Did L.A. Fall Off the Map?

Did you know that no truly significant abstract painting or sculpture has been made in Los Angeles in the 20th century?

Neither did I. But having now read the catalog and perused the checklist to the eagerly anticipated exhibition “Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline,” set to open today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, I’ve been thankfully brought up to speed. I’m now aware that in the history of abstract art, L.A. has been a bust.

The show was organized by former Guggenheim consultative curator Mark Rosenthal, currently a curator at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. Without claiming that the varied forms of abstract art together constitute a monolithic movement that unfolds over the course of our century, its 135 chosen works do mean to suggest that abstract painting and sculpture represent a singular phenomenon, unique to our epoch.

Rosenthal writes that he wanted to take stock of “a startling, previously unimaginable rupture with the past: abstraction.” Given the absence from his show of any abstract art from Los Angeles, apparently the city’s only compelling rupture is the one along the San Andreas fault.

From the Big Three Europeans in the 1910s--Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian--to the watershed of American Minimalist art of the 1960s and beyond, “Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline” is a huge undertaking. (The subtitle, in case you’re wondering, comes from an essay by the incomparable German-born American artist Eva Hesse.) It mostly stays away from the recent past, winding up with Postminimal art in the 1970s. Only two artists who came to the international foreground in the 1980s--German painter Gerhard Richter and American sculptor Martin Puryear--are included.

Some of the greatest artists of the previous eight decades are among the 48 painters and sculptors; most are represented by just one or two works, but 21 are seen in greater depth. Judging from the checklist, the Guggenheim has managed to snare some exceptional loans.

What caught my eye, however, were the names and works of art you won’t find.

No John McLaughlin. No Robert Irwin. No Richard Diebenkorn. No anyone whose work is identified with postwar L.A. How could that be?

The Guggenheim has hedged its bets with the obligatory disclaimer that always gets attached to big surveys like this: “The subject of abstraction is vast, and neither the exhibition nor a study of this size can encompass all of it.”

Yadda, yadda, yadda. What the disclaimer really means is, we might have skipped one of your personal favorites (we can’t satisfy everyone), but only some smaller ripples in abstract art have been omitted, not the main events.

With that polite slap in the face, forget about the unique brand of perceptual abstraction that 30 years ago helped mark the emergence of L.A.’s contemporary art into international prominence. The course from McLaughlin to Irwin and beyond is minor-league. And if the whole Light and Space genre doesn’t count, anomalous individuals don’t have the remotest chance.

Unless, of course, the minor movement or anomaly is European. Then, the Guggenheim will find room.

For instance, the show includes a small 1913 Vorticist work on paper by Wyndham Lewis, the blowhard British writer whose commitment to abstract art lasted about an hour and a half, and one from the same year by Giacomo Balla, the Italian Futurist painter who did step into the realm of total abstraction. It’s nice that they were interested in abstract art right at the very beginning, but in both cases their less than convincing work fertilized nothing.

Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana--good artists and minor postwar Italian followers of larger innovations--will also be seen in the show. And who knows? Maybe they should be. If so, there’s no cogent argument for entirely omitting L.A.’s artists.

Others who review the show can argue the details. Like whether or not Frank Stella merits five works, including one of those awful painted wall-reliefs of the 1980s that signaled the final diminution of his long overpraised career. Or like the omission of Mark Tobey, the great Pacific Northwest painter of meditative abstract calligraphies, or of Sol Lewitt, whose Conceptualist wall drawings are one of the glories of abstraction in the past 30 years.

Instead of gross details, look instead at the more telling distortion in the bigger picture: The Guggenheim’s retrograde exhibition equates Modern American art exclusively with New York. You’d think it was 1956, not 1996.

Is it serendipitous that Sam Francis--the show’s one artist who actually did have strong ties to L.A.--will be represented by a dazzling yellow abstraction from 1954, made smack in the middle of his five-year sojourn in Paris and long before he settled in Santa Monica? I don’t think so. Francis’ painting is French, after all, and the artistic ties between Europe and New York emerge as the real subject of this blinkered show.

Fifty years ago, as Europe was going up in smoke and New York was flexing its cultural muscles for the first time, Western civilization’s barely flickering candle needed to be nurtured and maintained. Passing the progressive torch of abstract art from Paris to New York became a theoretical scaffold for the rise of American art in general and the New York School in particular.

Now, at century’s end, the show’s selection of 21 European and 27 New York artists celebrates that success, and further heralds ongoing interactions between Europe and New York. No wonder a German painter and a New York sculptor are the show’s final avatars.

And no wonder the Guggenheim is its host. The inescapable subtext of so distinctly provincial a show is the Guggenheim itself, and the museum’s own transatlantic relationship to abstract art.

In 1939 the Guggenheim had its debut as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, principally in order to show abstractions by the European avant-garde. Today it has a satellite museum operating in Venice, Italy, and next year it will open its eagerly awaited outpost in Bilbao, Spain.

Meanwhile, it seems there will be a lot of great paintings and sculptures to see in the show. However, save for the deep pleasures to be had from individual works of art, it also looks as if there won’t be much reason to rush off and see it (I canceled my plans). As history, it’s bunk. “Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline” turns out to be more like total baloney.