Getty Center Exhibition Explores the Birth of the L.A. Art Scene 1950 1970

Written by Pauline Somersby Saturday, 26 May 2012 00:32

Los Angeles, CA - A new exhibition at the Getty Center explores the birth of the L.A. art scene with a historic survey of painting and sculpture from the 1950s and 1960s'. "Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950 - 1970" brings together 76 works by more than 40 artists produced in Southern California during this crucial period. The exhibition opens on October 1st and will remain on view through February 5th 2012, after which it will move to Berlin, where it can be seen at the Martin-Gropius-Bau from March 15th through June 10th 2012. In recent decades, Los Angeles has shed its stereotype as the land of sunshine, palm trees, and movie stars to become an artistic powerhouse and an increasingly important international creative capital. This fundamental shift in the cultural landscape of the city dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, a period of critical importance in art history that has never before been fully studied and presented.

"Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970" chronicles the rise of the Los Angeles art scene through a focused examination of painting and sculpture produced in Southern California during this crucial period. The exhibition features 79 objects by more than 45 artists including Peter Alexander, John Baldessari, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Ron Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Melvin Edwards, Llyn Foulkes, George Herms, David Hockney, Ed Kienholz, John McLaughlin, Ed Moses, Lee Mullican, Bruce Nauman, Helen Pashgian, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, and Peter Voulkos, among many others. This landmark survey of the period will be a cornerstone of the larger Pacific Standard Time initiative, an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California that will highlight different aspects of the region’s postwar artistic production. "Pacific Standard Time" will bring together works from renowned national and international collections to explore the beginnings of a significant indigenous modernism in and around Los Angeles, the important artistic movements that developed over time, and the great diversity of artistic practices that characterized the end of the postwar era. The exhibition will be organized both chronologically and thematically in six sections that convey the diversity of artistic practices happening simultaneously in Los Angeles and the continuities that connected artists throughout this period. Centering on movements that began in the 1950s, the first section will present hardedge painting and ceramic sculpture, practices that, although concurrent, have rarely been presented together. The second section will examine assemblage sculpture and collage, juxtaposing the major figures that pioneered this artistic approach in the 1950s with those who continued and re-envisaged the medium throughout the 1960s, particularly African American artists in Los Angeles.

A series of more thematically organized groupings will follow, the first of which will demonstrate Los Angeles’ rise as an important art center and will include a selection of works that convey visions of the city. The following section will present  paintings  by some of Los Angeles’ most celebrated artists, such as Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha, demonstrating that Southern California was one of the foremost centers for large scale pop and abstract painting in the 1960s. The final section of the exhibition will explore ways in which artists were — at the very same moment as West Coast painting’s rise to prominence—beginning to expand notions of traditional painting and sculpture, foregrounding perceptual phenomena and the material processes of artistic production. This section will include many works that emerged from the meeting of art and technology, such as a De Wain Valentine sculpture that utilizes the industrial material of cast polyester resin, and a Mary Corse canvas that incorporates highly reflective glass microspheres. It will also present a group of artists—many of whom were working with similar industrial materials—whose works retain traces of their own creation, as with the process paintings of Joe Goode, Allan McCollum, and Ed Moses; a poured resin work by Peter Alexander; and a fiberglass sculpture by Bruce Nauman.

The J. Paul Getty Center, in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus for cultural institutions founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. The Center sits atop a hill, connected to a visitor's parking garage at the bottom by a three-car, cable-pulled tram. With more than 1.3 million visitors annually, the Getty Museum is one of the most visited art museums in the USA. It is one of two locations of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the second being the ‘J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa in Malibu’, dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The ‘J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Centre’ is the branch of the museum specializing in "pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and 19th- and 20th-century American and European photographs". Besides the Museum, the Center's buildings house the Getty Research Institute (GRI), the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the administrative offices of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which owns and operates the Center. The Center was designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Richard Meier and includes a central garden designed by artist Robert Irwin. GRI's separate building contains a research library with over 900,000 volumes and two million photographs of art and architecture. Originally, the Getty Museum started in J. Paul Getty's house located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, when in 1954, he expanded the house with a museum wing. In the 1970's, Getty built a replica of an Italian villa on his property to better house his collection, which opened in 1974. After Getty's death in 1976, the entire property was turned over to the Getty Trust for museum purposes. However, the collection outgrew the site, which has since been renamed the Getty Villa, and management sought a location more accessible to Los Angeles. The purchase of the land upon which the Center is located (a campus of 24 acres on a site in the Santa Monica Mountains, surrounded by 600 acres kept in a natural state) was announced in 1983. The top of the hill is 900 feet (270 m) above Interstate 405, high enough that on a clear day it is possible to see not only the Los Angeles skyline but also the San Bernardino Mountains to the east as well as the Pacific Ocean to the west. The Center opened to the public on December 16, 1997. After the Center opened, the villa closed for extensive renovations, and reopened on January 28, 2006. The Center museum building consists of a three-level base building that is mostly closed to the public and provides staff workspace and storage areas. Five public, two-story towers on the base are called the North, East, South, West and the Exhibitions Pavilions. The Exhibitions Pavilion acts as the temporary residence for traveling art collections and the Foundation's artwork for which the permanent pavilions have no room. The permanent collection is displayed throughout the other four pavilions chronologically. The first-floor galleries in each pavilion house light-sensitive art, such as illuminated manuscripts, furniture, or photography. Computer-controlled skylights on the second floor galleries allow paintings to be displayed in natural light. The second floors are connected by a series of glass-enclosed bridges and open terraces, both of which offer views of the surrounding hillsides and central plaza. Sculpture is also on display at various points outside the buildings, including on various terraces and balconies. The lower level (the highest of the floors in the base) includes a public cafeteria, the terrace cafe, and the photography galleries. Visit the museum's website at ... www.getty.edu/museum/

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