1994 / YEAR IN REVIEW : The Highs Were High, the Lows Were Low : There were some fabulous shows and some promising trends in L.A.’s art community this year. And then there was the downside.

Herewith, in no particular order, the 10 events, episodes and issues most significant for the Los Angeles art world in 1994:

Dynamic Duo: Simultaneous retrospectives of the pivotal work of Bruce Nauman and Mike Kelley at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the L.A. County Museum of Art, respectively, made for a knockout summer museum season, while definitively underscoring the continuing international significance of art made in Los Angeles. An added twist: You would have expected the show of the younger artist (Kelley) to be at MOCA and of the older (Nauman) to be at LACMA, but the tables were refreshingly turned.

Solo Stars: Among the impressive solo shows in L.A.’s resilient galleries were those by L.A.-based artists Phyllis Baldino, Judie Bamber, Linda Burnham, Carole Caroompas, Michael Coughlan, Roy Dowell, Sam Durant, Sally Elesby, Nancy Evans, Chris Finley, Judy Fiskin, Michael Gonzalez, Scott Grieger, Roger Herman, Jim Isermann, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Joyce Lightbody, Paul McCarthy, Dan McCleary, Patrick Nickell, Jennifer Pastor and John Souza, as well as those of out-of-towners Stephan Balkenhal, Max Cole, Vernon Fisher, Michael Goldberg, William Klein, Richard Misrach, Joel Otterson, Therese Oulton, Peter Saul and Richard Tuttle. This extensive list--not definitive because incomplete--already ranks with the liveliest gallery scenes anywhere.

Show Business: The city’s museums came through the January earthquake relatively unscathed, while somewhat downsized exhibition schedules nonetheless managed to impress. LACMA boasted a sizable number, including “Picasso and the Weeping Women,” “Helen Levitt,” “The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits From the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection,” “Korean Arts of the 18th Century: Splendor and Simplicity,” “Spanish Polychrome Sculpture (1500-1800) in United States Collections” and the current “Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics from the Classic Period” and ‘The Peaceful Liberators: Jain Art of India.”

MOCA’s prudently trimmed Roy Lichtenstein retrospective looked infinitely better than at its debut at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. “Fouquet’s Century: Transformations in French Painting, 1415-1530” and “Andre Kertesz: A Centennial Tribute” dazzled at the J. Paul Getty Museum, as does the current “A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art From the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman.” The Getty also undertook an unprecedented collaboration with the Huntington Art Gallery for “Pictorialism in California: Photographs, 1900-1940.” The Norton Simon Museum opened an absorbing, yearlong show about German dealer Galka Scheyer, early champion in Los Angeles of the European avant-garde, while the Long Beach Museum of Art offered an eye-opening assessment of “The First Generation: Women and Video, 1970-1975.”

About Face: In January, the Lannan Foundation stunned the American art world with its announcement that it would stop collecting contemporary art. Instead, between $2 million and $3 million annually has been shifted to social programs in Native American communities. Lannan’s crucial program of funding museum exhibitions remains intact--both the Nauman and Kelley shows saw the light of day thanks to Lannan largess--but the heart of the foundation’s enterprise had been its ambitious acquisition program.

Percent-for-Ego: Culver City detonated a multi-megaton bombshell in April when it tentatively agreed that, henceforth, the one-percent-for- art requirement in civic development projects could be considered fulfilled if the city found the quality of the project’s architecture to be substantial enough. The silly plan, ostensibly intended to boost public recognition of building design, was widely seen as a political accommodation to an influential local developer and his favored architect. Suddenly disenfranchised artists and newly enfranchised architects were polarized into warring factions, while the precedent jeopardized hard-won percent-for-art ordinances in cities nationwide.

Rudderless Ship: Sixteen months have passed since the surprise departure of short-lived LACMA director Michael E. Shapiro. In November, Shapiro was named chief curator and program director at Atlanta’s High Museum, but LACMA will finish the year still directorless and without a likely candidate in sight. Meanwhile, major museums in Boston and New York successfully completed their protracted searches for appropriate leadership.

First Generation: A distinct changing of the guard was felt more strongly than ever as significant figures among the first generation of artists, collectors and curators to make L.A. an emergent cultural force in the 1950s and early 1960s either retired or went on to the Big Art World in the Sky. The passing of pivotal artists Sam Francis, Edward Kienholz and Hans Burkhardt; one-of-a-kind architect John Lautner; influential collector Frederick R. Weisman; multiple-museum trustee (and former Times Mirror Co. CEO) Franklin D. Murphy; and the widely revered collector, curator and dealer Betty Asher was followed in December by the unexpected retirement of Maurice Tuchman, founding curator in 1964 of LACMA’s 20th-Century art department.

NEA No-No: With an unconscionable action, the National Endowment for the Arts destroyed from within more of its hard-earned credibility than its most rabid enemies had yet managed. The presidentially appointed National Council on the Arts, which oversees the NEA, declared in August that political considerations would henceforth guide the awarding of NEA grants. Asserting that “we cannot be blind to political reality,” council member and Tufts University theater professor Barbara Grossman helped reject peer panel recommendations for fellowships to three artists--even though the NEA’s enabling legislation expressly forbids turning down grants on political grounds.

Under the Hammer: The Nov. 11 sale by the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center of a rare, autograph manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci bottomed out as “a new low for museum ethics,” in the words of Lee Rosenbaum, newspaper columnist and author of a standard reference work on art collecting. The museum auctioned off the irreplaceable public asset in order to create a war chest to deal with possible lawsuits against the Hammer estate. Adding insult to the injury was the cowardly silence of the leading professional organizations for American art museums, whose ethical guidelines had been so blatantly breached by the sale.

Gallery Glut: The September opening of Santa Monica’s multiple gallery enclave, Bergamot Station, generated enormous enthusiasm, attention and support. Less noticed has been the quiet emergence of a variety of new, smaller galleries--Acme, Dan Bernier, Blum & Poe, Crossing Gallery, Marc Foxx, TRI--which, following the successful precedents of such spaces as Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Food House, Sue Spaid and Richard Telles Fine Arts, are replacing in significance the “apartment galleries” that mushroomed a few seasons back. Finally, 1993’s budget-minded effort to have out-of-town dealers show their wares in borrowed L.A. galleries had felt thin and vaguely desperate, because most dealers brought only work they could fit in their suitcases--a practice that turned out to be ideally suited to the convivial art fair held in December in spacious hotel rooms at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip. The traveling-salesman ambience of a hotel was perfect, and the fair is likely to be repeated in 1995.*