The Museum That Changed Me Forever

Growing up in Pasadena in the 1960s meant, of course, enduring its reputation for little old ladies, New Year’s floats and football. It also meant living in a city of lingering intolerances.

At junior high school assemblies we were encouraged to report anyone, friends or family, who might harbor Communist sympathies. A high school friend whose parents belonged to a locally popular religious sect that forbade all contact with popular culture hid his jazz records at my house. A favorite teacher at Pasadena High School was suspended for growing a beard. The sullen youth who sometimes bagged our family groceries was Sirhan Sirhan.

But that wasn’t all there was to Pasadena. It had classic art at the Huntington Library; a decent symphony orchestra, conducted by Richard Lert (who was born in Vienna while Brahms was alive); important visiting artists at the Civic Auditorium (I first heard the likes of David Oistrakh there); top-drawer chamber music courtesy of the Coleman Concerts; the Pasadena Playhouse.

It had a good bookstore (Vroman’s, still there, holding its own against encroaching chains in Old Town), a good record store, a good public library, good schools, where music, art and theater were a part of the curriculum.

And it had the Pasadena Art Museum.

Just the place to excite the enthusiasms of a curious teenager, the Pasadena Art Museum was informal, exotic, appealingly ramshackle and accessible. I could ride my bike to the Chinese-style building. I felt welcome to hang out there, and I did. I must have gone to the famous Marcel Duchamp exhibition of 1963 a dozen or more times.

Here was an artist who questioned everything, and who revealed the beauty in a bicycle wheel like the ones I had just used to get to his show. Here was an artist who had the good sense to combine chemistry and sex, in his large glass piece “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”--what better way to encourage an adolescent do his chemistry homework? Here was an artist who played chess, just as I did at the time.

Well, not quite: When Duchamp played chess--in a private event during the show from which a famous photograph exists--he played with a voluptuous 20-year-old nude art student. Moreover, that nude, Eve Babitz, happened to be the daughter of Sol Babitz, one of my heroes at the time. He was a noted Los Angeles violinist who not only championed Stravinsky and Schoenberg but was also a pioneer of Baroque music played in a historic fashion on period instruments.

Then, in 1965, came the concerts: Leonard Stein’s Encounters Series. The museum presented modern composers not as outsiders, which is how the traditional music world viewed them, but as part of a larger world of modern art.

I heard John Cage fill the gallery with sound in such a way that the art on the walls seemed to come to life. Then I read of his early friendship with Mark Tobey, whose dappled paintings I had seen in the galleries, and his reverence for Duchamp, and I could make the connections.

Astonished by the new sounds I heard at Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Encounters concert, I asked him where he got such notions of futuristic electronic composition. He said he had tried modeling musical forms after sketches by Paul Klee--which I also knew from the museum.

When I heard Harry Partch, with his handmade instruments and 43-pitch scale, and Lou Harrison, whose music employed elements from many Pacific Rim cultures, I learned that there was a whole style of indigenous pioneering music, a California music unlike anything that came from Europe or even the East Coast.

The Pasadena Art Museum provided me with the experience of art as a part of everything else. Art no longer had to be exported from another time or place, a product of Beethoven’s 18th century Vienna (as heard at the Pasadena Symphony concerts), or Gainsborough’s 18th century Britain (seen at the Huntington). Instead, I found art made from my world, be it that bicycle wheel, my chemistry set at home or the different cultures of my classmates.

I left Pasadena in 1967 to study music in Berkeley, and the Pasadena Art Museum sent me on my way with Allan Kaprow’s happenings. These, I quickly realized, were the roots of not just avant-garde artists’ innovations, but also of a new youth culture, with its street theater, “be-ins” and all the rest. The timing was excellent: Before I could commit to squirreling away more of my youth in airless practice rooms, I needed to grasp that art and the street were not separate.

What the Pasadena Art Museum ultimately provided me with was a model of art and life as a huge jigsaw puzzle. It supplied some of the pieces. It suggested possible methods for fitting them together. And I now, thanks to the museum, spend my life finding new pieces and seeking new connections, happy to observe the network of arts become ever more global, ever more entwined.