Art : Leave Them to Heaven : Komar and Melamid’s angel-themed mural in the lobby of an L.A. skyscraper puts a new spin on a familiar metaphor

If 20th-Century skyscrapers are, as has long been claimed, modern “cathedrals of commerce,” then the stunning new mural recently completed by the artist-team of Komar and Melamid ranks as a worthy pendant to the bountiful basilica of business.

“Unity,” as the painted relief-mural is named, stretches across 90 feet of undulating walls in the entrance lobby to the First Interstate World Center, 633 West 5th St., in downtown Los Angeles. A triptych, its three panels bring together a trio of angels.

Their links to the past, the present and the future are at once celebratory and refreshingly judicious. For, unlike run-of-the-mill public art, “Unity” doesn’t just mouth sweetly boosterish aesthetic platitudes.

Instead, the mural adopts a critical position in relation to its site, artfully recognizing and harnessing the complexity and contrariness of public life. Komar and Melamid have made a dramatically decorative embellishment for the lobby of an enormous bank’s skyscraper; yet, they’ve done it with critical insight and trenchant wit, as well as ornamental skill.

Vitaly Komar, 49, and Alexander Melamid, 47, are Russian-born emigres to the United States. Having collaborated for more than a quarter-century, first in Moscow, then in Israel, they’ve worked in New York and New Jersey for nearly 15 years.

For the imagery in “Unity,” they turned to this city’s name. Indeed, there has been a proliferation of los angeles --angels--in recently unveiled public art around the downtown core.

Lili Lakich’s “L.A. Angel” is a long, signlike arabesque of neon sprouting from an automobile tail fin, beneath a roadway overpass on Olive Street. Cynthia Carlson’s “City of Angels” is a clumsy, painted relief featuring 11 stylized angel’s wings, installed above an escalator at Union Station. Even Jonathan Borofsky’s self-portrait sculptures of “flying men,” suspended over the train platform in the Civic Center station of the Metro Rail Red Line, can be thought of as secular seraphim.

The arrival of yet another flock of celestial beings at First Interstate might suggest a certain paucity of imagination in works of art designed to engage the public life of the city. With Komar and Melamid, however, that just ain’t so. Their angels have important business to do.

At the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design in the late 1950s, Komar and Melamid had thorough training in the tedious pomposity of typical academic style. (They met during a field trip to a Moscow morgue, where they studied cadavers for an anatomy class.) From the beginning of their collaboration, however, their work has had a Pop edge, executed with the Socialist Realist demeanor once required by Soviet officialdom.

Pop art is nothing if not subversively aware of the ways in which visual and verbal cliches can be pried open to reveal the unthinking, interior pieties of a culture. Try considering Pop cliches as a kind of bright, jazzy, hard-sell version of the conventions that rule academic art, as well as of the pedantic visual etiquette that governs duly authorized Socialist Realism. When this team of dissident artists departed from the Soviet Union in 1977, they left with a battery of artistic tools useful for examining the visual cues of Western officialdom.

Architecturally, the image of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce” has a long history. (Not for nothing does the Chrysler Building have Notre Dame-like gargoyles.) Perhaps its most notable, recent example is Philip Johnson’s design for the AT&T; building on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue.

The First Interstate World Center can claim no immediately recognizable religious iconography. It’s more abstract, although the pristine, off-white, finely detailed shaft of the 73-story building--the tallest in the Western United States--is certainly a rigorously idealized form. In the decoration of the lobby, Komar and Melamid provided the necessary icons.

To do it, the artists went to the source. Large inscriptions in English and Spanish on aluminum panels beneath the triptych explain that the 1781 decree of Gov. Felipe de Neve formally designated the region as El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles Sobre El Rio de la Porciuncula (the Town of the Queen of the Angels on the Porciuncula River). The name recalled the Franciscan origins of Fray Juan Crespi, who had served as the diarist for the Spanish expedition that first came to the basin 12 years before. That expedition had arrived one day after celebrating the great Franciscan feast held in honor of “Our Lady of the Angels of Porciuncula Chapel,” which is housed in the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels near Assisi, Italy.

Komar and Melamid’s triptych centers on an exuberant relief figure of an angel, which is flanked by two convex panels, each featuring a painted angel. The form of these painted angels derives from examples in the 13th-Century Porciuncula Chapel.

Garbed in diaphanous white robes, each angel is loosely painted on a surface of mottled brown, their limpid eyes cast heavenward. The angel at the right strums a mandolin, the angel at the left holds open a wide book (perhaps a hymnal). If their smallish scale seems a bit inadequate to survive the large, eccentrically shaped lobby, they nonetheless provide a suitably nostalgic frame for the dynamic central image.

The basic form of the central relief, which is composed from a half-dozen individual pieces, also derives from the Porciuncula angels, although the relief is considerably larger and more emphatic than its gossamer siblings. Long, streaming, blond tresses frame a face whose eyes, again, gaze heavenward. Clad in a flowing blue robe over a dark, yellow undergarment, this angel likewise fingers a mandolin.

Comically, the celestial guardian is poised over the inviting, concave portal leading to a bank of elevators, which stand ready to whisk the visitor heavenward to the ethereal reaches of a towering skyscraper. Enter, it says, and ascend.

Where the relief angel differs sharply from its Italian counterparts, however, is in its accessories. The figure hovers before the abstract, geometric, red and yellow patterns of a 10th-Century Buddhist banner. Its halo is a burst of gold-leaf borrowed from pre-Columbian images of the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, principal deity of the Aztecs. It is crowned by a mahogany headpiece, whose form derives from Nigerian masks.

Finally, and in keeping with this assembly of spiritually related accouterments, which are emblematic of a variety of cultures from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas that make up the demographic mix of latter-day Los Angeles, the angel is held aloft by a symbol associated with the American Indian. The muscular, spreading, silver wings, made from brushed aluminum, are those of an eagle.

Komar and Melamid clad their angel in spiritual raiments of multiple cultures, in a buoyant and graceful celebration of both ethnic diversity and the multitude of sacred faiths. Still, this is not simply a promotional work of art, meant to offer a benign soapbox to glossy civic sentiment. Pointedly, the angel’s wings are not those of just any eagle.

If the angel’s great, silver wings look strangely familiar, take a quarter from your pocket or purse and look at the eagle on the back. A historic cathedral may be one stylistic source for this unusually resonant work of public art, but commerce is the other. In the lobby of First Interstate, money creates the wings to heaven.

As surely as it celebrates the diversity of Los Angeles, the triptych also articulates the way in which multiculturalism, as a newly official and institutionalized doctrine, also becomes the cloak and crown for the customary angel of commerce. You may well be panhandled for a quarter on the streets outside this sleekly imposing, downtown corporate tower--a comon enough experience, but one that lends a certain poignancy to the angel hovering inside.

Stamped in the space between the eagle’s wings on a U.S. quarter is a U.S. motto: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one--or, as Komar and Melamid have optimistically titled their mural, “Unity.” With its multiple layers of meaning and their conflicted resonance for our day, they have fashioned a work of public art worthy of the name.