The City As Muse

Artist Robert Cottingham didn’t set out to document early 20th century Los Angeles. He just seems to have a soft spot for the romance of old places. In 1964, Cottingham, then an art director with an advertising firm, accepted a company transfer from his native New York to L.A. “When I first came,” he says, “I suffered from extreme culture shock. Pink stucco Spanish is a long way from the tenements of New York.”

But after about a year, Cottingham began to paint bygone L.A. from photographs he snapped himself: Hollywood homes, a Victorian on Bunker Hill, Art Deco icons such as the May Co. building on Wilshire Boulevard and the Pan Pacific Auditorium (which was destroyed by a fire in 1984). “In New York, I had done like 1 1/2 paintings,” he says. “I really got rolling in Los Angeles.” Images of the city are among the works now on view in “A Decade of Painting,” his first L.A. show in 30 years.

Cottingham (who resists the “photorealist” label often applied to his work and has described himself as an “urban landscape painter”) even set up a studio in a former shoe repair shop on Olympic Boulevard. (“Twice people showed up there with a pair of shoes.”)

The artist’s most significant L.A. paintings may be his interpretations of the neon signs on and around downtown’s Broadway. Part of a sign series he’s been working on since 1969, the L.A. pieces include “ART” from the Art Theater; “HOT” from the Barclay Hotel marquee; “ODE” from a jeweler called Rhodes; and dozens of others.

Only after moving back to the East Coast in 1976 did Cottingham notice that the downtown L.A. he’d haunted often stood in for his hometown in television and movies. “They say you can take a boy out of Brooklyn,” he concedes, “but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the boy.”