Museum Leaders to Get Eyeful of L.A. : Art: On its 25th anniversary, the Comite International Pour les Musees d’Art Moderne has bypassed New York to convene in Santa Monica.

For 24 years, the International Committee for Modern Art Museums has met annually throughout Europe. The group of museum directors and other leaders in the field of modern and contemporary art has convened in Amsterdam, Helsinki and Dubrovnik. Committee members have pondered museum issues in Lisbon, Dusseldorf, Paris and London. One year, they ventured across the Atlantic Ocean to Buenos Aires. But not once have they met in the United States, even though about 10% of the organization’s 275 members are Americans.

This year, as the committee marks its 25th birthday, the group will not only come to the United States, it will bypass New York and convene in Los Angeles. CIMAM (the acronym for Comite International Pour les Musees d’Art Moderne) will hold its 1990 conference today through next Saturday at Loew’s Hotel in Santa Monica. Participants will attend lecture sessions at the hotel and visit Southern California museums and collections.

Why are they finally coming here?

“Because I have nagged them for three years,” said Lyn Kienholz, director of the Los Angeles-based California/International Arts Foundation. “I was invited to join the organization about 6 1/2 years ago, and I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t met here.” Kienholz’s foundation, which organizes international art exchanges, is facilitating the conference with a committee of Southern California museum directors.

Kienholz has had close ties to the European art community for nearly three decades, but she said that her dealings with Europeans revealed a persistently disappointing perception of Los Angeles. “I kept hearing that nothing of interest happened in Los Angeles and that no good art was produced here,” she said.

The appointment of Pontus Hulten as the first director of Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art in 1980 turned the tide, Kienholz said.

Hulten, the founding director of Paris’ immensely popular Georges Pompidou Center, left MOCA in 1982, but the idea that Los Angeles was becoming an exciting art center had caught hold in Europe, she said. The notion gained substance when MOCA got its program rolling and opened its new building on Grand Avenue, the L.A. County Museum of Art built a new wing for modern and contemporary art, and the gallery scene boomed in Los Angeles and Santa Monica.

Conference participants who partake in all scheduled events will be busy visiting Watts Towers and a host of museums and collections, including an all-day trip to Santa Barbara and another to Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. Tonight’s inaugural event is the opening of the exhibition “Lee Miller: Photographer” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

CIMAM members will also attend lecture sessions on weighty topics. The opening program, on Monday morning, is dedicated to “Perspectives on the State of Culture at the End of the 20th Century.”

In Tuesday morning’s session on “Realities of the California Scene,” video artist Bill Viola will talk about California art and artists, art consultant Tamara Thomas will discuss corporate collections and Henry Hopkins, director of the Frederick Weisman Art Foundation, will speak about Southern California museums. Additionally, Thomas Hines will deliver a lecture, “Los Angeles Architecture: The Issue of Tradition in a 20th-Century City.”

A Thursday morning session on “Enlightened Sponsorship,” featuring speakers from Citicorp, the Rockefeller Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust, will introduce Europeans to American practices of private support for the arts. The final session, on Friday morning, will be a round-table discussion on “Present Day Developments” with curators and directors of private museums, galleries, foundations and study centers.

Following the conference, one group of participants will visit San Francisco and about 20 others will accompany Kienholz on a five-day trek through the Southwest.

Eighty-four CIMAM members have registered so far, the largest attendance in the organization’s history, Kienholz said. About half the participants are from Western Europe, two dozen live in the Americas or the Caribbean, and the rest hail from Japan, the Soviet Union, Israel, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and Australia. Most of the foreign participants have never visited the West Coast, Kienholz said.

CIMAM board members planned the lecture sessions, while Kienholz and her Los Angeles committee have organized housing, transportation, hospitality, art tours and funding.

Conference costs, totaling about $200,000, have been offset by contributions of money and services from corporations and foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation provided $60,000 to bring participants from developing nations to Los Angeles. The J. Paul Getty Trust contributed $24,700 to transport CIMAM members from East Bloc countries. Other sponsors include Citicorp, the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and Pacific Enterprises.

During nine years of work with the California/International Arts Foundation, Kienholz has become accustomed to the complications of international projects. She organized a show of California sculpture that opened at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival and toured Europe, and she coordinated an exchange of donated artworks between the Museum Stuki in Lodz, Poland and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also produced a film, “A Good Time to Be West,” on sculptors from California.