Artists Dip Brush Into Melting Pot : Art: Two Russian emigres try to capture the ethnic diversity of L.A. in a multimedia mural for the city’s tallest building.

When Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were students, nearly 30 years ago at the Stroganoff Art Institute in Moscow, Los Angeles was a mysterious place that seemed to have extraordinary significance.

“It was the ultimate destination for Europeans who went to the United States,” Melamid says.

Los Angeles was also a city that reversed Russians’ mental images of geography. “Living in Moscow, we always learned that Russia is the East and the United States is the West, but Los Angeles is so far west that we thought of it as the East and Russia as the West,” Komar says.

The celebrated artistic team now known as Komar and Melamid recently arrived in the city of their youthful imaginations. They are here to fulfill a commission for a 30x90-foot multimedia mural in the lobby of First Interstate World Center downtown. The massive artwork, called “Unity,” which portrays the artists’ interpretation of Los Angeles history, is expected to be complete for a Feb. 10 unveiling.

Komar and Melamid have visited California on two prior occasions since emigrating to the United States in 1978, settling in New York and establishing an enviable reputation. But they have long since disabused themselves of the mystique that surrounds Los Angeles. “Why do so many people love this place? It doesn’t deserve to be loved. There’s no explanation, but that’s the way love is,” Melamid says.

But when Maguire Thomas Partners developers invited them to create a mural for First Interstate’s 73-story headquarters, Los Angeles’ tallest building, the artists didn’t choose to express disenchantment. Instead, they delved into the idealism that has characterized the city’s history and continues to attract immigrants from all over the world.

Working as a team, as they have since 1965, they decided that angels would be an appropriate--if obvious--symbol for the metropolis known as the City of Angels. In a city of many religions, winged beings need not be interpreted in a strictly Christian context. Supernatural forces that fly in from outer space are a central concept of both ancient mythologies and modern UFOs, Komar says. But not just any airborne wonder would do for the Los Angeles mural.

They embarked on a research project, which led them to images of Los Angeles’ namesake--a pair of Franciscan angels that are painted on the Chapel of the Porciuncula (Italian for small portion of land), housed in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi, Italy. Re-creating these images in high-tech materials would provide a way to link Los Angeles’ 18th-Century settlements with the modern city, the artists thought. After visiting the Italian chapel, Komar and Melamid developed sketches of three angels to be enlarged and applied, one on each panel of the three-part mural.

The project has turned out to be enormously complex, both technically and conceptually. The lobby wall space--which begins well above eye level and soars 30 feet--consists of three curved sections. The central panel is concave, while flanking segments are convex. The entire base of the mural is covered with rectangular sheets of metal, which had to be precisely fitted to the curves. In an attempt to contrast the city’s roots with its modern image, the artists designed the outer panels of rusted steel and the central portion of shiny aluminum.

From an aesthetic point of view, the classically trained artists conceived the piece as an amalgamation of the traditional and the modern, as well as a representation of their abrupt confrontation with contemporary art when they left the Soviet Union. Ever quick to make analogies, Melamid likens their treatment of the mural to the American style of drinking. “In Russia, we drank vodka straight. We never heard of cocktails,” he says. “Here, you throw everything together.”

Acutely attuned to the oddities and agonies of their adopted country, Komar and Melamid have adapted the American propensity for mixtures to a politically correct, multicultural mural. While the two angels on the outer panels are essentially Renaissance images--which is to say, icons of politically incorrect Western art history--the central figure personifies America’s melting pot.

Unlike the two painted angels, the central figure is a multimedia construction, conceived as an angel of the 20th Century. Her cast aluminum wings, taken from the American bald eagle, represent American Indian culture. A gold-leafed wood arc, radiating around the angel’s head is borrowed from images of Quetzalcoatl, a god of the Aztec culture. A carved mahogany headpiece, inspired by a Nigerian mask, acknowledges Africans’ impact on American culture. A painted canvas arc behind the angel’s feet is the Asian component, adapted from a 10th-Century Buddhist painting.

The mural will also include a frieze stating the name of Los Angeles--El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de Porciuncula--as it was formalized in 1781 after Franciscan monks, some of Italian heritage, settled the area. Panels of text, in Spanish and English, will explain origins of the name.

Their combination of cultural themes results in a universal symbol for Los Angeles, the artists say. But the notion of placing angels in the heart of the downtown business community allows for ironic interpretations.

Playing into that reading, the artists say the location is perfect for heavenly imagery. “Skyscrapers are the only houses of religion in America. Money is power here,” Melamid says, erupting in laughter. “If God exists, he is here in a corporate headquarters.”

But Komar and Melamid, who revel in contradictions, appear to be having too good a time with their massive mural to indulge in hard-core cynicism. And they are on record as objecting to critics who have portrayed their earlier Social Realist paintings of Soviet heroes as political satire.

In their relatively recent foray into public art, they are particularly keen to produce work that is meaningful and accessible. “We used to create art, give it to the people and say, ‘Here, eat it, buy it.’ Now we are making art to please the people,” Melamid says.

“This century has been so terrible, with all its revolutions and violence, we want to bring something beautiful to the last decade of the century,” Komar says.