A Coming-Out of Modern Art in New Home

It has been a long wait for the couple necking in the “Back Seat Dodge ’38.”

Twenty years ago when the lovers made their first appearance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the county Board of Supervisors called the artwork by Edward Kienholz scandalous and demanded its removal. In the display, a man, constructed of chicken wire, stretched across a woman lying in the back seat. Her lingerie was flung on the car’s hood and beer bottles were scattered about.

A compromise, however, was struck back then to keep the car, recalled Stephanie Barron, the museum’s curator of 20th-Century art. When children walked by, the door of the bright blue Dodge was shut.

But that was the last time the car was seen in public until the museum opened its new home for modern art, the Robert O. Anderson Building.

After a prelude of private parties, Sunday was the first day the general public was invited to the airy new setting to see the museum show off modern artwork, which will be permanently displayed in the building’s second and third stories. The disparate collection ranged from David Hockney’s brilliantly colored mural of Mulholland Drive to Andy Warhol’s “Kellogg’s Cornflake Boxes” to Cubist paintings by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

Door Stays Open

And this time, the door of the Dodge, which was attracting a lot of attention Sunday, stayed open. “It has a patina of respectability now,” Barron observed.

By the time the doors closed Sunday evening, more than 3,000 people had visited the museum. The off-the-cuff reviews given were decidedly good from the little boy mesmerized by a six-foot comb leaning in a corner to the elderly couple marveling at the Matisse cutouts, to the New York architect who said the Post-Modern building made the recent addition to the National Gallery in Washington look, in comparison, like a “bus terminal.”

“I think it’s really a coming-out of art to Los Angeles,” said Sharon Brown, a Burbank resident, who has been haunting museums since her parents took her as a little girl to see stuffed animals at Exposition Park in 1948. “We’ve always been considered kind of backward. People in New York turn their noses up at us.”

Still others said it made them even more excited about the long-awaited opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new downtown home.

For those who attended, the experience was like a Rorschach test of ink blots. No one saw the same thing.

Perhaps nowhere was that demonstrated better than at the two entrances of a dazzling mirrored structure called the Corridor by artist Lucas Samaras. Anyone walking into the Corridor’s short tunnel was duplicated dozens of times.

“I feel it’s different dimensions of my soul,” said Orlando Amaya, a 31-year-old Bible salesman, after he walked barefoot through the mirrored box. “When I took the trip, I saw my soul and the different dimensions of my life.”

Reaction of Others

Others said the work reminded them of infinity, or represented a visible echo. Still others treated it more as a carnival exhibit.

“Step into the clone machine,” urged a security guard to the bashful standing on the perimeters. “It’s called the fun house,” she told others.

No one, however, was laughing at the mural donated by comedian Steve Martin, a longtime museum trustee who also had a gallery named after him in the new building. “Acid Story,” painted by Neil Jenney, shows a small section of two almost naked trees and is meant to illustrate the damage done when technology encroaches upon nature.

Some of the other pieces teased the mind. On the second floor, devoted to art of the last three decades, one of the most popular murals seemed to be a strange rendition of downtown Los Angeles. A green shadow appeared to be cast over the entire city and something seemed seriously wrong.

One by one, patrons were delighted when they guessed the secret of the painting. All they needed to do was spot the schools of fish and the algae on the Bonaventure Hotel.

Title Tells All

The title of the 1979 painting by Terry Schoonhoven also gave it away: “Downtown Los Angeles Underwater.”

Another puzzler was a photo emulsion of a man in short sleeves standing in front of a palm tree and a typical Los Angeles tract home. The picture, by John Baldessari, bore this message: “Wrong.”

William Broderius, surrounded by his family, tried in vain to understand the artwork.

“I look at this and it says wrong. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong.”

At every modern art museum though there are the detractors who grouse about the merits of modern art. One of those people on Sunday was Gene Christianson, a building contractor, who had just walked past a set of giant billiard balls and was heading toward a can of Spam rocketing across a paint-splattered canvas.

“Who would want to make a monument out of billiard balls?” Christianson asked.

Then he confided, “I’d rather look at a Van Dyck.”