The Goghing Gets Tough

The other day, I got blockbustered. The event was the exhibition du jour--”Van Gogh’s Van Goghs: Masterpieces From the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the ballyhooed show whose very eventfulness is driven home by the title’s repeated mantra of the famous artist’s name. Having seen the engaging presentation at a preview, I went back to see if it could be seen amid the milling throngs.

The answer is: Yes and no. With perseverance you can indeed navigate the jam-packed galleries at LACMA West, even working your way into relatively unencumbered visual proximity with any of the 70 Van Gogh’s Van Goghs. But it’s a struggle.

And exhausting--exceptionally so. Looking at art makes demands on your stamina even under the best of circumstances, which are not the circumstances that ever characterize a blockbuster museum show. After 30 minutes, I confess I wanted out.

Not that LACMA hasn’t tried. They’ve marshaled all their available organizational skills to make the daunting visit as easy as possible for as many as possible--possible being the operative word here. There’s only so much that can be done when as many as 7,500 people are expected to be herded into and out of a show during a 12-hour period.

As a LACMA member, I was entitled to two free tickets to the show. I called Ticketmaster’s LACMA Hotline ([323] 462-2787), listened to the sales pitch for Washington Mutual, the show’s corporate sponsor (no, I didn’t sign up for a checking account), and got a choice of three keypad options: members, nonmember and new members. This was mantra No. 2: Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Van Gogh; member, member, member.

The event, you see, is partly geared toward swelling the museum’s membership rolls. After seven minutes on hold listening to breathless synthesizer music punctuated by pitches for the online ordering service Ticketmaster.com, I got a sales clerk.

My first choice for timed entry--1 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon--was available. We finished the transaction and I listened to a third sales pitch (this one for a discount-coupon club; I declined). Tickets arrived in the mail.

On the appointed Thursday, at a few minutes before 1, I showed up at LACMA West, the ironically appropriate landmark former May Co. department store on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Metered two-hour parking was available on a nearby street.

LACMA has erected a huge, hard-shell tent out back on the lawn. The queue begins there. Buses filled with tour groups had already disgorged their passengers, who were waiting patiently in the snaking line. At 1:03, the line began to inch forward. At 1:05, it stopped.

A woman with a bullhorn and a Brooklyn accent gave booming instructions on how to locate the coat check, telephones and bathrooms (“Use ‘em before you go in, because once you leave the galleries there is no reentry!”) and then gave the sales pitch for the recorded tour (“Have your $5 ready! English language only!”).

At 1:09, the line began to move again. At 1:10, it stopped. People made their way out of the tent and into the LACMA West lobby in carefully controlled clumps. At 1:25, I successfully passed through the metal detector, then got in line to pick up my headset for the recorded tour.

Four minutes later I was in the first room of the show--together with what seemed like most of the population of a small town plus half of Leisure World. Normally, I like to begin my visit to an exhibition with a quick walk through the galleries, so I’ll have a sense of how to pace myself in the narrative that every show unfolds.

The prospect of a quick run-through didn’t look good here, though. One anomaly of the chronologically organized show is that, as Van Gogh gets better and better as a painter, the Van Gogh Museum’s collection of examples gets smaller and smaller. They own a lot of early work from the artist’s formative years in Holland, Antwerp and Paris, and not as much from the brief but intensely brilliant period in Arles, Saint-Remy and Auvers.

So, as the collection gets smaller, the galleries do too. These small rooms are where the classic works hang. More and more people pack themselves into less and less space. By the time I realized my usual run-through plan was a mistake, I was already in the Arles room. Going backward through the rooms to get back out to the first gallery was like spawning upstream.

The doorway between the Paris gallery and the Arles gallery is an especially clogged artery. The crush isn’t helped by having the paintings installed on either side of the door as designated stops on the recorded tour.

Speaking of the recorded tour: Some couples, in an apparent budgetary measure, share by passing one headset back and forth, remaining tethered together like an astronaut to the shuttle and making a formidably awkward bulk in already dense galleries. More than once I wished for a pair of scissors--though the metal detector at the entrance doubtless would have denied me.

The one groaner in the audio-tour comes all the way at the end, in the last room, where Van Gogh’s famously tempest-tossed “Wheatfield with Crows” is actually accompanied on your headset by studio sound effects. The whoosh! of wind through wheat and the caw! caw! of birds rising in a black cloud are backed by a mournful piano solo. Blessedly, we’re spared the discharge of a gun.

Turning an already lugubrious painting into a still from a B-movie did get me to exit the show with alacrity. Cash-register lines were long in the sunflower-yellow Van Gogh gift shop. I strode past the Washington Mutual automatic teller machine set up in the lobby (I didn’t stop to withdraw any cash) and headed over to LACMA’s main complex for a second look at the great, sprawling exhibition of ceramic sculpture from ancient West Mexico. The galleries were pleasant and uncrowded.