from the museum’s recent acquisition of 70 examples of paintings and works on paper. The latter were gifts from Almaraz’s widow, painter Elsa Flores, and their 9-year-old daughter, Maya.

Almaraz’s life has come to symbolize the dilemma of minority artists torn between the urge of individual aesthetic freedom and a sense of obligation to their community. Almaraz hardly seemed destined for social activism.

He was born in Mexico City in 1941. During the unrest of pachuco-era L.A., the Almaraz family lived in Chicago. Even there, he sensed racial tension in his public school. He felt something he later called social--and perhaps personal--”bifurcation.”

It was a sense of schism that would dog him most of his life. In 1949 the family, now expanded to include a new son, Rudy, moved to Los Angeles, finally settling in the barrio. A third child, Ricky, was born here. Carlos’ father wanted to be a writer but worked as a laborer for Union Pacific railroad. At the end of the day he wasn’t too tired to pursue a passion for film and good books. He passed his cultural aspirations to Carlos, who remained an avid reader all his life.

Almaraz graduated from Garfield High in 1959. In the ‘60s it became a hotbed of Chicano creativity and social protest. By that time Almaraz was long gone. He had moved to New York in 1965 pursuing the artistic muse. There he was joined for a stretch by his old L.A. friend Frank Romero. Both were 18 when they met and would remain best friends for 30 years.

“He was an extraordinary guy,” Romero reminisced during an interview in his studio near Dodger Stadium. “He was bright, gifted and unusually sophisticated for a barrio kid. There was this indefinable charm that made people fall in love with him and seek his advice.

“Carlos started my intellectual life. I started his life as a painter. He said, ‘Commercial art,’ I said, ‘No, paint.’

“In New York, Carlos was painting in the fashionable abstract hard-edge style of the day,” Romero said. “If you looked closely, the abstract shapes were sexual. He was never morose, but you knew there was a dark side. He took a romantic trip to Barcelona on a tramp steamer. He’d disappear at 2 in the morning. One night he told me he was gay.

“I came back to L.A. and bought a big old boarding-house style place in Echo Park. When Carlos returned, he moved in. I was raising a child alone and Carlos helped me with that. We lived there together almost five years.”

But, according to Romero, Almaraz was having his own troubles and was drinking heavily. Eventually, he collapsed. Romero took him to a hospital, near death and hallucinating. Shortly before, Almaraz, who’d taken to keeping journals, had written:

And where are we now

Lost in the mechanics of a

phonograph

or the sound of a telephone

liquor does not quell the mind

grass does nothing

and whatever you’ve got keep it

it’s only too sweet toward death.

When Almaraz finally recovered he kicked booze and never drank again. But still conflicted by his homosexuality, he’d gone into therapy.

At the same time Almaraz and Romero were introduced to the Chicano movement by the other two eventual members of Los Four. “We didn’t know from Chicano. We were painters,” Romero says. “We’d sit around the kitchen table and argue with the others about getting involved.”

Almaraz did. According to longtime friend and supporter, independent curator Josine Ianco-Starrels, Almaraz’s conversion to social activism was inspired by the death of his 21-year-old brother, Ricky. “After Ricky died of an overdose, Carlos felt he couldn’t abandon the Chicano community.”

He traveled to China and Cuba. Returning, he aligned himself with Chavez’s UFW. He once said, “I love people more than art,” and set out to prove it as a social worker in the Boyle Heights district.

“It lasted about five years,” said Romero. “Carlos continued to paint, too, then he just burned out behind the inevitable disillusionment of realizing that a guy like Chavez is only human and that his own save rate as a social worker was very low. About five of his clients were murdered, 15 went to jail. He saved a couple.”

“Los Four” opened first at UC Irvine, where it was conceived by Hal Glicksman. The LACMA showing was another kind of acid test for the young artists. “We weren’t ready for such a show. Much of the criticism of it was right but we weren’t about to pass up our big break,” said Romero.

The same year “Los Four” opened, Almaraz met Elsa Flores. In 1981 they married. Soon after, his career took off. He was included in an increasing number of prestigious museum solo and group exhibitions. In 1984 he contributed a poster to a portfolio for the Olympic Arts Festival. In 1987 he was part of the Corcoran Gallery’s traveling exhibition, “Hispanic Art in the United States,” a bellwether of rising interest in the genre.

Despite the attention, he still maintained a degree of militancy. In 1989, when the Corcoran show opened at the County Museum, he told a Times reporter: “(Institutions) are not interested in Hispanic art. It’s like the song, ‘Another Op’nin’, Another Show.’ This is supposed to appease the peasants. People will be quiet for another 15 years.”

By then, Almaraz had devoted himself to making prints and inventing memorable half-dreamed images of enchanted nights in Echo Park and cars exploding on L.A. freeways.

Flores, interviewed in her comfortable, art-filled home in South Pasadena, said: “Carlos wanted to be a mainstream painter. When he began to have a career, it caused a lot of resentment among his old friends. I think they were more hurt than angry.”

As for their personal relationship: “Carlos had dated a lot and lived with two women before we met. He made no secret of his sexual orientation. He wrote about it in his journals, which he knew would one day be public.

“We knew each other as friends for seven years before the relationship turned romantic. We kept to ourselves after we were married and spent summers in Hawaii. After Maya was born, he said he finally had all he wanted--a family and his work. We made love and painted.

“Carlos was devastated when he learned he was HIV-positive. He worried Maya and I would be infected, but we weren’t. He kept quiet about it because he didn’t want to be an ‘AIDS celebrity.’ He kept working hard. He left thousands of pieces.”