Monday, Oct. 03, 1988

Splendor Packaged In Kitsch

By ROBERT HUGHES

With its new Pavilion for Japanese Art, which opens to the public this week, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has risen from architectural hodgepodge to full-blast cacophony. Where but in Tinseltown could you see such an overlay of styles? First, the flaccid institutional moderne of the original buildings designed by William Pereira in the early '60s. Then the deco-ish hulk of stripes and glass blocks shoved in front of it by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in 1986. And now the only major public building by America's maestro of post-Wrightian, off-the-wall kitsch, Bruce Goff.

Goff died in 1982 at 78. The design was finished by his disciple Bart Prince, to whom the urban fabric of Los Angeles owes some gratitude: the green bulk that rises beside the La Brea Tar Pits has been toned down from Goff's original sketches. It no longer flaunts pseudo-Aztec mosaic panels; its tower, which looked like a Hawaiian chief's headdress clapped on top of a random-rubble grotto, has been pruned; and the millions of little round mother-of-pearl tiles, like sequins, that were meant to encrust its inside columns have been replaced by cream plaster. Connoisseurs of Goff will also miss the grace notes of his other buildings: no orange carpet on the roof, no replicas of Zen sand gardens done in furnace slag and fused bottle glass. By Goff's standards, this is almost a rational building -- essentially two cells of galleries anchored by towers sheathed in green quartzite, their circular roofs slung on cables from structural frames whose horns resemble torii, or Japanese temple gates.

One cell holds the offices, the bookstore and galleries containing material from both LACMA's own Japanese collection and a superb group of netsuke (the carved and ornamented toggles that make up a whole category of miniature sculpture in traditional Japan) given to the museum by the San Francisco collector and scholar Raymond Bushell and his wife Frances. The walls are pleats of white translucent plastic made to look like shoji, or paper screens, which filter daylight to the galleries.

The floors of the other, main cell swoop down through gentle ramps reminiscent of Wright's spiral in the Guggenheim Museum, hung above black water-filled moats. At each level are two tokonomas, large niches in which paintings from the Shin'enkan Collection can be hung. This collection is the core of the pavilion. It consists of some 300 screens and scrolls from the Edo period (1615-1868), assembled over the past 30 years by the Oklahoma collector Joe D. Price. In recent years, Price's collaborator has been LACMA's new curator of Japanese art, Robert T. Singer. The Shin'enkan is -- with no ifs, ands or buts -- the best collection of Japanese painting of the period outside Japan. In its new setting, Price writes in the catalog, "the art is to be experienced, not studied" -- by natural light through the walls, as the Edo artists intended, without the spotlights that did not exist in 18th century Japan. On any given day one may see perhaps a dozen screens and a dozen scrolls hanging in the main cell of the pavilion. They are to change once a month. Since the building cost some $12.7 million, this must be the lowest density of art per dollar in any museum in the world. Scholars can consult the main collection in storage.

If the pavilion looks and feels more like a private space (however eccentric) than a public one, there is a reason: it was originally meant to be built on Price's estate near Bartlesville, Okla., and Price -- whose devotion to Goff's architecture rivals his enthusiasm for Japanese art -- insisted that where the collection went, the building should go. He even gave $5 million toward its construction, and the rest was put up by Japanese and American corporations and the Los Angeles community.

Price, 58, is and always has been that American rara avis: a monocular collector who knows everything about one kind of art and nothing about the rest -- just an engineer from Oklahoma, to hear him tell it, who got hooked on Japan. Odder still, his expertise on the Edo period does not spill over into other areas of Oriental art -- Chinese brush painting, or earlier Japanese screens and scrolls. His taste has the devotional stubbornness, not far from / obsession, of the truly self-taught.

It winds back to the influences of youth. Price's father, who made a fortune manufacturing pipe for the oil industry, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design his corporate headquarters, the 1956 Price Tower in Bartlesville. Wright's enthusiasm for nature infected young Joe. "Do you spell God with a capital G?" Wright demanded. "Well, I spell Nature with a capital N." So, as Price recalls, "I was never taught to love Japanese painting, but I was taught to love the things the Edo painters themselves must have loved." Nobody else was buying much Edo painting in the '50s, or even the '60s. It was thought "modern" and decadent, having little of the severity and grand abstraction of earlier, Zen-based Japanese painting inspired by Chinese models. Its rehabilitation -- in Japan and outside it -- was very largely due to Price.

Edo art is highly realistic. An artist like Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858) could give you every graceful step of a group of cranes moving processionally across a six-fold screen. Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) -- Price's favorite, in whose work the collection is exceptionally rich -- immerses the eye in a world of fanatical detail, from the exact crinkle of a peony petal to the flirt of a mandarin duck's tailfeathers.

If Edo art lacks the spiritual authority of Zen works, it possesses an all- pervading reverence for life in the material world, and the artists of its Rimpa school (Kiitsu, Ogata Korin, Sakai Hoitsu and others) epitomize the Japanese genius for superrefined decoration. Moreover, it was culturally internalized: the Edo period (Edo is the old name for Tokyo, which displaced Kyoto as the capital) brought about the closing of Japanese ports to foreigners -- Chinese as well as European -- and an isolation that would last until Commodore Perry's black ships sailed into Uraga harbor in 1853. For Price, Edo painting is the most authentically Japanese art of all; and the visitor to LACMA's pavilion will be hard put to disagree with him.