Pacific Standard Time: A timeline

1945: Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller “Spellbound” opens, with memorable dream sequences by Salvador Dalí.

1946: Bassist and composer Charles Mingus, who grew up in Watts, records with his band the Stars of Swing. The recordings, now lost,anticipated the next decade’s influential West Coast jazz sound.

1946: Theodor Geisel, who writes children’s books under the pen name Dr. Seuss, moves to Hollywood to work for Warner Bros.

1947: Beginning of organized resistance to Modernism and abstraction in art as well as the beginning of “the painting witch hunt,” in the words of art historian Peter Plagens. “If screenwriters and college professors could be called on the patriotism carpet,” he writes in “Sunshine Muse,” a key history of West Coast art, “why not artists?”

1947: Cold War begins in response to formation of Eastern Bloc: Resulting expansion of U.S. defense budget creates aerospace boom in Southern California.

1950: Texas saxophonist Ornette Coleman arrives in Los Angeles as a member of a rhythm and blues band. After he is fired from the band, Coleman remains in L.A. for most of the decade, working at times as an elevator operator, and emerges as the leader of the jazz avant-garde.

1951: Modern art equated with Communist propaganda by Los Angeles City Council; public display is forbidden.

1953: Helen Lundeberg, an important and innovative Los Angeles artist who works with both geometric abstraction and landscape, has a one-woman show at Pasadena Art Institute.

1954: Los Angeles industrialist Norton Simon purchases his first artwork: two paintings from the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery inside the Ambassador Hotel. By the end of 1955, he had purchased 17 more works.

1955: Beat-influenced artist Wallace Berman publishes first issue of Semina, an idiosyncratic magazine of poetry and visual art.

1956: Driving a Ford along Route 66, Ed Ruscha arrives in Los Angeles from Oklahoma and begins one of the city’s great art careers.

1957: The Ferus Gallery, begun by eccentric curator Walter Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz, opens on La Cienega Boulevard.

1958: Business-minded Irving Blum takes over the Ferus co-ownership from Kienholz; he either saves the gallery’s finances or dulls its leading edge, depending on whom you ask.

1959: LACMA show, “Four Abstract Classicists,” of Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Fred Hammersley and John McLaughlin, geometrically minded artists later described as fathers of an L.A. school of “hard edge” painting.

1959: Heiress Virginia Dwan opens gallery in Westwood that will at times outstrip Ferus and any other for inventiveness and imagination.

1960: Important developments in Los Angeles modern architecture: Maverick “organic modernist” John Lautner designs flying-saucer-like Chemosphere House in Hollywood Hills. Julius Shulman photographs Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House in an arrangement of light, costume and hillside.

1960: Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles nominates Sen. John F. Kennedy for the presidency. Norman Mailer, writing about it for Esquire, calls Los Angeles “a kingdom of stucco … one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men.”

1960: June Wayne founds Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Among the first artists to work with Tamarind: Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis and Rufino Tamayo.

1961: Hawthorne band the Beach Boys begin recording their debut album, “Surfin’ Safari,” released the following year.

1962: Andy Warhol’s first show anywhere in the world takes place at Ferus Gallery; his Campbell’s Soup Cans paintings sell for $100 each.

1963: Walter Hopps, new director at Pasadena Art Museum, puts on Marcel Duchamp retrospective, an important portal for the influence of the French Dada artist on the West Coast.

1964: A young gay painter from Yorkshire, David Hockney, visits L.A. in part because of John Rechy’s novel “City of Night.” Meets writer Christopher Isherwood and creates swimming-pool paintings.

1964: Studio Watts begun by collection of L.A. jazz players, artists and poets; space offers classes in visual art, dance and acting as well as studio space for artists.

1965: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art moves from Exposition Park to larger quarters on Wilshire Boulevard, becoming the largest museum of its kind in the American West.

1965: White police officers in Watts pull over a young black driver; their conflict sparks a conflagration that will result in 34 deaths, more than a thousand injured and in excess of $40 million in damages.

1965: Nicholas Wilder opens his gallery, selling work by Bruce Nauman, John McCracken and David Hockney.

1966: Gemini G.E.L., a seminal lithography studio, opens. Associated at first with East Coast figures like Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg but later prints work by Ruscha, Hockney and John Altoon.

1966: Opening of Ed Kienholz retrospective at LACMA includes “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” and “Roxy’s,” the artist’s recollection of a Las Vegas bordello; the L.A. County Board of Supervisors denounces the show as “revolting and pornographic.”

1967: Artist brothers Alonzo and Dale Davis open Brockman Gallery in South Central Los Angeles, one of the city’s first black-owned galleries.

1968: Los Angeles band The Byrds releases “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” an unlikely turn toward country folk and traditional American music for the pioneers of psychedelia.

1968: Nation rocked by Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.

1969: The Pasadena Art Museum moves into a new Ladd + Kelsey-designed building on Colorado Boulevard. Though it was one of very few modern art strongholds south of San Francisco, the museum was hit with serious financial strain over the next few years.

1969: “Easy Rider,” directed by Ferus fellow traveler Dennis Hopper, opens, signaling a new sensibility in Hollywood.

1969: The Manson family murders occur in Benedict Canyon and environs; they become a symbol of the end of the ‘60s and of the dark side of the counterculture.

1970: Shy San Diego-area teacher and artist John Baldessari moves to Los Angeles. He will become an important force in Conceptual Art not only for his own work, but for his decades of teaching at CalArts and UCLA.

1970: In the Chicano Moratorim, 20,000 march down Whittier Boulevard in East L.A., protesting the Vietnam War..

1971: CalArts, which had grown out of the Chouinard Art Institute and had been funded by Walt Disney for a decade, moves to Valencia, becoming one of several influential and prestigious art schools in Southern California.

1971: LACMA’s Art and Technology show — which includes Christo, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol and other European and New York superstars — highlights a program the museum had been pursuing since 1967.

1972: Womanhouse, a politically minded exhibition space for women artists only, launched in a large Hollywood home by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro of CalArts’ feminist art program.

1972: A modern-day Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration is held in Los Angeles, instigated in part by California muralist Carlos Bueno. Key event in building of the Chicano movement and a return to traditional Latin American arts and culture.

1972: Helene Winer, director and curator of the Pomona College art gallery, is fired, bringing to an end several years of experimentation in minimalism, conceptual art, performance art and video.

1973: Tom Bradley elected Los Angeles’ first black mayor. He shapes the city and perceptions of it for the next 20 years.

1973: African American architect Paul R. Williams, who re-designed the Beverly Hills Hotel as well as new homes for Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Barbara Stanwyck, retires.

1974: Norton Simon takes over the struggling Pasadena Art Museum, moving his collection of European and Asian art into the Colorado Boulevard space.

1974: Opening of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Pacific Palisadesdesigned by Robert E. Langdon Jr. and Ernest C. Wilson Jr. in emulation of a first-century Roman villa.

1974: A touring art show called “West Coast ‘74: The Black Image” comes to Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and shows African American artists working largely outside the protest tradition.

1974: Orange County native and Whittier College alum Richard Nixon resigns the presidency of the United States on the eve of impeachment for his role in the Watergate scandal.

1975: Artists from Los Angeles and elsewhere in the state make up a third of the Whitney Biennial. It’s considered a recognition of California’s cultural flowering. Two years later, the Whitney would include work by Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Nauman, Chris Burden and others.

1975: A key show demonstrating the region’s leadership in video art, “Southland Video Anthology,” opens at the Long Beach Museum of Art and tours on the West Coast. Includes work by Allan Kaprow, Paul McCarthy, David Salle and others.

1976: “Concepts: Six Contemporary Asian Artists,” an exhibit at Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum, demonstrates the wide range of work produced by the state’s Asian American artists.

1976: California Gov. Jerry Brown closed the California Arts Commission, creating the California Arts Council. With a leadership including Noah Purifoy and other Southland artists, the council will emphasize grants and community-based projects.

1976: John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis and Greg Bryant and other artists in and around Watts launch Los Angeles’ first jazz festival, named for Watts Tower artist Simon Rodia and eventually encompassing a range of art forms.

1976: Art Center College of Design moves to its Craig Ellwood-designed Hillside Campus in Pasadena.

1977: The exhibit “Los Angeles in the Seventies” opens at the Fort Worth Art Museum and tours nationally. A wide range of media is represented, including work by artists Michael Asher and Judy Fiskin.

1977: California African American Museum chartered by the state of California. Will open in 1981 in a temporary space and in a permanent building in Exposition Park during the 1984 Olympics.

1979: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles is founded; fundraising and organization begin, though the museum in its early years occupied what is now the Geffen Contemporary — the Arata Isozaki building on Grand Avenue will not open for another seven years.

1980: “Los Angeles,” the debut album by the band X, is released, emphasizing a desperate, nihilistic sensibility different from the canyon-rock and introspective singer-songwriters who preceded them.

1980: Ronald Reagan elected the 40th president of the United States.