They’re in for pennies, not pounds

When trustee Peter B. Lewis pulled the plug on the excesses of Guggenheim Museum director Tom Krens early this month, threatening his termination if the institution’s fiscal house was not put in order, he had more than just the title of board chairman for clout. Since 1993, insurance magnate Lewis has given $62 million to the Manhattan museum, and he has pledged more than $150 million toward a possible downtown building project.

Quick: Aside from the posthumous bequest of cantankerous J. Paul Getty to his own museum a quarter century ago, name one trustee at any important art museum in L.A. who has ever shown anything close to Lewis’ philanthropic largess.

Time’s up. Stumped? Me too.

Never known as bountiful givers, the boards at many of L.A.’s art museums were especially self-satisfied with their philanthropic mediocrity this year. There are individual exceptions (and ladies -- because most of you are ladies -- you know who you are). Still, 2002 will be grimly remembered as the Year of the Cheapskate Trustees.

In a confidential draft that surfaced of a study commissioned last year by the Southwest Museum, the board was blasted for its collective failure to financially support its own institution, thus putting a great collection in jeopardy. Fiscal grief at the Museum of Contemporary Art brought the otherwise fine Warhol painting retrospective to town -- the first time MOCA has scheduled a show for the primary purpose of making money -- and was followed by postponement of a big survey of ‘60s Minimal art to 2004. A $25-million capital campaign sputtered at the UCLA Hammer Museum. And the capper: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art shelved a $300-million renovation plan that had made banner headlines just a year before.

It’s not because these folks don’t have money to give, difficult post-Sept. 11 economy or not. According to Forbes’ most recent list of America’s wealthiest citizens, just four locals who are or have been trustees at area art museums together claim assets in excess of $14 billion. Every one of them is richer than the Guggenheim’s Lewis -- most of them three times as rich.

Typical art-museum trustees want their institutions to shine in the international firmament. Ours do too -- but apparently they want someone else to pay for it.

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Christopher Knight’s notable developments for 2002

In no particular order, these were the 10 most significant developments in the art life of Southern California this year:

“Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta.” Terrific objects, illuminating installation, refreshing viewpoint, excellent catalog -- this UCLA Fowler Museum offering was the best show of the year.

“Black Out.” From an abundant array of strong gallery shows, Mike Kelley’s show at Patrick Painter Inc. dredged the swamp of modern American adolescence to examine the fault lines crisscrossing official culture and the counterculture. Kelley is among our most important artists, and this was Kelley at his finest.

“Evocations: Sharon Ellis, 1991-2001.” Ellis’ lush, oblique visual essays on inchoate feelings and the passage of time made for a concise, richly satisfying survey of paintings at the Long Beach Museum of Art. We need more focused museum shows of L.A. artists.

“Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure.” He had the most facile hand of any 20th century painter. The Museum of Contemporary Art’s gorgeous show of his pivotal drawings of women gave us the most intimate examination possible.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The Catholic Church hasn’t been a significant art patron for a few hundred years, so expectations were low for the art commissioned for the new, architecturally significant cathedral. Unfortunately, those expectations were met.

“Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions.” L.A.’s art museums talk a lot about the vibrancy of Latin American culture, but it was the San Diego Museum of Art that came up with “Axis Mexico,” a big, flawed but wonderfully ambitious survey of recent Mexican art. (It’s still on view, to March 9.)

“Andy Warhol Retrospective.” MOCA did a public service by bringing the excellent European retrospective of Warhol’s paintings to town on the 40th anniversary of the L.A. debut of his Campbell’s soup can paintings -- despite the galling absence from the show of the soup cans themselves, which New York’s Museum of Modern Art rudely refused to lend.

Southwest Museum. The financially unsound Southwest Museum failed to negotiate a successful partnership with the financially flush Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, which could have provided an unprecedented national model for enlightened Indian cultural philanthropy. Instead, the Southwest is headed for merger with the cash-rich, art-poor Autry Museum.

“Massacre of the Innocents.” The world’s richest art museum finally hit the wall when the J. Paul Getty Museum failed to acquire the most important Old Master painting to come up at auction since the 1980s -- Peter Paul Rubens’ “Massacre of the Innocents” (circa 1610). Party’s over.

Old Masters. There was a bumper crop of absorbing Old Master shows around town: at LACMA, Bartolome Esteban Murillo’s Spanish Catholic devotional paintings; at the Getty, Pieter Saenredam’s luminous paintings of Dutch church interiors and Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s emotionally overwrought French drawings; and, at the Huntington, a survey of British painting in American museums and George Romney’s aristocratic British portraits, which are some of art’s first luxury consumer goods.

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Disappointment

“Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett 2000,” which opened last month at LACMA and remains through Feb. 17, is not a train wreck of a show. It’s too dull and ham-fisted for that. What makes it the worst pile of the year is its context -- an art museum only too eager to showcase a mediocre New Yorker and an amateur-hour Hollywood celebrity, while barely giving the time of day to the immense quantity of authentic artistic talent in L.A.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.