CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Museum at Last

When the trustees of the Pasadena Art Museum, led by Harold Jurgensen, promoted Hopps from curator to director in 1964, they lost the best of him. Hopps was most effective as an artists’ liaison, able and willing to bring the latest developments into view at the museum. As director, he had less time to organize shows, so he hired as curator James T. Demetrion, who had been at UCLA with him and was teaching art history at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Like Hopps, Demetrion had had no previous museum experience. In fact, lack of experience had become something of a qualification for new hires at the museum. Energetic charm made do in the absence of a conventional bureaucracy. When photographer Jerry McMillan was hired to work on catalogs and other publications for the museum, Hopps handed him a set of keys so that he could work whenever it suited him.

Hopps organized a few shows, including a survey of Alexei Jawlensky, drawn from the Galka Scheyer collection, and he imported the Guggenheim’s Kandinsky retrospective and MoMA’s Schwitters retrospective, to which pieces were loaned by painter and photographer Kate Steinitz, who had met the artist in 1918 in their mutual hometown of Hannover, Germany. These were big commitments yet, as director, his primary role was to raise funds and build the permanent collection.

To that end, Hopps arranged exhibitions of work owned by trustees and museum supporters: Contemporary Selections from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan Collection, May 25 to June 27, 1965; Contemporary Selections from the Edwin Janss Collection, July 20 to September 5, 1965; Contemporary Paintings Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Weisman, November 25 to January 9, 1965; and another Contemporary Selections from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan Collection, February 25 to March 3, 1966.

Hopps had advised all of these collectors on their choices, both recommending artists and sometimes recommending specific works. The museum also showed the collection of Ed Janss’s brother, William Janss, a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Art, who owned works by Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning, from January 26 to February 28, 1965. Did he hope that works from these collections would be donated to the museum to build a permanent collection? No doubt.

“I did the gallery work because the art that the California artists and I wanted to look at, we couldn’t see in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, early 1960s,” he said later.1 Hopps brought that outlook to the museum, hoping to endow Los Angeles with works by the Abstract Expressionists who had been his early heroes and the color-field painters, as well as the already valuable art of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

One reason that the tiny Pasadena Art Museum attracted so much attention for its inventive, if modest, exhibitions was that the city of Los Angeles did not have a museum devoted exclusively to art, let alone modern art. The Getty collections were housed in the oil tycoon’s former residence on a bluff in Malibu. The university galleries did not have permanent collections. The Huntington had exceptional British paintings and decorative arts—as well as a library and gardens—but little interest in art of the twentieth century.

The provincial nature of Los Angeles, so beneficial to the originality of its young artists, had long been a problem for its few cultural institutions. The L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art, a beaux-arts behemoth, was erected south of the downtown district near the University of Southern California in 1913. The program of traveling art exhibitions tended to be conservative and the galleries were given over regularly to groups such as the California Watercolor Society. Upon entering the rotunda with its stained-glass dome, one walked past the dinosaurs and dioramas to reach the art. This discouraged one group of Japanese curators from loaning Buddhist art since it could not be shown in proximity to dead animals.

Nonetheless, the collections grew through the largesse of Los Angeles’s swelling ranks of wealthy individuals. William Preston Harrison donated fine nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American paintings. German-born William Valentiner had been a curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a founder of Art in America magazine, and director of the Detroit Art Institute when he was hired in 1946 as codirector of the L.A. County Museum. Thanks to his convincing personality, publisher William Randolph Hearst contributed a warehouse of decorative arts, Renaissance sculptures and tapestries, and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities. Crowded into small galleries and overflowing the storage areas, these collections were the reason that the city needed a new general art museum to be modeled after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Valentiner laid the groundwork for a museum where visitors would not have to walk around T. rex to see the Renaissance paintings, but before he could start in earnest, he left to become director of the first J. Paul Getty Museum, still in the tycoon’s house, but with the goal of building an appropriate structure for collections of antiquities and decorative arts. Valentiner’s successor was Richard Fargo Brown, grandson of William George Fargo, who had cofounded Wells, Fargo and Company. With a doctorate in art history from Harvard University, Brown pursued the plan to build a separate art museum. He appealed to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and wealthy individuals. In 1961, after Brown was made museum director, the county donated seven acres of land along the Miracle Mile, a wide stretch of Wilshire Boulevard lined with department stores such as Ohrbach’s and the May Company. Alas, the parcel also harbored the infamous La Brea tar pits. Before construction could begin, archaeologists had to inspect the excavation for fossils and bones. Engineers then covered the tar with a three-foot-thick, two-hundred-foot-long floating slab of concrete that led Time to refer to the new museum as the “temple on the tar pits.”

In the late 1950s, the feeling that Los Angeles was a city that had finally come of age and required cultural institutions to enhance her new stature was felt among its most prominent citizens, most significantly Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. (Their son Otis Chandler also became publisher.) She undertook an intensive campaign of raising funds to build a permanent hall for the L.A. Philharmonic. Thanks to her $19 million, land donated by the county, and $13.7 million in bonds guaranteed by the county, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion became the crown jewel of the downtown Music Center, a cultural shopping mall designed by Welton Becket with pavilions dedicated to dance, theater, and orchestral events. It opened in 1964 largely due to her ability to raise funds from friends in her own circle of the established wealthy living around Pasadena and Hancock Park, yet she also tapped the new-money people from Hollywood and the Jewish community on the west side.

A similar strategy was required for LACMA. As an outsider, Brown was finding it difficult to raise funds from the city’s established communities, and he appealed to those who had new wealth and social aspirations. Norton Simon had spent millions earned by his Hunt Foods conglomerate to compile a diverse art collection ranging from Tiepolo to Degas; Edward W. Carter helmed the Broadway-Hale department stores and collected quality seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes and landscape paintings. Though neither collector had been educated in the realm of fine art, they had proved dedicated in their connoisseurship and had built exceptional collections. Their involvement in the capital campaign proved successful. When the museum opened, Peter Bart hailed it in the New York Times as “an alliance of California’s ‘old families’ with the ‘new tycoons’ of the post war boom.”2

Choosing an architect was the first battle of the titans. Brown suggested the brilliant Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Howard Ahmanson, who had commissioned artist Millard Sheets to design forty of his Home Savings and Loan buildings and create mosaic murals for their facades, suggested that Sheets should design the museum. Brown was outraged but, as Ahmanson’s donation was major, his opinion had to be considered. As a compromise, Los Angeles architect William L. Pereira was given the job. Simon was a key vote, and two years before, he had commissioned Pereira to build a library and art gallery for the city of Fullerton, where Hunt Foods and Industries was located.

Pereira was known for the neoclassical gloss he used to lighten the rigors of late modern architecture, such as his design for CBS’s Television City. He came up with a plan similar to that of the Music Center in Los Angeles or, for that matter, Lincoln Center in New York. Built for $11.5 million, three separate pavilions appeared to float on a plaza with reflecting pools and fountains. (According to Pereira’s widow, Bronya Galef, the architect installed the water element to emphasize a separation between the pavilions and their donors, who were arguing constantly with one another.) Each pavilion bore the name of a primary donor: Howard Ahmanson; Leo S. Bing, the late husband of donor Anna Bing; and Barton Lytton, a brusque personality who had built a savings and loan empire. When his banks collapsed in 1965, Lytton could not fulfill his pledge and his name was replaced by that of oil magnate Armand Hammer and his wife Frances. (Lytton opened his own gallery called Lytton Center of Visual Arts in the lobby of one of his bank buildings on Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights, across from Schwabs. Director Josine Ianco-Starrels, daughter of Dadaist Marcel Ianco, showed the work of a great number of contemporary artists. In 1977, Lytton’s daughter, Timothea Stewart, opened a gallery of her own at 669 North La Cienega Boulevard, where the Nelson and Mizuno galleries had been located.)

Only a small plaque at LACMA acknowledged Norton Simon, whose collection of one hundred paintings of extraordinarily high quality, many acquired when he bought the entire inventory of the late art dealer Lord Joseph Duveen, was on loan to the galleries in the Ahmanson Building. Simon disapproved of the self-promotional nature of these “naming opportunities” and, desirous of control, was frustrated by the attitudes of his fellow trustees. In 1971, he resigned from the board and began looking for a new home for his collection.

From the outset, these rich, opinionated, self-made men sought to run LACMA as if it were one of their companies. Brown, frustrated by the erosion of his own role, resigned before the building was completed to accept a position as director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Brown’s mild-mannered deputy director, Kenneth Donohue, was promoted into the job, and LACMA began consolidating its reputation as a museum with an inexperienced but meddlesome board of trustees.

Before Brown’s departure, however, he made the commitment of hiring a curator of modern art. Maurice Tuchman, a student of the brilliant art historian Meyer Schapiro and curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, had never been to California before flying in for his interview with Simon and another trustee, Taft Schreiber, then vice president of the Music Corporation of America. Tuchman was shocked by the rudeness of both men who, he said, “interrogated” him at Simon’s home. He was even more shocked to be offered the job, which he accepted and dominated for the next thirty years.

For many living in postwar Los Angeles, where dozens of screenwriters and others in the arts were blacklisted because of the work of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, modern art was associated with Communism, a notion kept alive by an active John Birch Society. William Brice’s painting of a mortar and pestle shown at the 1948 annual exhibition was said to symbolize a grinding device for the seeds of Communism. As late as 1954, when County Museum curator James Byrnes was offered a small Jackson Pollock painting for the collection at $500, trustees tried to block the purchase. They finally relented on the condition that he keep the painting in his office to be exhibited to the public only for educational purposes.3

LACMA’s first important modern art collection came as a gift in 1967 with the bequest from trustee David Bright of twenty-three major paintings by Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and others. The new LACMA, a general museum with collections of Asian and pre-Columbian art, as well as European and American painting, would embrace modern art but not without numerous challenges.

Like most transplants from New York, Tuchman felt a responsibility to alleviate what he considered a provincial attitude by exhibiting art from Manhattan. His debut exhibition, New York School: The First Generation, Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, was a critical and popular success. At the same time, Tuchman could scarcely avoid the simmering feelings of neglect among the younger Los Angeles artists. He responded with a number of shows: Peter Voulkos, the ceramic sculptor who had mentored Bengston, Mason, Price, di Suvero, and a host of others, had his work shown there in spring of 1965. Then the paintings of Irwin and the ceramics of Price were shown together. Others would follow; one of the most memorable was the retrospective of Ed Kienholz’s sculptures.