Creativity on a global stage

“You might call it ‘Globalization, Act 1,’ ” curator Keith Wilson said of the new attraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Japan Goes to the World’s Fairs: Japanese Art at the Great Expositions in Europe and the United States, 1867-1904” fills a large portion of the museum’s Japanese pavilion with historic objects designed to transform traditional Japanese crafts into Western-style fine art -- and persuade shoppers to buy Japanese.

You also might call the show “Japan Sells Out to the West” or “Art in the Service of Commerce.” But there’s no denying that late 19th and early 20th century world’s fairs were crucial venues for the international exchange of information about industry and the arts. The fairs had an enormous economic and cultural impact on nations that made the most of the opportunity to raise their profiles and push their products.

“When the fairs started, people didn’t travel,” Wilson said. “Unless you were a diplomat or a soldier or maybe a very rich businessperson, you didn’t go abroad. For many people, the fairs offered the first opportunity to see exotic things.”

The notion of going to a fair to be dazzled by technological breakthroughs and aesthetic wonders seems quaint today, when information flies on the Internet and international art fairs proliferate from Miami to Shanghai and Reykjavik. But a coincidence of exhibition timing indicates that old-fashioned world’s fairs have a legacy in the up-to-the-minute contemporary art world -- in the form of the Venice Biennale, which opens today.

While “Japan Goes to the World’s Fairs” offers insight into a fascinating aspect of art history, the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale carries on a tradition of presenting contemporary art under national banners. The Italian exhibition has changed a great deal over the years, but -- unlike younger counterparts that present an international melange of new art -- the 110-year-old Biennale has retained a core of national pavilions. Some countries have permanent buildings in a large garden; others rent spaces all over town.

“The national pavilions make the Venice Biennale different from other big international exhibitions,” said Donna De Salvo, an administrator and curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York who helped Linda Norden of Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum organize the show of Edward Ruscha’s work in the U.S. pavilion. “It’s the only one that is organized on that 19th century model. It’s a kind of world’s fair.”

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Fairs as world forums

World’s fairs got their start in 1851 at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London. Dreams of world peace and world trade -- and intense curiosity -- brought more than 6 million people to see exhibits from 28 nations in the immense Crystal Palace. Designed by architect Joseph Paxton, it was erected on a 26-acre site in Hyde Park. Not to be outdone, Paris staged a fair in 1855 with a separate building for fine arts. London hosted its second international fair in 1862, Paris in 1867. Then came many other cities.

The fairs introduced the Eiffel Tower, the Ferris wheel and components of the Statue of Liberty, along with false teeth, electric lighting, the hydraulic elevator, iced tea, nylon stockings and the rocking chair. Visitors also saw tour-de-force artworks such as those at LACMA, including a 3-foot woodcarving of a monkey, a landmark of Japanese 19th century art; a gilded porcelain incense burner in the form of an elephant; and a tortoiseshell platter decorated with a lacquer and ivory scene from Japanese literature.

European artists also used fairs as forums for their ideas. At the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, French architect Le Corbusier unveiled his “Machine for Living,” a model residence intended to prove that standardized design could produce functional and appealing environments. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dali created his “Dream of Venus,” a cave-like emulation of an underwater hideaway adorned with erotic imagery and female bathers milking a cow.

“The first Japanese involvement in the fairs was in 1873 in Vienna,” Wilson said. And they seized the moment with remarkable energy and determination. “The Japanese story is special because they were emerging from the Edo period and opening up to the West at exactly the same time as the exposition era,” he said. “Japan promoted itself at the fairs to an astonishingly successful degree, essentially within the space of two decades.

“In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Japan was the first non-Western nation admitted to the fine arts pavilion. Also at Chicago, Japan won 10 times the number of prizes and trophies and awards of China and Korea combined. The Japanese exhibits were huge. In Philadelphia, in 1876, they were the third-largest participant, behind the United States and Britain. Just in terms of numbers, Japan was taking advantage of fairs like no one else.” During the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japan participated in 19 international fairs and organized five domestic ones to prepare for large events in other countries.

“The fairs had a very deep national impact,” Wilson said. “There was the sense that sending historical trophies or traditional crafts was not going to succeed in capturing the kind of attention and commercial potential that the fairs promised. So the government was deeply involved in reorganizing the Japanese craft industry and encouraging artists and artisans to redefine Japanese art in a way that would make it more attractive to a foreign audience.”

The Los Angeles exhibition grew out of a historical survey of fairs that traveled in Japan over the past year. LACMA organized the new edition with the Tokyo National Museum; the Japan Assn. for the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi prefecture, which runs through Sept. 25; and Japanese corporate support. The Osaka Municipal Museum of Art and the Nagoya City Museum, which helped organize the earlier show, provided curatorial assistance. Most of the 146 objects on view at LACMA are from the collections of the Tokyo museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

“What you see when you go through our show,” Wilson said, “is a sea change from what was shown in Vienna in 1873, which was predominantly ceramics and lacquers and enormous Victorian-style amalgams of what Japan thought was Western taste. By Chicago, you get cloisonne enamel, lacquer, porcelain, all sorts of media being used to create flat, framed panels that are extremely painting-like. There’s a radical aesthetic shift.

“The goal had always been to get out of the decorative arts hall or the industrial arts hall and into the fine arts hall,” he said. “That’s why this triumph in Chicago in 1893 was so big for the Japanese. They had finally made it beside France, Italy, the U.S. and Holland. They were considered an artistic culture.”

Nonetheless, the fairs were commercial enterprises, Wilson said. “The point was to develop markets and sell things -- sell cultures.”

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The Biennale phenomenon

The Venice Biennale was conceived in 1893 as a biennial exhibition of Italian art, to be inaugurated the following year. When it finally materialized, in 1895, the emphasis was on Italy, but there was a section for foreign artists.

Subsequently switching to even-numbered years and back again, with breaks for wars, the event gradually acquired a more international flavor. Belgium opened its pavilion in 1907, followed by Hungary, Germany and Britain in 1909, France in 1912 and Russia in 1914. The U.S. pavilion was built in 1930. China opens its official showcase this year.

In the early days of the Biennale, Italian artists received most of the honors. Francesco Paolo Michetti -- whose 1877 self-portrait is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum -- won first prize at the inaugural exhibition in Venice for his painting “Daughter of Iorio,” now installed at the Governor’s Palace in Pescara, Italy. Michetti followed up on his success with a show of paintings at the 1900 world’s fair in Paris, known as the Exposition Universelle, but he was so disappointed by the response that he gave up painting and went into seclusion.

Many other artists have attracted favorable attention at the Venice Biennale, only to fade into obscurity. But the history of the event is sprinkled with famous names as well. Amedeo Modigliani was given a posthumous retrospective at the Biennale in 1922, two years after his death. A painting by Pablo Picasso was removed from the 1910 edition by an Italian official who deemed the work too shocking, but the Spanish artist was honored with a retrospective in 1948, when the Biennales resumed after World War II. Chinese artists made their first major appearance in 1999, when Cai Guo-Qiang garnered the top honor for “Venice’s Rent Collection Courtyard,” his provocative installation of 50 life-size clay figures in an environment that reeked of human degradation and exploitation.

American artists gained a much larger presence with the rise of the New York art scene. Alfred H. Barr Jr., a highly influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art, helped to organize the 1950 exhibition for the U.S. pavilion and focused on Abstract Expressionism. Along with works by Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he selected Willem de Kooning’s early masterpiece “Excavation,” now a prized possession of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alexander Calder became the first American to win the international prize for sculpture at the 1952 Biennale. Robert Rauschenberg followed suit in 1964, when he received the equivalent award for painting. His victory seemed to signal that Pop art had arrived on the international scene and that definitions of painting had broadened. Among the “combine paintings” in Rauschenberg’s show were “Coca-Cola Plan,” a rectangular wood wall piece with metallic wings mounted on its sides and three Coca-Cola bottles encased on a shelf; and “Man With White Shoes,” a towering, collaged structure that includes a pair of shoes and a stuffed chicken. Purchased by Italian collectors Giuseppe and Giovanna Panza di Biumo, both pieces are now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

MOCA also has a re-creation of Ruscha’s “Chocolate Room,” which created a sensation in its original form at the 1970 Biennale. The Los Angeles-based artist covered the walls of one gallery in the U.S. pavilion with 360 shingle-like sheets of chocolate-coated paper. Ants loved the show, as did two-legged visitors who couldn’t resist licking the art. This year, Ruscha is representing the U.S. at Venice with a more conventional show of paintings.

The Biennale has grown enormously with the addition of large international shows and temporary installations. It also has lots of competition in Documenta, a prestigious exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and many other contemporary art spectacles. But the Venice Biennale still has a particular cachet.

“It has a singular place in terms of these fairs, in the same way that MoMA has, in terms of Modernism,” said Paul Schimmel, chief curator at MOCA. “The Venice Biennale remains the first, the biggest, the best. More important is who goes there. And everybody goes there. Documenta may be more influential; it is certainly more coherent. But nothing brings out the art world like Venice. It’s a spectacular place to go. The national pavilions are part of it, but so are the other exhibitions. And of course everyone has to go to the Accademia,” he said, referring to Venice’s preeminent art museum. “It’s that context that makes it really important.”

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‘Japan Goes to the World’s Fairs’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.,

Los Angeles

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Ends: Oct. 10

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org