ART NOTES : Openings Not Business as Usual

Capping an avalanche of post-Labor Day art openings, several West Hollywood galleries located on Melrose Avenue, Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard are hosting a joint reception for new exhibitions Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. And the lineup isn’t exactly business as usual.

The Manny Silverman Gallery, which concentrates on New York School painting of the 1950s, is presenting “Painting Beyond the Idea . . . ,” featuring works by 13 contemporary Los Angeles artists and curated by Los Angeles art dealer Bennett Roberts. The idea is to consider the future of painting and how L.A. artists fit into the American tradition.

Louis Stern Fine Arts has pulled off a coup with an assembly of artworks that might be expected at a museum: paintings, watercolors and drawings by French artist Fernand Leger, a leading modernist known for bold, simplified images of machinery and proletarian subjects.

Remba Gallery is showing a massive cast-copper assemblage and works on paper by Dutch artist Karel Appel. Among other attractions, Kohn Turner is presenting photographs by Karl Blossfeldt and Imogen Cunningham, Herbert Palmer is continuing its unusual show of 17th-Century Dutch paintings, and George Stern is offering “Images of California,” a survey of paintings.

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ON SALE NOW: The first issue of the Art Matters Catalog of artist-designed gifts is in the mail. Proceeds from sales of such items as Janet Cooper’s bottle cap purse ($80), Lari Pittman’s “Go Girl” silk scarf ($75) and William Wegman’s ceramic plate depicting his dear departed dog Man Ray ($125) will fund grants to emerging artists from the Art Matters Foundation in New York.

The nonprofit foundation, established in 1985, has already awarded about $3 million in fellowships to 3,000 artists. The gift catalogue is intended to increase the program’s resources and stimulate public interest in contemporary art.

Information: (212) 929-7190.

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READY FOR THE BIG ONE: The Northridge earthquake has spawned a new kind of business in the art world: preparing collectors for the next big temblor. Among the latest to emerge is Quake-Masters, a two-person firm that offers “the finest in earthquake-proof art preparation and installation.”

The entrepreneurs are Lia Polsky, a private art dealer and former gallery owner, and M. Kevin Murphy, an artist and special exhibitions preparator at the Palos Verdes Art Center who acquired experience with unwieldy artworks while working for Chuck Arnoldi and hanging his massive wood wall pieces. Murphy has developed hardware that prevents artworks from jumping off the wall during earthquakes and is currently at work on a new design that he hopes to patent and custom-fabricate.

Information: (310) 247-1761.

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CULTURE PROMOTER: The Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau, a private, nonprofit business association that functions as the city’s official visitor-promotion agent, has launched a program to link the local arts community with the tourism industry.

The initial move was the appointment of Robert Barrett, former director and chief curator of the Fresno Art Museum, as the bureau’s first director of cultural tourism. Charged with luring more arts aficionados to the city, Barrett is currently working on “American Smithsonian,” a traveling exhibition of 150 objects from the Smithsonian Institution’s collection that will appear at the Los Angeles Convention Center in January.

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ON COLLECTING: Twenty specialists in various aspects of collecting will settle in at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities for the 1995-96 academic year. Five of them, invited as Center Fellows, will complete their doctoral dissertations or revise them for publication. Postdoctoral fellows are Todd Gernes of Brown University, whose subject is “Recasting the Culture of Ephemera: Young Women’s Literary Culture in 19th-Century America,” and Paul Holdengraber of Princeton University, who will work on “Portrait of the Artist as Collector: Walter Benjamin and the Collector’s Struggle Against Dispersion.” Predoctoral fellows are UC Berkeley art historian William MacGregor and historians Louis Marchesano of Cornell University and Aaron Segal of UCLA.

The center also will host a group of 15 scholars from the United States, Europe, Mexico and Japan. Their research topics include the use of art collections for purposes of prestige and power, collecting practices in Renaissance Italy and how objects such as perfume bottles become collectibles.

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CATLETT SPEAKS: Artist Elizabeth Catlett will present this year’s Sojourner Truth Lecture, “About My Life,” on Sept. 28, 8 p.m., at Claremont McKenna College’s Mary Pickford Auditorium in Claremont. The annual lectureship was established in 1983 by the Claremont Colleges’ Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies to honor the achievements of outstanding African American women. Catlett, who was born in 1919 in Washington and resides in Cuernavaca, Mexico, is known for powerful images of black women in sculpture and paintings.

Information: (909) 607-3070.