Pasadena’s Wild Past on Parade

Little old ladies in tennis shoes, Greene and Greene bungalows on tree-lined streets, flower-covered floats in the Rose Parade, rare Old Master and French Impressionist paintings at the Norton Simon Museum. Pasadena is known for many things--none of them radical. As America’s television audience knows, Pasadena is a bastion of conservatism where everything comes up roses, and the sun almost always shines--especially on New Year’s Day.

But now several Pasadena arts institutions have joined forces in an ambitious collaborative effort to resurrect a far-out chapter of local history. Called “Radical Past: Contemporary Art & Music in Pasadena, 1960-74,” the multifaceted project consists of a three-part art exhibition, at the Norton Simon Museum, the Armory Center for the Arts and Art Center College of Design; a show of documentary photographs at the New Pasadena Gallery; and a concert series at the Armory and the Colburn School of Performing Arts. The exhibitions open today; musical performances begin next Sunday at the Armory and Feb. 16 at the Colburn School.

“Radical Past” celebrates a period when Pasadena was the improbable site of a startling array of avant-garde events. Roy Lichtenstein, America’s most durable and successful Pop artist, had his first major museum exhibition in Pasadena, in 1967. So did Conceptualist Allan Kaprow, the father of “happenings”--the spontaneous theatrical events that evolved as a new art form in the 1960s.

Sculptor Richard Serra--whose recent exhibition of “Torqued Ellipses” at the Museum of Contemporary Art was a spectacular success--also made an early appearance in Pasadena, in 1970, with an 80-ton installation of 12 enormous red fir logs. A few months later, Andy Warhol staged a big show of his Brillo box sculptures, Campbell’s soup can paintings and other serial works.

Astonishing as these exhibitions may have seemed at the time, none of them had “the tectonic-plate-moving effect” of a 1963 exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s work, as Newsweek art critic and artist Peter Plagens puts it in his essay in the “Radical Past” catalog. Among the wonders of that show--which was, believe it or not, Duchamp’s first full-scale retrospective--the French iconoclast played a game of chess with a nude young woman, Eve Babitz.

Artist Walter Gabrielson, who lived in Pasadena from 1966 to 1981 and shared a studio with Plagens for much of that time, didn’t see the nude chess player, but he remembers the Duchamp exhibition vividly.

“When I saw the Duchamp show, he was sitting near the front of the building as you came in,” Gabrielson said, speaking by telephone from his studio in Santa Barbara. “He was just sitting there playing chess with himself. There he was, the grand old man.

“So then I’m walking around inside, looking at all this stuff,” he continued. “I’m in the room with the urinal and the bicycle wheel on the stool and this Pasadena matron, mighty hefty, comes rolling in with her husband in tow, like a little tugboat. And she looks around with this imperious gaze at all this stuff. And then she declaims to the multitudes, ‘This exhibition is a public disgrace,’ and turns around and marches out, and her husband follows her out.

“It was so good, I’m wondering, ‘Did Duchamp set this up?’ But no, it was just too good for someone to think of it. But appropriately, in Pasadena, he created the response that his work did with people in general. No one could figure this stuff out, but the artists thought it was a lot of fun.

“Then there was the Pop art show,” Gabrielson said, recalling “New Painting of Common Objects,” an early (1962) survey of Pop art by 10 artists including Lichtenstein, Warhol, Edward Ruscha and Wayne Thiebaud. “That was terrific. It was the first time we had seen the stuff.”

Beyond the museum, artists thrived in a scruffy environment where studio rent was cheap; they painted and partied in the vast spaces of old industrial buildings. “It was a terrific scene,” Gabrielson said, recalling the neighborhood where he and Plagens worked, along with Karen Carson, Bruce Nauman, Ron Linden and Jim Turrell, among others.

The musical scene in Pasadena was equally lively. On one occasion in 1966, Karlheinz Stockhausen, a leading German avant-garde composer, drew an overflow crowd to hear his new work “Telemusik,” created from electronically manufactured sounds, and “Mikrophonie,” a piece composed of amplified sounds made by striking a Chinese gong. At another memorable Pasadena performance, in 1970, American composer John Cage “played part of a tape of a recent work, read from his diary, performed on the piano and left a lingering afterglow of gentle anarchy,” The Times reported.

The institution where most of this activity occurred was the Pasadena Museum of Art, which flourished during the 1960s and early ‘70s but sank under the weight of financial mismanagement and a mounting debt, incurred by the construction of a new building that opened in 1969. In a last-ditch effort to save the museum, in 1974, the museum’s trustees turned it over to industrialist and collector Norton Simon. He paid off the debt and transformed the museum into a showcase primarily for his own collection of European and Asian art, but also for the Modern and Contemporary art holdings of the Pasadena museum.

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The museum began its life in 1924 as the Pasadena Art Institute, in an old wood building on the city-owned property currently occupied by the Norton Simon Museum, then known as Carmelita Park. In 1942 the museum moved to the Chinese-style building on Los Robles Avenue that is now the home of the Pacific Asia Museum. The move was intended to be temporary, while the museum’s trustees raised money for a new building in Carmelita Park, but it lasted for 27 years.

During that time the institute evolved from a sleepy provincial gallery to a forward-looking museum that aspired to be a world-class showcase for cutting-edge art. The institute took a giant step in 1951, when it became the trustee of the collection of Galka E. Scheyer, a German emigre collector and dealer who represented a group of artists she called the Blue Four--Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexei Jawlensky. Her collection is composed of about 450 works by the Blue Four and other modern artists, together with 800 documents.

The trusteeship of the Scheyer collection heightened the ambitions of the Pasadena Art Institute’s staff and trustees, who changed its name to the Pasadena Art Museum in 1954. A move to erect a new building in Carmelita Park gained force in the early 1960s, but progress was slowed by conflicts between potential donors who envisioned a traditional museum and those who championed a more adventurous approach.

Meanwhile, the museum got a major boost from Walter Hopps, who co-founded Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery with artist Edward Kienholz in 1957. Hopps established an informal relationship with the museum in 1960, became its curator in 1962 and served as director from 1964 to 1967. He energized and distinguished the museum with a program of exhibitions that included early 20th century art as well as up-to-the-minute work. Among the highlights were a comprehensive survey of works by German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, the first retrospective of John McLaughlin’s abstract paintings and the Duchamp retrospective.

“You can’t underestimate the effect of the museum, not only on the artists who worked in the city during the period covered by this exhibition but also on the Southern California art world as a whole,” Plagens writes in the catalog. Indeed, the museum greatly enriched the region’s awareness of contemporary art, providing a forum for under-recognized California artists as well as prominent figures from New York.

As the museum’s program grew and talks about a new building gathered steam, Hopps made it clear that he preferred a relatively modest expansion on the Los Robles site. But the museum’s trustees were eager to take advantage of the opportunity they had in Carmelita Park. They planned a $3-million building but ended up with a $5-million structure they could not afford to program and maintain, in addition to a $1.5-million debt on the building. The museum was in big trouble when its doors opened in 1969, and financial difficulties mounted soon after the inaugural festivities.

Grand as it looked, the building was the beginning of the end for what had been an enormously vital and influential institution.

“The old Pasadena museum [on Los Robles] was really where the action was,” Gabrielson said. “They had magnificent shows, and the building was quirky. It all fit. When the new museum opened, I honestly don’t know if anybody was really affected by it because it had made a transformation from a user-friendly place to a very imperious place. My feeling was, it was created so the board of directors could have nice meetings there. It had that look about it; the art was an afterthought.

“It was a classic case of putting the cart before the horse,” he said. “They had a beautiful setup in a marginal building, and they went from that to a marginal setup in a sort of beautiful building. I guess you could say it was a place where Pasadena tried to put itself on the map. And it did. But then the building just sat there, like a deflated tire.”

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“Radical Past” was conceived by Jay Belloli, director of gallery programs at the Armory Center for the Arts. The idea has been brewing since he arrived in 1982, and it has grown considerably along the way.

“The project really came out of my awareness of the artist community in Pasadena and how incredibly active it had been,” Belloli said in an interview at the Armory. “It had been chewing at me for a long time, but it was just one those shows you are going to get to at some point but keep pushing off.”

He tentatively scheduled the show for 1999, without realizing that would be the 10th anniversary of the Armory and the 25th anniversary of the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum. Belloli was planning a show that would focus on artists who had studios in Pasadena, but after doing preliminary research--and getting a surprisingly long list of names from artist Walter Askin--he realized the show would be too big to do alone.

“My instinct when I have a project that is too much for me is to call Steve Nowlin [director of the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design] and invite him to lunch,” Belloli said.

But when they got together, Nowlin pushed the project into an even larger realm by asking what kind of collection the Pasadena Art Museum had, and if it was still at the Norton Simon Museum. Belloli didn’t know, so they made an appointment to see the collection with Andrea Clark, who was the registrar of the Pasadena Art Museum and has continued as registrar at the Norton Simon Museum.

“The collection was an astonishing surprise,” Belloli said. “I wasn’t prepared at all for what I saw; it’s a great collection of art from that period.”

Although relatively few contemporary works are typically on view at the Norton Simon Museum, which at any time can only display about 10% of its 12,000-piece holding, the museum still maintains the defunct Pasadena museum’s large and varied collection in its storage vaults. The collection includes assemblages by George Herms and Bruce Connor, paintings by Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Tom Wesselmann, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly and sculptures by Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg.

Clark also gave Belloli a list of exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum that “just about bowled me over,” he said. “That made it clear that the show was going to have to be about art in Pasadena, not just the artists who lived here,” Belloli said. “It would have to be about the artistic environment, which fed off the artists and their studios or bounced off the energy at that museum. Works from the collection itself would indicate what the museum had done. We would also feature, as best we could, the really wonderful works of some of the people who had shown at that museum, even if they hadn’t wound up in the collection.

“So, it suddenly became a big project.” And in early July, when the Norton Simon Museum agreed not only to loan works to the show but also to participate in it, “it was a go,” Belloli said.

At that point, three institutions were involved. As their leaders sorted out a logical way to illuminate the 15-year period of history, they decided that the Norton Simon Museum would focus on the earlier Southern California material in its collection of contemporary art, the Armory would show later Southern California art that had either been collected or featured at the museum and Art Center would display works by non-Californians who had shown their work at the Pasadena Art Museum.

While the project was taking its final form, the New Pasadena Gallery, in the One Colorado commercial complex, expressed interest. “We couldn’t put works of art there that were valuable or unique” because of security, Belloli said. “The solution was historical photographs--Lichtenstein signing the billboard for his show, Ed Ruscha and his date at the Duchamp opening, all that stuff. They give a sense of the scene that surrounded all these works.”

Even before enlisting Nowlin’s help, Belloli was thinking about including a musical component, in collaboration with Southwest Chamber Music, which has been in residence at the Armory since 1993. “We were well aware that the center for contemporary music in Southern California in the ‘60s and early ‘70s was the Pasadena Art Museum,” Belloli said. Leonard Stein, who directed the Encounter Series at the Pasadena Art Museum and Caltech from 1964 to 1973, “brought in just about every famous composer there was, to talk or have a performance of his or her music,” he said.

Southwest Chamber Music has planned a festival of seven programs celebrating the Encounters Series. The programs will present music by composers featured in the series, including Charles Ives, John Cage and Harry Partch.

Belloli expects “Radical Past” to be a revelation of a remarkable era. “It was a period of really incredible possibility for contemporary art,” he said. “There was suddenly a huge number of interesting artists, not just a handful, working here. There was suddenly a bunch of interesting curators and directors, including [curator] Maurice Tuchman and [director] Ric [Richard Fargo] Brown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And then, suddenly, there were some major collectors of contemporary art--the Weismans and the Grinsteins and the Rowans and the Phillips and Robert Halff, and I don’t know who all else.

“So the mix started happening. There were people to make the work, people who were excited about showing the work and people who were interested in buying the work,” he said. “We realized fairly early on that nobody was going to do this show except Pasadena,” he said. “There’s no perfect way of doing it because such a large number of artists worked here and what the museum did was so extraordinary and rich. But we had to do something, and 1999 was the time to do it, both because of the Armory’s history and the art museum’s history. It had to be done this year.”

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“Radical Past: Contemporary Art & Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974” begins today at four locations;each segment of the show has an individual title and each venue has different hours. “The Museum: 1960-1969, Highlights From the Collection and Archives of the Pasadena Art Museum,” Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., (626) 449-6840; adults $4, seniors and students $2; ends May 9. “Southern California Art: 1969-1974,” Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., (626) 792-5101; free; ends April 11. “Influences: 1960-1974, Selections From the Contemporary Collection of the Norton Simon Museum,” Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., (626) 396-2244; free; ends April 11. “Pasadena Scene: 1960-1974, Photographs of Contemporary Art in Pasadena,” New Pasadena Gallery, One Colorado, Miller Alley, (626) 564-1066; free; ends April 11. “Music From a Radical Past: 7 Concerts Honoring the Encounters Series,” next Sunday-April 13. For information and tickets, call (800) 726-7147.