200 Silent Ambassadors to the World

Few Americans have an opportunity to visit their country’s embassies, much less see the art that adorns the interiors and gardens. But for those in the rarefied circles of international diplomacy, the artworks displayed at an ambassador’s residence and office represent the nation’s cultural ideals and achievements.

Along with fulfilling this symbolic function, works by American artists in U.S. embassies around the world sometimes play a role in diplomatic discourse, said Robin Chandler Duke, whose late husband Angier Biddle Duke served as U.S. ambassador to Spain, Denmark and Morocco. “If you don’t agree on trade issues or you argue about oil, at least you can talk about the art. It puts another face on us and provides information about who we are,” she said.

A resident of New York who devotes much of her time to public service projects, Duke has joined forces with the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies, a nonprofit foundation established in 1986 to help the Department of State exhibit and preserve art in the nation’s 171 diplomatic facilities. As co-chair of the Washington-based foundation’s Millennium Committee, she is leading a nationwide effort to amass about 200 artworks by the end of the year, either through gifts or purchases and commissions funded by donations.

The goal is to build a significant holding of works by American artists as a gift to the nation, Duke said on a recent trip to Los Angeles. The committee has a wish list of well-known artists, compiled by an advisory committee of prominent museum directors and curators. But Duke is looking for “a healthy mix” of 19th and 20th century material that would include decorative objects, crafts, Native American art and folk art, as well as paintings, sculpture, works on paper and photographs by the likes of Thomas Eakins, Richard Diebenkorn, Richard Serra and Walker Evans. While other art pieces displayed in embassies are usually loaned for a relatively short time, the Gift to the Nation collection is intended to be “a lasting legacy,” Duke said.

To get things moving and encourage nationwide participation, she has asked a senator in each state to appoint a project representative. In California, Los Angeles architect and collector Elyse Grinstein has been tapped by Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Four months into the project, results are encouraging, Duke said. About 60 gifts have been promised so far, and plans are in the works to exhibit the collection at the National Gallery in Washington and document the project in a book.

One commissioned work, “Conjunction,” a 40-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Joel Shapiro, has been installed in the garden adjacent to the new U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. Another bronze sculpture, Elie Nadelman’s “Seated Woman With Raised Arm” (1924), bought with funds from New York arts patron Janice Levin, is destined for a garden at the embassy in London, to be designed by landscape architect Morgan Wheelock.

Other gifts include “Reflections on Senorita,” a 1990 painting by Pop master Roy Lichtenstein, donated by his widow, Dorothy, and a “Stars and Bars” Civil War-era quilt, given by London-based arts patrons Robert and Ricki Conway. Los Angeles collectors Peter and Eileen Norton have donated works by Larry Bell, Christo, Lawrence Gipe and William Wegman. Actor-artist Dennis Hopper has contributed two of his vintage photographic portraits, a 1962 shot of actor Bill Cosby and a 1964 photo of painter Jasper Johns.

Meanwhile, as part of its continuing program, the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies has agreed to help restore the public rooms at Ho^tel de Talleyrand in Paris, where the Marshall Plan was written. Owned by the U.S. government, the building houses a consular office and the Marshall Center for Cultural Affairs, said Lee Kimche McGrath, the foundation’s executive director.

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SUNSHINE MUSE IS BACK: Peter Plagens’ much-maligned but absolutely essential 1974 book, “Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970,” has been reprinted by the University of California Press. Issued with a new introduction and cover illustration--a sunny landscape by Richard Diebenkorn has replaced Wayne Thiebaud’s cheeky “Girl With an Ice Cream Cone”--the new edition is available in paperback at $19.95.

Plagens, a New York-based critic, painter and novelist, wrote “Sunshine Muse” as an irreverent insider when he lived in Los Angeles. He left in 1980 to chair the art department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, moved to New York in 1985 and has been Newsweek’s art critic since 1989. His whirlwind survey of West Coast art may strike newcomers as a slim slice of local history, but the book looms much larger than its 200-page form because it is still the only account of its kind.

“It’s had a long shelf life by default,” Plagens said of the book, in a telephone interview at his office in New York. “When I wrote it, I hoped and expected that there would be all these other books,” he said, recounting his vision of possible themes and monographs about major West Coast artists. “I hoped it would open the floodgates and then go to the back of the line as this quaint little book that started the whole thing with a look at art since 1945.”

Books about other aspects of the West Coast art scene have been published during the last quarter-century, of course, but “Sunshine Muse” did not yield a batch of sequels or alternate interpretations. Nor was Plagens inclined to update his book, particularly after he moved to the East Coast. “I’ve been out to lunch for 20 years,” he said of his relationship with his former home.

Nonetheless, he agreed to have “Sunshine Muse” reprinted as “a period piece.” The new introduction recalls the climate in which the book was written from a 25-years-later perspective. Plagens corrected typos and factual errors in the original text--which were pointed out in assiduous detail by his critics--but he made no substantive changes. Content to let the book stand as a document of its time, he offers no apologies but cheerfully acknowledges shortcomings.

“My one big error, and I admit it in the introduction,” he said, “is that I omitted feminism--including ‘Womanhouse,’ a Los Angeles bungalow that was transformed by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and younger artists into an engaging, if sometimes sledgehammer, agitprop environment.” The women’s movement changed the course of cultural history, he said. But Chris Burden’s performances, William Wegman’s witty conceptualism and Maria Nordman’s Light and Space art loomed so much larger at the time that he simply didn’t see its full significance.

“I would hope that readers of this edition will not view its text through a distorted ideological lens,” Plagens writes in the final paragraph of the book’s new introduction. “Most important, I would hope that readers will, in effect, write their own histories of West Coast art since the 1970s by going out and looking at as much of it as they possibly can, and forming their own opinions.”

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IN PRAISE OF PATRONS: Philip and Beatrice Gersh, two of Los Angeles’ most dedicated supporters of the Museum of Contemporary Art, will be honored in “The Collector as Patron in the 20th Century,” a two-part exhibition exploring the role of patronage in building America’s public art collections, at Knoedler & Company gallery in New York.

The exhibition--running from May 2 to July 31--will begin with a historic section, featuring portraits of Henry Clay Frick and other early collector-benefactors along with archival materials from the gallery’s extensive holdings.

The second part of the show, curated by art historian Irving Sandler, will feature paintings from the collections of Agnes Gund, who supports the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Marieluise Hessel (Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.); Crosby and Bebe Kemper (Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.; Jim and Mary Patton (Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, N.C.); and the Gershes.

Sandler selected five paintings from the Gersh collection: Jackson Pollock’s “No. 3” (1948), Willem de Kooning’s “Two Women” (1949), Hans Hofmann’s “Polar Caves” (1954), an untitled 1962 canvas by Ellsworth Kelly and an untitled 1959 oil-on-paper work by Mark Rothko.

Suzanne Muchnic is The Times’ art writer.