A Refreshingly Modest Exhibition

At art museums, we’re deep into an era of bigger is better. Bigger buildings, bigger exhibitions, bigger crowds, bigger fanfare. If it’s not getting bigger, the museum seems not to be doing its job.

At the Long Beach Museum of Art, bigger doesn’t much apply. Yes, its handsome new pavilion of six galleries, which opened to the public Sunday, nearly doubles the previous amount of exhibition space. But at just under 13,000 square feet, with 10,000 square feet of gallery space, the two-story building is decidedly modest. Clearly an effort has been made to make a virtue of relative smallness, and certainly it has its rewards.

During the last 25 years, the museum has undergone a seemingly endless series of unsuccessful attempts at expansion--a new building to have been designed by I.M. Pei, the renovation and adaptive reuse of an old downtown department store, integration into a planned convention center. Proposals and announcements came and went.

Through it all the museum remained where it had been since the city acquired it in 1950 as a civic art center--in a graceful, Craftsman-style summer house, built in 1912 on a bluff overlooking the harbor. Happiness has now been found in its own backyard, where room was made for a new, free-standing pavilion. The museum’s offices, together with a gift shop and a small cafe, have been consolidated in the 1912 house.

The old household setting seems to have formed the guiding principle for the equally graceful new addition. If the house-galleries were awkward and not ideally suited to their public function as a place for the display of art, the new galleries do conform to modern museum standards. Yet they also remain modest in size and scale. Public functions are knitted together with conscious echoes of the museum’s domestic legacy--such as the prominent staircase with mahogany banisters that dominates the lobby, which is plainly meant to allude to the central stair that dominates the old Craftsman house.

Provocatively, the museum’s domestic roots also have shaped a new direction for the collection, which is displayed in the new pavilion. The opening exhibition is an eclectic group of small shows, one per gallery, presented under the umbrella title “Rooms With a View.” In most cases, paintings and sculptures are shown together with decorative arts.

One of the two strongest displays is “California Modernism: 1940-1970,” which juxtaposes excellent abstract paintings by John McLaughlin, Florence Arnold, Lorser Feitelson and others with familiar furniture by Charles and Ray Eames and suave ceramic vessels by Harrison McIntosh and Laura Andreson. The other is “In Ye Grandest Manner and After Ye Newest Fashion: Selections From the Gail-Oxford Collection” of 18th century American furniture. Period glass and ceramics are shown alongside exceptional Queen Anne and Chippendale chairs, tables, a desk and other pieces, while portraits by John Singleton Copley and Matthew Pratt, both on long-term loan from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, complete the installation.

Both shows are small but choice--just 20 objects in the Gail-Oxford collection, and seven paintings, four chairs, a wall-relief and a dozen ceramics in “California Modernism.” The consistently high quality, coupled with the domestic feel of the rooms, creates a satisfying situation. These are works meant to be lived with, their rewards unfolded over time. What the shows lack in breadth, they make up in the depth of individual pieces.

The same cannot be said for the 14 easel paintings, mostly undistinguished, in “Early California Landscape Painting: 1915-1940.” The best are a few loosely painted pastoral views by Jean Mannheim, a German emigre to Pasadena. The rest are so weak that you’re drawn immediately to the smashing ocean view out the windows, which puts the dreary paintings at your back.

Two little galleries focus on European abstraction between the two world wars, and they draw power from the museum’s crown jewel, the Milton Wichner Collection. In addition to a pair of fine geometric abstractions by Wassily Kandinsky, the standouts are nine vividly colored landscapes and portrait heads by Russian modernist Alexei Jawlensky. They’re shown with seven glass vessels by French craftsman Charles Schneider; his use of intensely colored abstract patterning creates a kind of delirious, post-Art Nouveau feeling that’s right in step with the paintings.

Twenty-seven more Jawlensky paintings are in the museum’s holdings, but they’re not on view. Why hide your light under a bushel? It would be worth hanging as many of these gems as possible.

Nine tin-glazed earthen tureens, bowls and other vessels borrowed from the Marie Forrest Collection of 18th century French faience fill a display case, acting as a focused adjunct to the Gail-Oxford antiques. And downstairs a room is devoted to 27 contemporary ceramics, mostly from California, which were a gift from Melba and Al Langman. With fine examples by important artists as diverse as Peter Voulkos, Jerry Rothman, Elsa Rady and Adrian Saxe, it takes a while before you realize what’s missing: anything by Kenneth Price, whose 40-year career is turning out to be the signal contemporary achievement in clay.

The biggest disappointment of the inaugural presentation is the show in the main gallery. “Enter Laughing: Humor in Contemporary Art” is mostly unfunny, but it’s also filled with mediocre work, like the jokey ceramic frog by David Gilhooly. A few worthwhile things--a Bruce Nauman drawing that riffs on Henry Moore, a small gilded aluminum panel by Billy Al Bengston--tend to get lost, while a selection of three videotapes is awkwardly displayed on a free-standing television monitor.

Of historical interest is Craig Kauffman’s 1963 “Plain Jane.” Erotically entwined machine-forms are painted on a large sheet of glass in a way that builds on the influential precedent of Marcel Duchamp, whose now-legendary first retrospective was organized in Pasadena that year. This hybrid painting represents a critical step on the way to Kauffman’s classic works in vacuum-formed plastic.

Easily the wittiest piece, however, is Karen Carson’s large, unstretched canvas painted with white gesso. It hangs on the wall like a sagging box. A surface layer of canvas is peeled back to expose the painting’s empty interior, thanks to some strategically placed zippers. The painting is slyly transformed into a Minimalist striptease.

Together, “Rooms With a View” reveals a museum collection that is modest, uneven and has room for considerable growth. One important feature of the collection is also obscured. The Long Beach Museum of Art is internationally known as a pioneer in developing a collection of single-channel video art (and even helping artists to produce the work). The collection numbers several thousand tapes, though just three are shown.

A dilemma has arisen, now that video art is some 30 years old. Classic works from the 1970s and even the 1980s, periods when portable video technology was still new, pose significant issues for conservation. In turn, this makes their public presentation difficult. The challenge now is to find a solution to this costly problem, which goes to the heart of the museum’s function as a repository for art.

Like the mixing of paintings with decorative arts, television work further recalls post-1950 domestic history, which coincides with the Long Beach Museum of Art’s own past. Collectively these small shows make a case for the daily pleasures of living with art, as opposed to only visiting the institutional extravaganzas so common today. That’s certainly a case worth making. Perhaps because it’s unexpected from a museum, it comes across with considerable charm.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., (562) 439-2119, through March 18. Closed Monday.