ART : A Bigger Picture : Spectacle demanded attention, but the year’s lasting moments came from many exhibitions that explored 20th-Century history

There’s still time to catch the most beautiful exhibition mounted in Los Angeles in 1991--the retrospective of abstract paintings by American artist Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967), which is at the Museum of Contemporary Art through Jan. 5. A considered homage to a rigorous clarity of thought and feeling, this bracing show is as good as they get.

Determined to erase from art any pretense of picturing what he called “a reality behind reality,� Reinhardt was instrumental in establishing an upfront standard by which art would henceforth be judged--albeit in ways that would likely have surprised him. But the painter looked and he looked hard; in the exquisitely subtle black paintings that occupied the end of his life, he demanded nothing less of the audience.

In the past year, Southern California saw at least a dozen first-rate exhibitions in museums large and small. Most focused on remarkable moments or episodes in the 20th Century.

Some were little gems, such as the concise and compelling survey of the early Russian-expatriate modernist Alexej Jawlensky, organized at the Long Beach Museum of Art and drawing on the rich core of pictures in its celebrated Milton Wichner Collection. The museum’s announcement of plans to build a new home gave rise to hopes that the Wichner Collection might someday be on permanent view. Also in that category was the J. Paul Getty Museum’s 60-print survey of the remarkable portrait photographs of Germany’s August Sander (1876-1964), drawn from its staggering holdings of nearly 1,300 images.

As a bonus, the exhibition happened to coincide with a show at the Newport Harbor Art Museum of contemporary photographs whose debt to Sander’s example is plain (the show was called “Typologies�).

The Getty too is constructing a new home, although its billion-dollar building program is a wee bit more ambitious in scope than Long Beach’s--or, for that matter, Newport’s, which was announced several years ago but seems to have stalled amid recessionary sluggishness. After seven years of planning, architect Richard Meier’s design for the proposed Getty Center in Brentwood was something of a letdown--a perfectly fine ensemble of buildings, but not the riveting leap in imagination one might have hoped for.

For unanticipated topical relevance, no show could have been more apposite than “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany� at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The government censorship scandals in the United States in recent years haven’t gotten to the point they did in 1930s Germany, but there’s no denying that the LACMA show--whose inception long predated the Washington follies--could be seen as a worst-case-scenario warning.

An exceptional achievement of archival research and scholarship, this ambitious reconstruction of the notorious 1937 exhibition in Munich that condemned modern art, and of the Depression-era context within which that chilling event took place, clearly established the fate of the avant-garde as anticipating the genocidal practices of Hitler and his gang.

“Degenerate Art� showed how the National Socialist government’s official denial of intrinsic artistic legitimacy to certain types of painting and sculpture, which made it easy to round up and destroy because it “wasn’t really art,� paralleled the subsequent denial of the innate humanity of certain classes of people, which made it not unthinkable to engineer a Holocaust.

In a related vein, an enlightening show at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego of photojournalism from the Weimar Republic--�Camera as Weapon: Worker Photography Between the Wars�--brought to light a hitherto unexamined genre from some of Germany’s darkest days. Such images as Hans Schiff’s 1931 pictures of police surveillance of citizens on the streets of Cologne stood as chilling, still-camera ancestors to the notorious videotape of the unspeakable police beating of Rodney G. King.

The topical relevance of these shows was demonstrated yet again this month in Los Angeles when a troika composed of a federal court judge, a congressman and a federal bureaucrat unceremoniously yanked portions of a public sculpture they didn’t like from the plaza of a new government building at Temple and Ala meda streets. Its fate is unclear, but the dispute over New York-based artist Tom Otterness’ work loomed as a potential test case for the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, which went into effect in June and provides legal standing for artists in such cases as this.

Meanwhile, the year’s most dangerous development in the ongoing censorship wars came in a very different guise: the Supreme Court’s shocking ruling last spring in Rust vs. Sullivan, which said that federally financed family planning clinics could legitimately restrict what doctors may tell their patients about abortion.

First Amendment supporters fear that efforts might be under way to extend this gag rule on free expression to all manner of agencies or individuals that receive government funding, including art museums and artists who accept grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A cluster of the most satisfying shows of the past 12 months were by African-American artists--an abundance rarely encountered not so long ago.

The spectrum was broad, including the jazzy, Cubist-derived collages of Romare Bearden (1914-1988), lately opened at UCLA, and the trenchant, sometimes wickedly funny assemblages of David Hammons at the San Diego (nee La Jolla, before its fourth name change in 27 years) Museum of Contemporary Art. The California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park offered a century’s worth of revealing pictures in “Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest,� while “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking� at the Long Beach Museum presented a convincing case for the existence of a distinctly black genre of extraordinary needlework.

Mexican art made an appearance in a depth and breadth hitherto unknown. So complete has been the saturation that it’s close to unnecessary even to mention the extravagant “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,� still on view at LACMA (through next Sunday), still trailing the remnants of literally scores of gallery shows and performances in its two-festival wake, and still on many people’s lips.

For all its eye-popping treasures, “Splendors� is certainly a problematic presentation--would anyone even consider attempting a coherent survey of 3,000 years of Italian, Chinese or Indian art?--and woefully few of the festival offerings this critic saw (and it was impossible to see them all) delivered on their outsize promises.

The chief exception was “The Perennial Illusion of a Vanishing Principle: Another Mexican Art� at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, which cleverly meant to play against expectations and also featured a remarkably perceptive and original videotape by the youthful team of Ruben Ortiz and Aaron Anish.

Rivaling “Splendors� on the spectacle meter was the American half of Christo’s “The Umbrellas: Project for Japan and the United States,� which dotted both the Tejon Pass and a farming valley near Tokyo with several thousand enormous bumbershoots.

The three-week stunt, whose artistic triteness suggested Christo has finally run out of steam, ended in dual tragedy, with the deaths of a California viewer and a Japanese worker. Because Christo’s mass-culture extravaganzas require unencumbered goodwill on the part of myriad participants, much doubt has been expressed about how the calamities will affect the artist’s ability to pull off another one.

The past year also witnessed unusual efforts to bring to town two highly regarded exhibitions from New York not originally scheduled to travel at all. The Lannan Foundation brought “Head-On: The Modern Portrait,� an eye-opening survey assembled by painter Chuck Close of more than 140 small portraits from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. And MOCA--thanks to a grant from the Lannan Foundation--brought from the Whitney Museum “The New Sculpture,� which examined the ambitious, wildly divergent work of the 1970s, loosely called Postminimal.

Also from New York was “Liubov Popova,� an important retrospective jointly organized by MOMA and LACMA, where the show was seen, of the great Russian avant-gardist. Despite the short shrift given to the artist’s extraordinary theater and textile design, this long-overdue reckoning of a pivotal artist will likely assure her a major place in the history of 20th-Century art.

Speaking of New York’s MOMA, that venerable institution fairly colonized L.A. for the summer months, with high-profile shows simultaneously on view at LACMA (“Popova�), the Lannan (“The Modern Portrait�) and MOCA (the calamitous “High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture�). What can we learn from this?

The perennial rivalry between the coasts shifted subtly in another way: While the number of L.A.-based artists selected for New York’s Whitney Biennial inexplicably declined last spring from its previous outing, only artists working here and in Manhattan were among all three generations of Americans represented in the sprawling show. The undeniable depth in this city’s cultural life was duly signaled, while the Biennial debut of artist Jim Shaw was perhaps the show’s most talked-about feature.

Add to that what is, to my knowledge, a first: The survey of the mixed-media work of Alexis Smith that opened last month at the Whitney Museum of (nominally) American Art is the first full, mid-career retrospective of an artist based in Los Angeles ever organized by the Madison Avenue museum. (It travels to MOCA in March.)

Gifts of art poured in to local museums, as they did nationally, in the wake of a special loophole temporarily restoring their tax deductibility.

Jasper Johns’ great 1962 “Map� went on view last winter at MOCA, transforming what was perhaps the most important contemporary painting in private hands in Los Angeles into an extraordinary public asset. It was the gift of longtime collector Marcia Simon Weisman, whose sudden death this fall left a gap that cannot be filled.

Tremors from the deepening recession took their toll around town, felling the once-crucial, long-since-quiescent Woman’s Building after 18 years in downtown L.A., and at least sending a shudder through the foundations at the established artist-run space LACE. The usual competition for scarce arts dollars grew even more fierce, as is likely to continue in 1992--a situation to date not effectively altered by the still relatively new grant programs of the city-run Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts.

A few commercial galleries disappeared this season as well, the most notable being the Santa Monica branch of the Manhattan powerhouse BlumHelman Gallery. The loss of a major commercial venue isn’t what was notable, for BlumHelman had been a disappointment from the start--an endless string of shows of seeming “leftovers� from the New York office, too rarely interrupted by adventurous fare.

Instead, what was notable was how the closing of a prestigious gallery caused barely a ripple in the local scene. A decade ago, it might have delivered a crippling body blow; today, with nearly 100 galleries scattered around Los Angeles, and with more than a third of those worth watching on a regular basis, it hardly registered.