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There are perhaps 1,000 art buyers in Los Angeles. Their passions invite, and to some extent deserve, a degree of skepticism. The visitor who wends his way from house to house, seeing the same work by the same fashionable names, trophies of an insecure herd instinct that relies too much on too few galleries, most of them in New York (Castelli, Pace, Blum Helman, Boone, Cooper, Gagosian), is bound to feel dyspeptic. Was ever so much money raked from such passive, anxious uniformity of taste? And did dealers ever have such an unbridled influence on museum trustees and, through trustees, on curators? The problem is not confined to Los Angeles, but it seems to show itself there more vividly than in any other major art center. Such lobbying is why MOCA's opening show, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, presented as an account of world painting and sculpture since 1945, became a travesty of its subject, albeit one that contains some distinguished art.
Yet Los Angeles has some of the best private collections in America. These include the scholarly and fastidiously chosen group of 19th century American paintings assembled over the past two decades by Jo Ann and Julian Ganz Jr.; Robert Rifkind's superb conspectus of German expressionist paintings, sculpture, prints and posters, remarkable for its depth and its number of first-rate works by unfamiliar names as well as obvious greats; the collections of post-1945 American art put together by Robert Rowan, Marcia Weisman and her ex-husband Frederick Weisman; anthologies of big-ticket contemporary work bought in a few years by Douglas Cramer and Eli Broad; smaller and more concentrated collections owned by Steve Martin and Beatrice and Phil Gersh.
But over the past decade, the thinness of L.A.'s art institutions began to cause heartburn. There had been a contemporary museum in Pasadena, but it collapsed for lack of money in 1974 and was acquired by the industrialist Norton Simon; it now houses his magnificent collection of old-master and 19th century painting. This left LACMA as the main showplace for current art. But through the '70s its treatment of contemporary painting and sculpture had been sporadic. Some collectors and artists came to feel a new museum was needed.
Chief among these was Marcia Weisman, Norton Simon's sister and a formidable < presence on the cultural horizon of the West Coast. In 1979 she began to lobby L.A.'s mayor, Tom Bradley, for a building -- or at least a site -- for a contemporary art museum, and helped form an ad hoc museum committee. This came to the ears of the community redevelopment agency which was getting ready to let a final eleven-acre parcel of land in Los Angeles' seedy downtown Bunker Hill district. Gradually a deal was hammered out that is unique in the civic relations of American museums.