ART : Laboring Under No Illusions : Pratapaditya Pal has built one of this country’s preeminent collections of Indian and Southeast Asian artworks at LACMA. Do we appreciate him? Well, he’s pretty realistic about popular acclaim.

Two Ph.D.s. Twenty-two major museum exhibitions. Two hundred fifty-seven publications. Nineteen editorships. Six professional appointments. Eight university teaching positions. Twenty fellowships and awards. Too many lectures to count.

Pratapaditya Pal’s resume reads like a committee’s lifetime work, but the credits all belong to one man, the senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. What’s more, Pal’s curriculum vitae doesn’t even mention his most visible legacy: a collection that he built from a handful of items to about 4,000 pieces, giving LACMA one of the nation’s preeminent holdings of Indian and Southeast Asian art.

“It really is quite staggering to see what we have done,” Pal says. “If you gave me $30 million or $40 million to put this collection together today, I couldn’t do it.”

Casting his net wider to emphasize this unheralded aspect of Southern California’s cultural wealth, Pal says: “If we put our collection and the Norton Simon collection--which I also helped to build--together with the Edward Binney collections of paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art and at our museum, without question this would be absolutely the No. 1 place in America for the No. 1 collection of art from India, Southeast Asia, Nepal and Tibet.”

Having played a lead role in amassing these riches is enormously satisfying, the 59-year-old curator says.

“But whether the city knows about it or not, and whether they appreciate it or not is another matter,” he says. “One day maybe they will, 100 years after I’m gone, which is OK. It’s all right. You can’t expect instant rewards.”

Within museum circles, however, Pal is no secret treasure. Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III, who directed LACMA for 12 years before taking over the helm at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, praises Pal’s intellect and talent: “He’s very gifted, he’s a great scholar, and he has worked with donors to build the premier collection of its kind in the country. His is a rarefied field, and he’s at the top of it.”

Approaching his 25th year at LACMA and having recently organized the museum’s critically acclaimed exhibition “The Peaceful Liberators: Jain Art From India” (which runs through Jan. 22), Pal is in the limelight. And he is delighted that the art of a little-known religious sect--whose pacifist devotees believe that every living creature has an immortal soul--is getting so much attention.

“I am putting Jain art on the map,” he says. “No major exhibition of Jain art has ever been done, even in India. . . . This is the first and only major attempt at representing one of the great artistic traditions--under the umbrella of Indian art’s aesthetic tradition of course, but through the eyes of the Jains.”

*

Taking a break from welcoming out-of-town visitors and fielding inquiries about the show, Pal has agreed to an interview. Seated at a long table that serves as his desk in a loft behind the museum’s Indian art galleries, he reflects on his career with a mixture of contentment and regret.

Pal is unabashedly proud of LACMA’s collection and his scholarly accomplishments--preserved in voluminous writings that put his less industrious colleagues to shame--but far too truthful and art-world weary to pretend that all his ambitions and dreams have been fulfilled. As a senior curator in an institution he loves, he is grateful for the opportunities that have come his way and for friends who have faithfully supported his collecting efforts.

But it isn’t easy being a curator of Indian art in a country that has little interest in the subject, let alone in a city whose collectors favor contemporary art. Neither has it been pleasant to watch his department’s acquisitions budget diminish--from a high of $545,251 in 1981 to a low of $28,000 in 1993--as the museum threw its resources into expanded facilities during the 1980s, then tightened its belt to deal with an economic crunch in the early 1990s. Yet another sore point is multiculturalism, which he says is the subject of too much talk and too little action, not only at LACMA but throughout the museum community.

This is vintage Pal--or Pratap, as friends call him. Gracious and witty but brutally frank, he is LACMA’s eminence grise, resident critic and perpetual outsider. Pal, born in Bangladesh and educated in India and England, has thrived professionally as a Los Angeles County civil service employee, but he does not suffer the bureaucratic system gladly.

“I don’t believe in wasting time,” he says, when asked how he has published so much without the benefit of sabbaticals.

The story of his career begins in 1957 at the University of Calcutta, where he was working on a master of arts degree in ancient Indian history and culture.

“I really wanted to specialize in anthropology,” Pal says. “But that year they did not offer an anthropology course, so I had no alternative but to take fine arts. I did extremely well. I topped the list at the university, so I was given a scholarship to go for a Ph.D.”

He earned his first doctorate in 1962 in the history of architecture in Nepal, then won a scholarship to Cambridge University, where he was granted a second doctorate, in Nepalese sculpture and painting, in 1965.

“I really wanted to go back to India and teach in a university,” he says, “but I couldn’t get a job. Not because there weren’t jobs. There were dozens of university jobs. The problem was the Indian system. Things were slow. No one cared about looking at applications. Things just didn’t move. Also some people may have felt threatened because I had two Ph.D.s. I may have been overqualified. Whatever it was, I didn’t get a job.”

Meanwhile, the British Museum in London, the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston all made offers. Pal opted for Boston, which appointed him keeper of the Indian Collection. The title had been created for an illustrious predecessor, Ceylonese art historian Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, who died in 1947.

It was a prestigious opportunity for a young scholar, but Pal thought of it as temporary until he found employment in India.

“But this is one of the tragedies of India,” he says. “It is not very kind to its expatriates, who--even if they want to go back--are treated with apathy, if not hostility. I didn’t leave of my own doing. I was a forced brain drain, you might say.”

While working in Boston in 1969, Pal consulted with the Los Angeles County Museum on its first important acquisition of Indian art, 235 works from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck collection. The next year, Pal accepted LACMA Director Kenneth Donahue’s offer to head the museum’s newly created department of Indian and Islamic art. (Pal became acting director in 1979-80, after Donahue’s retirement, and senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art in 1981, after the formation of a separate department of Islamic art.)

“Apart from the Heeramaneck collection, the museum had nothing in Indian art--maybe half a dozen or a dozen objects, of which two or three were interesting,” Pal says. And indeed, some of his colleagues questioned his judgment, if not his sanity. Sherman Lee, the eminent director of the Cleveland Art Museum and an Asian art specialist, “reprimanded me and said it was a mistake, that I was taking a demotion,” Pal recalls. “But to me it made no difference whether I stayed in Boston or Los Angeles. They are both in America anyway.

“Also, I felt the Boston collection had been built by Coomaraswamy, and it was really not going to go anywhere in terms of support . . . so I felt it would be more exciting to work with a new collection. And Kenneth Donahue was very dedicated in terms of his desires to build up the Asian collection. The Heeramaneck collection was his purchase, so I knew that I would get whatever support I could.”

The late Franklin D. Murphy, a longtime museum trustee and Times Mirror director, also impressed Pal with a promise to find funds for an Indian art library requested by the young Indian curator.

“He asked me how much it would cost,” Pal recalls. “I said $50,000, which was just a guess. And he said, ‘Fine. On the day you join us, I will send you a check for $25,000, and when you have spent it I will send you another check.’ Well, that was it. That decided me. Any institution that could make decisions that quickly seemed like a good place to be.”

Although Pal came to Los Angeles with no idea of what he was getting into, he had enormous support in the 1970s. His major patron was longtime LACMA trustee Anna Bing Arnold, whose gifts helped fill in gaps in the Heeramaneck collection and acquire major pieces of sculpture. Back then, the museum paid big prices, say $300,000 or $400,000, for special pieces. In addition, Joan Palevsky bought the Heeramanecks’ collection of Islamic art for the museum, and the Ahmanson Foundation helped to fund an additional purchase of West Asian art from the same collection.

One thrill for Pal was working with Norton Simon, who sought Pal’s help in the mid-’70s when Simon began collecting Asian art for his museum in Pasadena.

“It was exciting to help Mr. Simon,” Pal says. “But--although I didn’t realize it at the time--he made it increasingly difficult for (LACMA) to buy. He was such a potent force and such a sudden force in the market that I think . . . he was the most important influence in upping the price of Indian art.”

In these days of tightened budgets, many curators across the country are required to raise their own acquisitions funds and court donors more actively than ever.

“Every curator in every department has the same problem,” Pal says. “You find an object and then you try to identify who can be seduced by it. . . . I would say that has been the greatest stress in my 24 years.” Today he counts on personal friends such as New York collector Paul F. Walter to donate artworks and on LACMA patrons Harry and Yvonne Lenart to provide cash for acquisitions.

Winning appreciation for Indian art has been difficult, Pal says.

“Ten years ago, I would have probably felt bad about it,” he says, “But now when I think of the narrow parameters within which Los Angeles collectors collect, I don’t feel as bad, because there are hardly any collectors of Old Masters here either or of great classical works or African or Asian art.”

It will take another two generations to nurture private collectors of Indian art in Los Angeles’ Indian community, Pal believes.

While he pointed out that “Jain Art From India” lists Indians among its supporters, he believes that the future of general art museums such as LACMA is not a matter of persuading ethnic groups to value their own cultural heritages. He would rather see widespread community support for museums, libraries and other cultural institutions. And museums should do their part by pointing out intercultural relationships, Pal contends, as he did in “Light of Asia,” a 1984 exhibition of art from India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia.

“We sit around the table and yak about multiculturalism but we do not do intercultural shows,” he says. “We build national boundaries, so we are really contributing to fragmenting the world. In a sense, we are ourselves responsible for the Saddam Husseins and the Bosnian crisis and all that. If we are going to try and say that this is one world, that we have the same challenges, the same vision, the same dreams, what better way than to do it with art?”

* “The Peaceful Liberators: Jain Art From India,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Through Jan. 22. Admission: adults, $6; students over 18 and senior citizens, $4; children over 5 , $1. (213) 857-6000.