Pacific Asia Museum’s ‘Collectors’ Choice’ Honors Its Legacy

History is never about just one time, place or person. It’s about how all factors interact to create a special story. This is particularly clear in the Pacific Asia Museum’s new show, “Collectors’ Choice: An Exhibition in Honor of Grace Nicholson.”

At a visual scan the ensemble--organized by executive director David Kamansky--suggests a look at historic Asian art. There is the familiar Chinese furniture with scrollwork chairs and lovingly crafted cabinets; a spectacular tapestry representing peacocks in gold and silver thread; Japanese ceramics and paintings, such as an 18th century example of a stylized moon and pine trees rendered on a golden fan. But the display takes odd twists.

Suddenly there is a cabinet filled with American Indian baskets, a wall of vintage photographs of the museum itself, paintings of Asians by Western artists in 1920s style and 19th century Chinese paintings of Canton harbor showing Western brigs among the junks and colonial buildings on the shore. Then the whole thing shifts its attention to a group of esoteric Tibetan paintings called Thanka that are mandala-like in their complexity.

The net effect of all this is to create the atmosphere of some sort of sumptuous curiosity shop--if that idea can be understood in its most positive sense. The exhibition conjures an aura of wonder as if all this material were being discovered for the first time. It invites us to delight in its sheer strangeness and intimations of people from cultures enticingly different from our own. In short, the exhibition feels both innocent and exotic.

That certainly must have been this art’s general effect on Los Angeles when all of it was introduced here, beginning in the teens of this century by the human subject of the exhibition, Grace Nicholson.

She was one of those exceptional self-invented people Kevin Starr likes to write about in his histories of L.A. Along with characters like Charles Fletcher Lummis and Jake Zeitlin she more or less scissored herself out of whole cloth and then proceeded to weave her singularity into the cultural fabric of Lotusland.

She was born in Philadelphia in 1877. By the age of 24 she’d lost both parents and grandparents. Trained as a secretary, she moved to Pasadena in 1901 and transformed herself into an art dealer specializing in antiques and American Indian material. She called her store the Old Curio Shop, but she wasn’t kidding. Her expertise in Native American art was such that she attracted leading collectors and museums as prestigious as the Smithsonian and Chicago’s Field Museum.

Having allowed her to build a reputation as a leading dealer in native art, the fates apparently decided to test her resiliency. By 1916, she could see the market for her specialty drying up at both ends, so she reinvented herself again, adding Asian connoisseurship to her talents.

By 1924, she could afford to expand her residence on Los Robles Avenue into a palatial showplace designed by one of the leading eclectic-revivalist architectural firms of the day, Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury. Sylvanus Marston--who has the distinction of having built the first of L.A.’s trademark bungalow courts--seemingly had little trouble adapting his talent for Mediterranean courtyard architecture to the idea of an imperial Chinese palace. To this day, the landmark structure feels serene and authentic.

Many objects on view here are from Nicholson’s collections. She retired in 1943 and died five years later, having deeded her fantasy building to the city of Pasadena. By a remarkable act of serendipity, it later became the Pasadena Art Museum and acted as the local launching pad for yet another exotic art form, radical modernism. At the beginning of the 1960s, the museum’s curator, Walter Hopps, organized the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective as well as introducing L.A.’s contemporary breakthrough artists in its precincts.

Now the Chinese palace celebrates its 25th anniversary as the Pacific Asia Museum, calling attention to art of the Orient in a new multicultural L.A., where Asia is finally fully recognized as being the natural part of the local environment it has always been.

* Pacific Asia Museum, 46 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena; through Jan. 20. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. (818) 449-2742.