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.”