The Blossoming of L.A. Artists in ’88. : Multimillion-dollar prices for ‘priceless’ pieces were numbing, but out here the outlook is down-to-earth

Well, it’s over again. Bits of pastel serpentine weave through the carpet and a champagne cork is wedged into the potted palm. Time to stare out at the garden and ruminate on ’88.

It might have gone down as the year when the tainted opulence of Post-Modernism was in full flower, the spectacle of an art world where aesthetics are swamped by jillionaire collectors flourishing power.

Winter: Armand Hammer announced he would jerk his blue-chip collection away from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it had been promised repeatedly for nearly 20 years. Hammer decided to establish his own private boutique museum in Westwood.

Spring: Negotiations aimed at bringing Norton Simon’s fabled collections under the stewardship of UCLA guttered out.

Summer: The annual confrontation between the J. Paul Getty Museum and Thomas Hoving’s Connoisseur magazine arrived with the predictability of the gas bill. The Getty bought a rare ancient Greek Aphrodite and Hoving said it had been smuggled out of Italy. Something similar had happened the year before. And the year before that.

Fall: New York auctions turned into a feeding frenzy that drove prices for modern art to stratospheric obscenity. A Jasper Johns brought $17 million. A Picasso at $24.75 million, then another in London for $38.5 million. Sales totals in the hundreds of millions.

Felt like the Last Days of Pompeii, lavish hysteria.

Remember when great art was called “priceless”? There was something nice about that. “Priceless” said it doesn’t matter if a work of art sells for $50 or $50 million, the experience of it is about something else, something delicate, numinous and poetic. Hard figures vulgarize the expression like a price tag put on the act of love.

It could have been remembered as a year of fascinating naughty titivating tattle out of “Life Styles of the Rich and Arrogant” but things happened in Los Angeles that evidence significance. A generation of artists who were once art’s quirky Young Turks came to mature fulfillment.

This gratifying harvest was probably best symbolized by a man who is not a painter or a sculptor but an architect. Frank Gehry has long been the L.A. art world’s architect--openly and deeply influenced by everybody from Billy Al Bengston to Robert Irwin. His year began with a traveling retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a triumph of exhibition design including recreations of copper-clad spiral rooms, a walk-in fish used as an office by somebody with Jonah-in-the-whale fantasies, cardboard tables and chairs that looked like bats wearing bearskin coats, all wonderfully imaginative and gently tough.

The next thing you knew, Gehry was the centerpiece of a New York exhibition god-fathered by Philip Johnson. Titled “Deconstructivist Architecture,” it placed Gehry at the wellspring position among an international group searching for ways to revivify the modernist structural vocabulary.

By year’s end, architectural critics had praised him as the most important practitioner in the country. He became a rare prophet in his own land when he finally received a commission for a key cultural building, the Disney Pavilion at the Music Center.

No discouraging word was heard around Gehry’s apotheosis. Clearly deserved, it was nothing but justice done.

The rest of the year was punctuated with echoes of the L.A. aesthetic coming to mature ripening. David Hockney’s retrospective at LACMA found the transplanted Brit intelligent, urbane, witty and curious. This artist, who virtually created L.A.’s own hedonistic image of itself--reflected in the whiplash ripples of its pools--left us a lot to ponder. Hockney--sometimes seen as a lightweight who fritters away his gifts on opera sets and Polaroid montages--can no more be denied the underlying seriousness of his purpose than could Noel Coward.

As the months rolled by, the sense of L.A. coming into its own just kept on blossoming. There were external events such as the opening of LACMA’s pavilion for Japanese Art. Housing Joe D. Price’s superb collection of Edo period painting in an imaginative and apt building by the late Bruce Goff provided a curiously exotic harmonic to LACMA’s diverse architectural styles. Curator Stephanie Barron confirmed her expertise and originality in the exhibition “German Expressionism, The Second Generation.”

But artists--L.A. artists--managed to hold center stage. Bengston’s retrospective, still on view at LACMA, added itself to Hockney, and a look back at Richard Diebenkorn’s works on paper headed this way in March from New York. There is an unexpected overlap in their work, in its shared tropical pastel palette and fundamental concern with timeless questions of drawing and composition. They share a degree of calm mastery.

Count in the sculptor Robert Graham, whose LACMA showing of his monument to Duke Ellington found him more flexible and more calmly assured than ever.

But it was old Ed Moses who came sidewinding out of the chute like a buckaroo on a stoned pony. Paintings seen at L.A. Louver certainly constituted the commercial gallery show of the year, with their crazy Pollock-ribbons of paint kicking open deep space with all the control of a Frank Stella. If a full-dress Moses retrospective is not in the works, there just ain’t no justice.

And it was not just The Boys who came up smiling. L.A.’s enduring maverick’s maverick Joyce Treiman was reviewed in a USC exhibition. Her classic painterly realist diary of haunted art fantasies and spiritual insight revealed new depths to even her closest observers.

And LACMA tipped our hat to Helen Lundeberg, who was painting around here when our ranking patriarchs were still on tricycles.

It left us all knowing that making real art takes a long time. This amazing payoff represents at least three decades of artistic ripening. It was all begun when things were very focused around here. People who paid attention knew all the artists who counted and followed their work in great detail. The people who made the work had anybody’s normal dreams of recognition and reward, but they were going to make their art if it meant two-bit second jobs and a lifetime of spaghetti and cheap red wine.

In today’s sprawling, overpopulated, fast-buck climate, where good artists cave in to making corporate decoration and careers blaze and fizzle like flat-tire flares, it’s hard to know where a comparable generation is going to come from in 2025. Art goes on. That there is still serious purpose out there somewhere was well attested by the Anselm Kiefer survey at MOCA. There’s always hope, but the future has a formidable task of sorting ahead.

Funny how nice stuff manages to happen in a climate where every charge of vulgarized art and popularized museums is absolutely true. And yet they keep managing to engage us deeply with revelatory revivals, such as LACMA’s current Guido Reni exhibitions, or with once-in-a-lifetime extravaganzas, such as the Metropolitan’s Degas exhibition or the pageant of Paul Gauguin at the National Gallery.

Proves there are still good people out there doing the right thing. Proves that no matter how fetid the climate, art is still great stuff.