ART : McLaughlin Show Rescheduled for ’96 : The Laguna museum exhibition on the abstract painter had been the baby of then-director Charles Desmarais.

The Laguna Art Museum has rescheduled its retrospective of work by seminal Southern California abstract painter John McLaughlin for the summer of 1996, officials said Thursday.

The museum also announced that Peter Selz, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, will join three other art historians working on the exhibition. The exhibition, a four-year project of former museum director Charles Desmarais, who was fired in March, was to have opened in October.

Although Desmarais originally was to have written the chief catalogue essay for the exhibition, acting museum director Susan M. Anderson said Thursday that he is no longer a participant in the show. It will be revamped to include some early (pre-1950) paintings and an essay addressing McLaughlin’s legacy in Southern California. Neither aspect was part of the original version of the show, she said.

Selz joins catalogue essayist Susan C. Larsen, a professor of art history at USC, Anderson and museum assistant curator Lisa Buck as contributors to the exhibition. But the museum--rather than any particular individual--will be credited as the principal “author” of the catalogue, with Larsen assuming a more active role as project coordinator, Anderson said.

Selz, 75, has had a long career in the art world, including jobs as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1958-65) and founding director of the University Art Museum, Berkeley (1965-73).

Selz was involved with the 1959 exhibition “Four Abstract Classicists”--which first brought McLaughlin’s severely geometrical work to broad public attention--at what was then known as the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. The show also included work by Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin and Fred Hammersley.

Selz’s role in that show was the subject of debate. Selz--who at the time was leaving Pomona College for his new job at MOMA--was credited in the preface of that show’s catalogue for “initiating” the exhibition. But art critic Jules Langsner wrote the catalogue. And in the preface, then-L.A. County Museum assistant curator James Elliott said Langsner “played a major role in its organization.”

Whether Selz or Langsner deserved curatorial credit for that exhibition was argued in an exchange of letters between Selz and Langsner’s widow. The letters were published in 1975 in the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal.

Larsen, 47, is an authority in American abstract art whose books include “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927-1944” (with John R. Lane). She also was curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and wrote a major essay on McLaughlin for a 1977 Los Angeles County Museum project.

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Anderson said the original venues on the tour (the Oakland Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Newark Museum in New Jersey) are “still interested” in hosting the show after it leaves Laguna.

Countering Desmarais’ statement earlier this week that his version of the show would be ready for presentation in October and that all funding was in place, Anderson said the museum needs to raise an additional $77,000 to meet the $173,000 budget, which includes a major catalogue. (Anderson said the budget for the new show would be roughly similar to the exhibition conceived by Desmarais.)

Desmarais said Thursday that the $173,000 figure was the original budget goal but that it had been scaled back to $100,000 before he left the museum.

Even though he is no longer involved in the project, Desmarais said: “The fact still stands that I conceptualized the show. I did the research. . . . The real question is: Why change it, when the exhibition is already done? To be more true to McLaughlin and his work? To better serve the public? Or is it personal? . . . It may or may not be legal, but it doesn’t strike me as fair or ethical.”

Said Anderson: “After (Desmarais) left the museum, we envisioned the project anew. The museum’s view of his participation and his view were irreconcilable. He didn’t like the idea of a group project. . . .

“There were changes in the checklist, the catalogue, the (accompanying) video. We discovered we were envisioning a product that was different. We were talking about a new show with a new curatorial team, and it didn’t make sense for any one person to be called sole author of the project. . . . We certainly don’t want to take his exhibition and claim it as our own. We’re moving forward with a new team.”