Turning the Clock Back to “Pacific Standard Time”

The Survey of L.A.’s Postwar Art Spans the Forgotten Decades

A decade ago, a covey of intrepid art detectives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles began interviewing aging artists who worked in the city since the 1940s. They wanted their oral histories before they were gone. One thing led to the next, of course. This month the Getty, along with most of Southern California’s art establishment, opened a $10 million region-wide exhibition recalling what those artists accomplished, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980.”

            On a hilltop in north L.A., overlooking the Pacific, the Getty Museum held a gala opening on Oct. 2. And it is worth noting that in attendance was the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the metropolis that once overshadowed Los Angeles; in the glare of Manhattan, L.A. struggled to gain attention for its modern art.
            The glare is mutual now. Los Angeles now ranks as the second hub of America’s contemporary art world. That status had brought amnesia about the hardscrabble past. So through March, the regional art event hopes to take people back in time to the two generations of innovative artists after World War II. Their work fills 60 shows at museums, university galleries, and art spaces from L.A. to San Diego.
            The cooperation of this many art venues, and the funding by Getty, may be unprecedented in the country. One model the Los Angeles project has kept in mind is the 1984 Summer Olympics, which included a well-attended Arts Festival. That even was mostly and music and performance, however. L.A. culture leaders will soon find out if they can draw their public to a visual arts tableau that is as much scholarly as it is theatrical.
            For local history buffs, the official exhibition catalog and a series of insightful articles by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, have helped dispel the collective amnesia. Through the 1950s, “L.A. had no avant-garde because it had no garde—no mighty, monolithic artistic establishment ruling the city’s cultural life,” Knight says.
            As some of us native Californians know, moreover, California was essentially two states orbiting around San Francisco or Los Angeles. San Francisco was the risqué city. L.A. was conservative, a hub of rural migrants, business, freeways, stucco suburbs, hot rods, evangelicals, surfboards, and the aerospace industry. The kind of cheeky art galleries the operated openly in San Francisco got in trouble in 1950’s L.A., where they were likened to adult bookstores.
            That was only half of the story, however. Other kinds of art blossomed, and it was not just due to Hollywood (where movie stars had money to buy art and where Salvador

Dalí arrived to design an Alfred Hitchcock movie dream scene). Nor was it simply the Disney studios that fueled art as it produced such epic cartoons as “Fantasia" (194) and “Bambi” (1942).

            The modern impulse in art, Knight says, was “an unorthodox iconoclasm” that sprouted from California individualism, the cardinal trait of a young city with open spaces and high mobility. Open space produced some distinct L.A. looks. The open road, with its freeway-and-billboard aesthetic, a veritable world of signage, became models for L.A. painting and photos. To the east were the desert states, and from those high-vaulted skies young artists arrived in L.A. thinking about the light and space of their childhoods. Indeed, as the exhibition shows, “Light and Space” art was an L.A. contribution. It lit up gallery interiors and produced outdoor “earth art” that let the sun create the special effects.

            In one way or another, 1960s L.A. was about to have it all: enclaves for black and Chicano artists, and with the 1970s the art of feminists and the antiwar movements. As to painting, some Asian influence may have dropped into southern California as well, where the Japanese flat aesthetic arguably inspired early paintings now called hard-edge. If there was Abstract Expressionism, it was in wild clay-baked ceramics.
             In sunny California, sport and technology also made a difference. Its artists became known for mastering use of resin, plastic, fiberglass and colored lacquers, something first seen on hotrods, surfboards, and rocket design. When it was said that the “L.A. look” was airbrush slick, cool, and glamorous, it was not just the Hollywood spillover: it was mainly the colorfully lacquered paintings and minimalist sculptures.
            The detritus of city life and technology also made their mark in the rise of assemblage sculptures, and one is tempted to think that the mystique and ubiquity of  the Hollywood set must have borne some influence on this rise of shocking "tableau" art. The L.A. scene was dry kindling that still need a match, however, and that was struck by a New York City import: Andy Warhol, the future icon of Pop art. He rose to fame on his 1962 Campbell soup can show in L.A. As some view it, L.A. art was hitched to his rising star (until L.A. had its own momentum).
            Unlike the angst-drive Abstract Expressionists of New York, the L.A. artists never had a “dark side,” it has been said. They had their shy curmudgeon, however, in the city’s conceptual artist John Baldessari, now tall and very white haired. “I live here because L.A. is ugly,” he said at an exhibition panel. “If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art? . . . I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.”

Revisiting Vincent van Gogh, the Sane Martyr

New Biography Shows that Gunplay, Not Suicide, Led to His Death

Experts on the life of Vincent van Gogh have long been convinced that he was neither insane nor mentally poisoned by his oil paints. His difficult personality, and apparent death wish, were probably related to his having temporal lobe epilepsy, which haunted him since childhood.

              Victims of this form of epilepsy do not have seizures, but they do black out. Worst of all, they feel the “electric storm in the brain” coming on before it takes place. This fills their lives with constant anxiety. To others, it produces a personality that is entirely inexplicable: one that looks crazy.
              This can explain why, for the 37 years of his life, Van Gogh had erratic behavior, was considered insane by his family, had no close friends, and would maim himself, as illustrated by the cut he inflicted on his ear. Despite all this, he painted a thousand brilliant works.
              This week on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” two authors of a new biography of Van Gogh argued that not only was he perfectly sane, but his death was not a suicide. The traditional story has been that Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field. He borrowed a pistol from the innkeeper to scare away crows, which bothered him as he painted. A ten year investigation into the actual events of those fateful days is now telling a different story. With their 976-page book, Van Gogh: The Life, authors Steve Naifeh and Greg Smith have stirred an electric storm in the art world.
              “What the evidence points to is that this incident [the shooting] took place not in the wheat fields, but in a farmyard,” Naifeh told Morely Shafer on “60 Minutes.” The incident involved two mischievous boys with a gun. “And that it was either an accident or a deliberate act.”
              The two boys, who liked to play cowboys, were known for taunting the odd Van Gogh around the vacation town of Auvers. On this particular day they may have had a pistol (since American cowboys were all the rage in Paris at the time). “Was it playing cowboy in some way that went awry?” Naifeh asked. Or, “Was it teasing with the gun with Vincent lunging out?” Whatever the case, this scenario can explain two things from the police and medical reports. When the police asked Van Gogh if he had tried to commit suicide, he said two things: “Yes, I believe so,” and then added, “Don’t accuse anyone else.” In turn, the doctor’s medical report noted that Van Gogh's wound suggest a gun aimed at an odd angle some distance from the flesh.
              Naifeh and Smith have done their homework. Having visited the French town of Auvers, they found accounts of one resident recalling a gun shot that day in the neighborhood a half mile from the inn where Van Gogh lived. According to the previous account—told now for 121 years—Van Gogh had struggle back from the wheat fields, over rough terrain, for more than a mile with his wound. The half-mile of flat streets better explains how he made it back to the inn, where he died 30 hours later.
              There is also a modern-day account of a wealthy Parisian businessman who, a year before he died, told of how he had borrowed a pistol from the innkeeper’s daughter, but that Van Gogh had stolen it later. In any case, the businessman said, he and his friend—the two boys—had left Auvers for Paris before Van Gogh was shot. So a new picture comes into focus, thanks to what amounts to a CSI Van Gogh: he was shot by the youths, but did not want to get them in trouble.
              “A couple of kids had shot Vincent van Gogh and he decided to basically protect them and accept this as the way to die,” Naifeh said. “These kids had basically done him the favor of shooting him.”
              “So he was covering up his own murder?” Safer asked.
              “Covering up his own murder,” Naifeh agreed.
              The new understanding of Van Gogh’s death is meticulously reconstructed, but finally based on circumstantial evidence. It could well be true. It could also help us better understand Van Gogh the painter.
              First of all, Van Gogh’s approach to painting was not driven by madness or physical disability. He had discovered a personal aesthetic and had mastered it through oil paint, drawing, and colors. In his letters, he spoke of giving up the dark and light contrast of the painting in his native Holland for the brightness of the French Impressionists. He was proud that he could do a painting a day, and once completed a canvas in 45 minutes. He loved portraits: it was his chance to spend time with individuals, since finding lasting friends proved difficult. His “Wheatfield with Crows” (1890) was therefore no his last painting (with its ominous crows, harbingers of death). He actually painted several beautiful and cheerful works before the actual day of the shooting.
              As a second matter, Van Gogh, who once had tried to be a minister like his father, believed that suicide was wrong. Nevertheless, with his tortuous epilepsy and maladjusted life, he might have wished to die, but not by his own hand. If the taunting boys shot him, they did him a favor. He did not turn them in.
              “The miracle is that this alienated person ended up becoming the most popular artist of all time,” Naifeh said. “So he achieved exactly what he set out to achieve. I mean . . . [his paintings] provide consolation for humanity.”

Cultural Icons: Warhol Celebrated, Steve Jobs Mourned

The Andy Warhol Exhibits in D.C. Make Their Own “Headlines”

WASHINGTON D.C.—“Warhol Bombs!” “Warhol Sensational!”
            Depending on your point of view, either headline might serve as an accurate report on the two new Andy Warhol exhibitions on the National Mall. In one, the National Gallery of Art breaks fresh ground by looking at 80 works in which Warhol, a founder of Pop art, replicated in drawings and prints the front pages of tabloids with their bold headlines.
            Across the Mall, the Hirshhorn Museum (the Smithsonian’s contemporary art unit) arrays Warhol’s 450-foot “painting” titled “Shadows.” It is made up of 102 multi-colored panels, each a large-sized canvas that Warhol painted and silk-screened. On the Hirshhorn’s curved white wall, the canvases are lined up edge-to-edge, each one showing the same geometrical image that came from a shadow that Warhol had photographed. A Pop art rainbow comes to mind.
            The Warhol exhibit season in D.C., which runs through January, also features lectures and films. Much of that fare will be offered by people who were part of Warhol’s Factory, a studio-and-art-party scene he established in Manhattan. As the “Headlines” exhibit reminds us, Warhol died young. On Feb. 23, 1987 the New York Post tabloid blared: “Andy Warhol Dead at 58.” He was the “prince of pop art,” the Post said. He died during a routine hospital operation.
            Warhol first started to copy out newspaper fronts as pencil doodles in 1956. By the next decade he was taking photos of newspapers. Then, with a light projector, he traced out the photo images on paper or canvas and filled them in with pencil and paint. The result was rather unpolished. He eventually turned entirely to using photographic stencils on silkscreens, enabling him to mass produce high quality images of news pages. On small size canvases, Warhol nearly set out to silkscreen every page of the Oct. 24, 1983 issue of the New York Post. He also did newspaper fronts on canvases the size of an entire wall.
            Warhol’s “favorite subjects” were celebrity, death, and destruction, the exhibit explains. He did newspapers because they “represented another consumer product.” After all, consumer products—such as Brillo boxes and Campbell soup cans—were Warhol’s signature style in the art market. It was tedious work, but by keeping up a production line of silkscreen prints, Warhol became the unrivaled icon of contemporary art. His partisans will argue—as does the “Headlines” exhibition—that Warhol’s mechanical replication of mundane images “radically shifted the boundaries between vernacular and fine art.”
            He also broke the speed record for art production. His works were printed rather swiftly, using a warehouse-floor production line, though each piece had a bit of variation. The 102 virtually identical canvases lined up in the “Shadows” exhibit are a case in point. Today, there are so many Warhol works that curators and lawyers often must rule on which are “original.” An original Warhol—whatever that may mean—can fetch hundreds of thousand of dollars on the art market.
            The Warhol “Headlines” exhibition opened during the same weeks in which we heard of the death of another cultural icon, Steve Jobs. As the Oct. 6 New York Post bannered: “Steve Jobs Dead.” It may be hard to imagine two greater cultural icons than Warhol and Jobs. Each gave our modern-day visual culture a salient feature. Warhol turned ads, products, celebrity photos, and headlines into large, simple, colorful artworks. Think T-shirts and posters. Jobs framed our world in a new kind of widow: computer screens with icons and animation.
            Most of all, however, Warhol and Jobs were not shy about being masters of mass marketing. Warhol had no qualms about saying that “art” can indeed print money, and the more the merrier. Jobs built innovative corporations that made no bones about cornering markets.
            In today's world, culture is changed not by highly refined artworks, but by images and objects that lend to large-scale output. It may not seem fair: Warhol mass-produced scores of five-minutes-to-make silkscreen prints. Jobs punched out millions of iPods on Chinese factory lines. Fair or not, these are what have shaped contemporary American culture. In short, Warhol and Jobs are mass media friendly.
            The big difference, however, is that Warhol operated inside the art world. He mass produced things, but as “art,” each one retained a special status, what art historians have called the “aura.” Owning an aura-laden Warhol print is beyond the means of ordinary people. Some of these run into the millions of dollars at art auctions. The price of Apple computers and mobile devices start out high, but eventually come within the reach of just about everybody who wants one.
            Thirty years after Warhol’s death, we continue to celebrate him in the form of major retrospective exhibits. What about Steve Jobs thirty years hence? One day there may be an Apple Museum or a Jobs Foundation. However, in 2041 will Jobs be celebrated on the scale that we still celebrate Warhol? That seems unlikely.
            The world of contemporary art is unique. It thrives on celebrating its icons on a regular basis. The Warhol show travels next year to Frankfurt, Rome, and his own hometown museum in Pittsburgh. Andy Warhol will always give contemporary art a fresh set of headlines.

October Harvest: National Arts and Humanities Month

The Creativity Starts with a Presidential Proclamation, Ends with Halloween

In the spirit of October harvest time, this column will jump on the hay wagon, or more precisely the bandwagon, of our national arts culture. Halloween might seem to be the season's biggest artistic event, but those smiling Jack-o'-lanterns can be deceiving. In reality, this is National Arts and Humanities Month. President Obama has kicked it off with a proclamation:

“Millions of Americans earn a living in the arts and humanities, and the non-profit and for-profit arts industries are important parts of both our cultural heritage and our economy. . . .We must recognize the contributions of the arts and humanities not only by supporting the artists of today, but also by giving opportunities to the creative thinkers of tomorrow. Educators across our country are opening young minds, fostering innovation, and developing imaginations through arts education.”

            Although Halloween will produce millions upon millions of creative costumes, fuel the candy economy, and produce some striking art work at art schools—which often have Halloween spectacles—National Arts and Humanities Month takes in a far larger political vision.
            The Obama excerpt above, which focuses on art economics, was selected to be sent around the nation by our main arts lobby in Washington, Americans for the Arts. Its job is to keep a fire to the feet of Congress for arts funding. That is because, as even Obama suggests, arts produce jobs. They fuel the economy. October is also, in effect, the start of the one-year countdown for the great political event of 2012: the presidential election, the great quadrennial mood swing in America. The main issue will be jobs and economics.
            The proclamation by President Obama, who has held several impressive music and arts galas at the White House, addresses more than just “earning a living.” So this column ends with other proclamation highlights: the president’s comments on art and social change, arts education—and, again, the economy:
            “Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers are classic and recognizable portrayals of American life. A longtime advocate of tolerance, Rockwell was criticized by some for a painting now hanging steps from the Oval Office—The Problem We All Live With. Inspired by the story of Ruby Bridges, this painting depicts a young girl being escorted to her newly-integrated school by United States Marshals. Today, the portrait remains a symbol of our Nation’s struggle for racial equality.
            “Like Rockwell’s painting, art in all its forms often challenges us to consider new perspectives and to rethink how we see the world. This image still moves us with its simple poignancy, capturing a moment in American history that changed us forever. This is the power of the arts and humanities—they speak to our condition and affirm our desire for something more and something better. Great works of literature, theater, dance, fine art, and music reach us through a universal language that unites us regardless of background, gender, race, or creed. . . .
            “Educators across our country are opening young minds, fostering innovation, and developing imaginations through arts education. Through their work, they are empowering our Nation’s students with the ability to meet the challenges of a global marketplace. It is a well-rounded education for our children that will fuel our efforts to lead in a new economy where critical and creative thinking will be the keys to success.
            “Today, the arts and humanities continue to break social and political barriers. Throughout our history, American hopes and aspirations have been captured in the arts, from the songs of enslaved Americans yearning for freedom to the films that grace our screens today. This month, we celebrate the enlightenment and insight we have gained from the arts and humanities, and we recommit to supporting expression that challenges our assumptions, sparks our curiosity, and continues to drive us toward a more perfect union. . . .
            “I call upon the people of the United States to join together in observing this month with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs to celebrate the arts and the humanities in America.”
             —Barach Obama.

            On its Web site, Americans for the Arts lists more than 300 events already scheduled in most of the 50 states. The events cover just about everything: music, art tours, historical re-enactments, storytelling, photo exhibits, free museum days, talks on art, green art, queer art, ceramic fairs, Artober (for artists) and Archtober (for architects), and lots of local theater productions.
            The number of events is expected to grow as the month passes. They will not end with a whimper, either. On October 30 comes the “Bayou Jam Halloween Bash” in Slidell, Louisiana. By that point, the Jack-o'-lanterns will be smiling. On October 31, the last day of the month, comes Halloween, a national bandwagon that rolls art and economics into one.