HANG TIME : Art of the State

As I stare at two rows of vivid green royal palms receding into the lower center of Mel Ramos’ watercolor, “Palo Alto, Ode to Moe,” a smiling lawyer, Alana Peters, interrupts my reverie. “I really like having it outside my office,” she says, “because it’s so colorful, though it does remind me of my first unhappy impression of Los Angeles in 1970: a city of gas stations and taco stands with palm leaves waving in the sun above them.”

Ramos’ classic 1982 image is one of 161 California landscapes--paintings, photographs, woodcuts, etchings--displayed on the eight floors of the Wells Fargo Building occupied by the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. When the firm, the country’s fifth largest, was planning its move into these offices 15 years ago, it faced a choice “between art and crown moldings,” says now-retired partner Dan Frost. The firm chose art.

Frost asked Tressa Miller--former Director of Cultural Affairs for Security Pacific Bank--to put together a collection of California work. Landscapes were a natural theme since plein air (outdoor painting) was the principal California style, especially in the southern part of the state, from about 1890 to 1930. According to art consultant Nancy Moure, a specialist in California plein air painting, the results are “more representative of the high points of California landscape than any other non-museum collection.”

Called “A Century of California Landscapes,” it actually spans 130 years, beginning with two Carleton Watkins photographs of Yosemite from the mid-1860s and including works by such contemporary artists as Carlos Almaraz, Ed Ruscha and Wayne Thiebaud. Because of the heightened interest in California art, a collection of this caliber would be now extremely difficult to assemble: Comparable works are either no longer on the market or their prices have become prohibitive. Although individual pieces occasionally are loaned to museums, and 25 or so works hang in spaces accessible to the public, the collection remains private. Indeed, few of Gibbons, Dunn & Crutcher’s 200 lawyers and 500 employees have seen everything, spread out as it is along 4,000 feet of corridors, 24 conference rooms and numerous entry areas.

Miller, who has since advised other corporations on their art acquisitions, agreed to show the entire collection. We begin in the main reception area, where one is immediately struck by the collection’s earliest painting, a vibrant view of Yosemite’s North Dome, done around 1880 by Thomas Hill. “Walking through the corridors again,” Miller says, “brings back the great pleasure of the two years I spent fulfilling this vision.”

The cumulative effect of looking at these images is like taking a trip through the Californias of romantic myth and terrible destruction, from mountain majesty and desert glory to earthquake ruin and urban despair. Brian Hagiwara’s photograph, “Flying Tires,” rubs up against Joe Deal’s 19-piece “The Fault Zone.” Stanton MacDonald-Wright’s 1918 modernist watercolor, “California Landscape,” connects up to Almaraz’s pastels of Echo Park Lake at night. The dramatic grandeur of Edgar Payne’s oil, “Peaks Sublime,” stands opposed to Larry Cohen’s 1986 “View of the Bay,” a placid view of Santa Monica Bay and the Pacific Palisades. Dominating one entranceway is the most abstract work in the collection: Helen Lundeberg’s 1963 oil, “Desert Coast,” its hard-edged color fields of khaki, sienna and mustard dramatically evoking a series of receding mountain peaks.

These works, however, don’t merely reflect 130 years of changing visions of California. With the passage of time, Mel Ramos’ palm trees no longer have negative connotations for lawyer Peters. “Now that I’m thoroughly acculturated to living here, it’s become a symbol of everything that’s good about Los Angeles.”