Art: Splendor Packaged In Kitsch

Los Angeles unveils a home for Japanese treasures

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....

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