The City of Angels used to be a place where culture feared to tread. But to day the traffic slowing down to neck-crane along Wilshire Boulevard is not looking for stars but admiring the shimmering complex of pavilions surrounded by a moatlike reflecting pool of vastly more substance and value than was ever to be seen in a DeMille superset. Only four months after the opening of its new Music Center, which packs pews each evening, the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens this week, making Los Angeles the artistic capital of the U.S. West.
The new museum, designed by William Pereira, is the largest built since Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery was completed in 1941, and just getting it into place requires a miracle of engineering. It is situated on the squishy soil of the La Brea Tar Pits, where saber-toothed tigers and Jack Benny’s jokes once prowled. In fact, getting the O.K. to excavate required inspection by a team of archaeologists. They found old bones, but fortunately these were plain chicken. “If they had been dinosaur,” says Museum Director Richard Brown, “we’d have taken four years longer to be here.”
Instead, only 6½ years after fundraising began, the $12 million museum floats on the tar like a battleship on a 600-ft. by 250-ft. concrete raft. Scraps of canvas make the ship sail. A fortnight ago, the museum’s chief art donor, California Entrepreneur Norton Simon, acquired Rembrandt’s Titus (TIME, March 26) for a staggering $2,234,400. Eventually it will go to the new museum—the brightest star in a firmament of fine art valued at some $35 million.
Housing the collection are three cipolin marble-tile pavilions that rest in a shallow sea of reflecting pools (which double as air-conditioning evaporation pans). As with almost every single room within the museum, each superstructure bears the name of its local art champion. The Leo S. Bing Center contains a 602-seat theater and a children’s studio.
A second structure for exhibitions was bankrolled by Savings and Loan Tycoon Bart Lytton. The permanent collection hangs in the last pavilion—four tiers of balconies around an 85-ft.-high interior court, which was due to the generosity of Financier Howard Ahmanson.
Magnificent Deduction. Launching and outfitting any new museum involves prodigious effort. The old county museum was an attic for archaeology and science as well as art. “It was a historical anomaly,” says Director Brown, “really a 16th century Wunderkammer, with everything but a unicorn’s horn and an ostrich egg.” Stutz Bearcats, dinosaur tails and mineral collections clamored for attention with the art works.
One day in 1957, Norton Simon startled museum trustees by offering matching funds for a separate art museum. Museum President Edward Carter, a shrewd retailer (Broadway-Hale Stores) as well as chairman of the University of California’s Board of Regents, set out to raise $4,500,000, and through his persuasion wound up with $12 million. At a white-tie extravaganza last week, Comedian Bob Hope called the museum “the most magnificent tax deduction I’ve ever seen.” He had a right to say so: he donated $125,000.
Outdoorsy Place. “We frankly can hardly wait to see the Renaissance stuff,” says Billy Al Bengston, one of Los Angeles’ pop artists. He is hardly alone. Although the doors will not officially open until this week, museum memberships (at $10 each) have been rolling in at the rate of 200 a day for months. Director Brown expects more than 2,000,000 visitors in the first year, and one aide fears that it might reach 4,000,000.
What the visitors will find should gladden their eyes and their metatarsal arches. Before designing the building, Architect Pereira examined the plan of every known museum, conducted an exhaustive questionnaire of museumgoers, resolved to cope with their pet peeves and hates. To beat museum fatigue, the floors are carpeted wall-to-wall; elevators spare staircase schlepping; Mies and Eames chairs beckon visitors everywhere. To defeat the claustrophobia resulting from endless galleries, there is plenty of glass and natural light. “We did not want it to be a forbidding place, full of cul-de-sacs, but a pleasant, outdoorsy place,” Pereira explains. “And anyone who grows weary of marching around merely steps to one of the plazas. There he can contemplate the statues, pools and acres of parkland.”
Hello to the Girls. No one environment is right for all the centuries, it was decided, and there is no bare white plaster anywhere in the galleries. Instead, moderns hang against natural-colored monk’s cloth, and old masters are shown against lustrous shades of velvet. Despite elegant walls, Brown and his staff of nine curators have chosen not to impress by clutter: a small but prize array of impressionists and postimpressionists, including a magnificent Cézanne still life that seems to tilt a plate of cherries into the viewer’s mouth, is brought together to demonstrate one of the museum’s strengths. Great Renaissance paintings, still in short supply despite loans of Botticellis, Van Dycks, and an individual Bellini, Giorgione and Canaletto from the Norton Simon Foundation, share space with Andrea di Orcagna’s incomparable trecento marbles of musicians with musette, timbrel and zither, like pearly leprechauns playing away the centuries.
Nor are all delights indoors. The plaza already boasts sculptures by Henry Moore, Renoir, and a welded stainless steel abstraction by Germany’s Norbert Kricke. Astraddle one reflecting pool is a trio of Alexander Calder stabile-mobiles, whose balancing paddles are propelled sporadically by water jets. The U.S. sculptor’s metal bathers were commissioned by the museum’s Art Museum Council, an active volunteer group of 200 ladies. They are kiddingly called “the Culturettes.” In tribute, Calder topped his work with two waving black disks, like Mickey Mouse ears, and titled it Hello Girls.
Ice Cream & Corn. Presiding over all this fun and fanfare is Richard Fargo Brown, at 48 one of the younger major U.S. museum directors, and a man who, in a young city that thrives on cultural imbroglios, thrives on his wit and wisdom. A jocular scholar who is apt to bump into trustees with a chocolate ice cream cone in his hand, Brown is an artist’s son and a Bucknell University scholarship student (he was a four-letter man in high school) who got an M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard, then perfected his taste with five years as a research scholar at Manhattan’s Frick Collection. There, he recalls, “I could feel myself growing the way a man says he can hear the corn growing in an Iowa field.” When older colleagues kept warning him that Los Angeles was a lost cause culturally, he grew more interested in the challenge. He came to Los Angeles in 1954 as a junior curator, and in 1961 was made director.
The need for a new museum was all too apparent. Not only was Los Angeles moving from third to second position in population, but the best art collected in the area was going elsewhere for lack of a proper home: in 1951 the Arensberg Collection of French impressionists had departed for Philadelphia, in 1957 the old Los Angeles County Museum lost out, by $500,000, when the Edward G. Robinson collection went to Stavros Niarchos for $3,000,000. More recently, Avery Brundage’s Oriental treasures have gone to San Francisco.
Roman Candle Shows. The new museum will not only put a stop to the drain, Brown is convinced, but also prove a magnet in its own right. Says he: “We cannot rival the Metropolitan in the Met’s terms now. No one is taking whole carloads of treasures out of Egypt any more. But our museum can look to the Orient and to Latin American art easier and quicker just because of geography.” He intends building on the present splendors to produce a top-grade total museum. “Doing it becomes an obligation,” says he. “The new museum will become what all truly great museums are: an instrument with which a community can set increasingly high standards for its citizens.”
To fill their large rotating exhibition space, Brown has whipped up a schedule for the remainder of 1965 that crackles like a roman candle. And as the new museum opened to the public, there was already talk that it was obsolescent. Actually, it is more than talk; the building was constructed with $200,000 worth of extra foundations for new wings. According to Brown, it will not be long before the remainder of those dinosaur bones in the La Brea Tar Pits are covered with a newer, more elegant layer of civilization.
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