ART : McLaughlin Show Again Postponed

The Laguna Art Museum has postponed its eagerly awaited exhibition of seminal Southern California modernist painter John McLaughlin, which was scheduled to open Oct. 14.

Museum officials would confirm only that the show will not open in 1995, either. A new date will be announced Friday.

The McLaughlin retrospective was a pet project of the museum’s former director, Charles Desmarais. His catalogue was to have been the first major book written about the abstract painter, who spent his 30-year career working in semi-isolation in Dana Point. Despite many years of poor or nonexistent sales, McLaughlin showed a single-minded devotion to his work that set an example for Southern California artists of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Although the show was postponed once before (it initially was scheduled for the museum’s 75th anniversary celebration last year), the new postponement may signal a much-reduced role for Desmarais, who began working on the ambitious project four years ago. In a phone interview this week from his home in Laguna Beach, he said the show, as he conceived it, is ready for presentation this fall.

After Desmarais was fired by the board last spring, the exhibition became a bone of contention. While he proposed that he still curate the show and present it at the museum, museum officials insisted that the show had become their project.

Desmarais said his last contact with the museum was a late April meeting with acting director Susan M. Anderson and two trustees.

Anderson said Wednesday that she would not comment on Desmarais’ remarks or provide further details about the exhibition until the formal announcement on Friday.

Desmarais said he had offered to limit his involvement with the show to writing the main essay in the exhibition catalogue. (Other essays in the catalogue are by Anderson and art historian Susan Larsen.) Although the museum had offered to pay him for the essay, he said he would forgo any money as long as he received credit as the catalogue author.

“My feeling is, this has been my project, and I conducted all the research and am the quote-unquote expert,” Desmarais said. “I wanted to be recognized as the author of the book. I was given a long letter that proposed my involvement but didn’t include the central recognition that I thought was necessary. . . .

“I was asked to respond (to the letter) in a day, and I did. I said (being credited as catalogue author) was my only problem. They said they’d get back to me, but no one ever has,” Desmarais said.

He added that the show already has received enough funding “to do a bang-up job.”

In addition to two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for $7,500 and $50,000, the show received a $10,000 gift from private donors and a $15,000 pledge from the museum’s Exhibitionists council. Other venues on the tour schedule (which was to include the Oakland Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Newark Museum in New Jersey) were to provide an additional $15,000, for a total of $97,500.

In place of the McLaughlin show, the museum will substitute a fall exhibition of Amish quilts from the collection of Doug Tompkins.