On the Modern trail

THE Getty is going Modern -- for better and for worse.

On the ledger’s “better” side -- by a longshot -- is Tuesday’s opening of the Getty Museum’s handsome new Center for Photographs. The 7,000-square-foot space on the West Pavilion’s terrace level finally offers a showplace commensurate to the stature of the photographs collection, the nation’s largest and arguably most important. No more hiding its light under a bushel.

The debut is celebrated with a large, compelling show drawn from a local collection, most of it a gift to the museum. And it coincides with a second effort -- a lovely, tightly focused painting exhibition -- housed in the modest former galleries for photographs.

The old photo galleries feature eight landscapes by the mystical Romantic genius Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), paintings lent from a museum in Dresden, Germany. Gerhard Richter, the celebrated contemporary painter who studied in Dresden when that city languished behind the Iron Curtain, chose a bold suite of recent abstractions to show alongside Friedrich’s moody works. Friedrich died at the moment photography was invented; Richter grapples with painting in a world awash with photographs.

If the Getty Museum is getting its foray into Modern and contemporary art mostly right, its parent Getty Trust, alas, is making a hash of it. The dissonance is striking.

Before we get to the bad news, let’s first look at the inviting Center for Photographs.

“Where We Live: Photographs of America From the Berman Collection” is a fine inaugural show, organized by curators Judith Keller and Anne Lacoste. The entry’s title card is mocked up to resemble a movie marquee. Partly that alludes to collector Bruce Berman, a successful Hollywood movie producer, and his wife, Nancy. And partly it lends an appropriately elegiac aura of “The Last Picture Show” to the 166 works inside.

“Where We Live” is a chronicle of quotidian recent America as it slips into history. Small-town living rooms, trash-strewn urban lots, desert shacks just beyond the edge of L.A.’s massive sprawl, neon-lighted roadside restaurants, off-season Midwestern fairgrounds, forlorn suburban New Jersey -- the mood is always lyrical and often melancholy.

People are mostly incidental. Typical is Doug Dubois’ “Laundromat, Avella, Pennsylvania.” It shows a worn commercial washing machine, pointedly branded “American.” Taped to the front, a hand-lettered note says “out of order.” Dubois’ image encapsulates the Rust Belt decline of industrial manufacturing. But he does it casually, without drama, going for the thoughtful opposite of quick-hit tabloid urgency.

Most of these photographers work in series, which makes their pictorial selections into something that approximates a photo essay. The collectors, sifting through the options, become a bit like picture editors.

When people do turn up, as in Sheron Rupp’s picture of a primly dressed older woman walking through a garden of towering, fading sunflowers, passionate beauty merges with imminent, inevitable loss. Populated or not, the pictures by Rupp, Dubois and most of the two dozen other photographers turn on a similar recognition. Death makes beauty possible. Without it, what incentive would there be to notice?

Few of these photographers -- Robert Adams, William Christenberry, John Divola and a handful more -- are widely known. But all are clearly skilled. With the exception of 15 works by William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore, almost every picture was shot in the last 25 years. Color outnumbers black-and-white, 20 to 1.

The selections often evoke Walker Evans, updated via Robert Smithson ruminating on the industrial debris of Passaic, N.J. “Where We Live” plucks moments from the entropy of daily experience, both bleak and hopeful, where everything inevitably dissipates into chaotic homogeneity.

The show glistens, partly because of the high level of acuity the artists bring to bear on vernacular America. Yet the tone is also heightened by the demise of a certain aura around camera work.

Our universe is now digital, meaning photographic images can be made without a traditional camera. Lens-based pictures like these proliferate, but they are losing their singular, century-old authority. It is passing into history as surely as Jack D. Teemer Jr.’s industrial Cleveland is, or Camilo Jose Vergara’s Chicago storefronts transformed into neighborhood churches.

Outside the museum’s Center for Photographs, things go suddenly awry. Next to the entrance is a display of five Modern bronze sculptures by different artists, all depicting the female nude. Barbara Hepworth’s billowy 1968 “Figure for Landscape,” suggesting an upright, lacerated seed pod, is the best. As the only woman among the artists, she knew her subject from the inside.

Backed by stone walls, however, the sculpture has been cruelly sited. The holes Hepworth cut in the upright form are meant to allow green landscape in -- hence the title -- enfolding nature within a feminine form. But landscape is nowhere to be seen.

These works are from the Stark collection of Modern sculpture, which the Getty Trust acquired in April 2005. When trust President Barry Munitz was forced to resign 10 months later for misgovernance, the first thing his interim successor, Deborah Marrow, should have done was rescind the ill-conceived gift. Unfortunately she didn’t.

Fran and Ray Stark, the late Hollywood producer, intended their collection to go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he was a longtime trustee. The collection’s quality varies widely. But its 20th century range -- from the early Modernist idealism of Aristide Maillol to the late Post-Minimalism of Joel Shapiro and Peter Shelton -- made sense for LACMA, whose collections are encyclopedic.

Surrounding the Getty Museum, where the sculpture collection ends at 1900, the anomalous assembly is banal. You wonder, “Is this is the best the Getty can do?”

One big sticking point in the LACMA negotiation with Stark’s executor was the demand for a self-contained sculpture garden. That demand apparently evaporated in the heady Getty ether. The 28 works are being installed all over the campus, from the tram station at the foot of the hill to sites around the center’s various buildings above.

The trust expects to complete the sculpture installation by spring. More than a third are on view now. One recurrent problem is that much of the collection is domestically scaled. Roy Lichtenstein’s small statue of brushstrokes is fine for a backyard -- even a big one in Bel-Air, like Stark’s. But it wilts under the monumentality of the Getty’s hilltop complex.

Maillol’s hovering 1938 personification of “Air,” posthumously fabricated in 1962, is ironically made from heavier-than-air lead. A nearby sign warns, “Lead is a metal known by the State of California to cause reproductive harm.”

For a posthumous edition, which Maillol never laid hand or eyes on, this reproductive caution fairly bristles with unintended meaning.

Most egregiously, Fernand Leger’s brightly glazed ceramic “Walking Flower” -- a blown-up version of a fatuous 1951 tabletop sculpture -- has landed in the otherwise magnificent Irwin Garden. A corporate bauble, it exudes less charm than the potted plant adjacent.

The jokey theme of a strolling posy mars the garden, itself a sublime environmental sculpture by perceptual artist Robert Irwin.

At least the Stark sculptures can be moved. In 1999 the Getty Trust commissioned Martin Puryear’s monumental “That Profile,” four stories tall, for the tram arrival plaza. The sculptor, whose work will be the subject of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective next year, took that site into account.

Puryear is an American artist of African descent working in a sculptural idiom of European derivation. His marvelous open-framework sculpture fuses 15th century Nigerian and Italian motifs. A sleek, Ife-style head is set against blue sky and rolling green hills, in a manner derived from Florentine Renaissance portraiture.

Inexplicably -- and unbeknownst to the artist, according to a recent telephone conversation -- the Getty Trust is building an elevator tower next to “That Profile,” rising from a shuttle bus turnaround below the plaza. The stubby stone-and-glass tower obstructs a section of the essential landscape vista.

Puryear’s poetic sculpture is strong enough to stand up to this intrusive blot. But the elevator did not need to be built where it is. What’s sobering is that it apparently occurred to no one at the Getty Trust that an elevator tower might pose an aesthetic problem for the adjacent sculpture. Worse, no one thought to ask the artist.

Art institutions focused on the past commonly assume the only good artist is a dead artist. If the Getty is serious about going Modern, it’s going to need to change that attitude -- and fast.

chris.knight@latimes.com

*

‘Where We Live’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, closed Mondays.

Ends: Feb. 25

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300; www.getty.edu