Appreciation : Betty Asher: An Artful Evolution : The art collector, curator and dealer helped shape culture in postwar Los Angeles. She will be remembered tonight in a memorial tribute.

Betty Asher was a triple threat. As an art collector for more than 40 years, a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for 13 years (1966-79) and a gallery owner for 11 years (1979-90), her accumulated experience with modern and contemporary art outpaced that of just about anyone else in the city. Her death May 11 at the age of 80 marks a passage.

Fittingly that passage will be remembered tonight in a memorial tribute to be held at 6:30 in LACMA’s Bing Theater.

In part, it marks a passage because Asher was once a rare breed, an active figure among a relatively small coterie of aficionados who hunker down together to try to make a difference (or, perhaps, maintain their sanity), as they do in most American cities where art in general, and contemporary art in particular, is regarded with suspicion or, more likely, genial indifference. By stark contrast to her early years, the Southern California art scene Asher left behind three weeks ago ranks among the handful of the most significant in the world.

Asher is one of many reasons for the dramatic change. When she moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1941, her own artistic interests were ragged and unformed, and they stayed that way for quite some time. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, Los Angeles was rapidly becoming the principal engine that defined popular American culture for a burgeoning postwar generation. In two respects, Betty Asher seemed to have plugged right into that developing ethos.

First, when she began to buy art in an ambitious way in the 1960s, she had a special affinity for Pop art. Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha--they remained among her favorite artists. Yes, she acquired abstract painting and sculpture by Frank Stella and Donald Judd, too, but it was Stella at his most neon of moments and Judd at his flashiest and most glamorously sleek. Think of the nested florescent squares of the former and the stacks of aluminum and colored plexiglass of the latter as a kind of “abstract Pop.”

Second, there was her now-legendary collection of ceramic cups (much of which now resides at LACMA). The collection, which eventually grew to number in the hundreds, also got under way in the 1960s, with the acquisition of some useful coffee mugs made by sculptor Kenneth Price.

For an ostensibly serious collector of painting and sculpture to simultaneously develop a collection of funky cups gives one pause. It is to come awfully close to indulging in a wallow in junior high school kitsch. A cup collection is one step away from an adolescent establishing some identity by hoarding porcelain pigs from strip-mall gift shops, or by amassing souvenir thermometers from global tourist destinations.

Which is, of course, the point. The Pop edge of the practice is unmistakable (remember Andy Warhol’s cookie jars?). It’s revealing, too, because it blurs typically class-bound distinctions between being a determined art collector and being a committed art hobbyist. Passion is passion, Asher’s ever-growing cup collection said; get into it.

For an art collector/curator/dealer in postwar Los Angeles, the cups’ connection to a tradition of crafts also claims a subtle significance. In the mid-1950s, a period noted in L.A. more for a conservative hostility toward art than for any respect for the few exceptional artists actually at work here, the most important event was the establishment of a ceramics workshop by Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute. Otis Clay, as the work of Voulkos and his students and colleagues has come to be called, achieved a small revolution by radically subverting the most traditional medium imaginable. Ever since, a critically interpreted crafts aesthetic has been of recurring importance to some of the most adventurous art made here.

There’s a famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken in Las Vegas in 1963, at the time the French Dadaist was having his landmark retrospective at the old Pasadena Art Museum. Seated with him in a booth among a group of revelers was Betty Asher. It seems fitting that the artist who had led the modern European philosophical inquiry into the nature of art would inspire a soon-to-be notable American collector of Pop art and eccentric cups.

In retrospect it seems fitting in another way, for Asher harbored another passion. Aside from art or cups, she was also a fanatic for playing poker. Looking at that photograph of Asher together in Las Vegas with Duchamp, who had supposedly retired from making art 30 years before to devote his life to playing the game of chess, can make you think that poker became her all-American version of his fascination with playing the odds.

Duchamp labored toward checkmate, in time-honored European fashion, but Betty Asher was on the prowl for a royal flush. I’d say she got it.