Lively lesson about L.A.’s 1940s scene

Who knew that Los Angeles had a hot art scene in the 1940s? Four walking, talking eminences grises with encyclopedic memories attracted a full house at “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Late Forties,” a recent panel discussion at the Getty Center.

In most accounts of the city’s art history, life began in 1957 with the founding of Ferus Gallery, a vanguard showcase on La Cienega Boulevard. But Tom Crow, director of the Getty Research Institute, invited artist Frederick Hammersley and veteran curator-administrators Henry Hopkins, Walter Hopps and James Byrnes to fill in the preceding chapter. For nearly two hours, they captivated their audience with facts and anecdotes about local shows, artists, critics, galleries and museums, not to mention a few scandals and run-ins with the law.

Byrnes had a trove of tales about his tenure as the first curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park. The capper: After much cajoling, he got permission to purchase Jackson Pollock’s 22-by-22-inch painting “No. 15,” for $400 (about $2,800 in today’s dollars) -- provided that he use it “for educational purposes” and keep it in his office, where it wouldn’t offend the trustees. Byrnes bought the painting but refused to follow the rules.

“I hung it on the second floor, where the trustees never went,” he said. Today, the painting is frequently on view at the art museum’s “new” home, LACMA, on Wilshire Boulevard, which opened in 1965.

-- Suzanne Muchnic