No room at LACMA’s inn

Postwar exuberance coupled with Cold War fear produced a schizophrenic blast of art and design in mid-20th century America. Amoeboid paintings, kidney-shaped tables and tail-finned cars invoke a spirit of freedom, while camouflage ponchos and coffee sets decorated with atomic motifs recall an era when ordinary folks built bomb shelters in their backyards. If there’s a single aesthetic symbol of the period, it’s an ambivalent blob.

That’s the gist of “Vital Forms: American Art in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960,� a provocative traveling exhibition that was scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Nov. 17 to Feb. 23.

But you won’t see it on Wilshire Boulevard. The show was quietly canceled a few months ago and booked into the San Diego Museum of Art, where it opened on Saturday and will continue to Jan. 26.

The problem? Too many exhibitions and too little space. Not to mention money.

“Munakata Shiko (1903-1975): Modern Master of the Japanese Print� had to be moved up four months to accommodate lenders, LACMA press officer Bo Smith said. Organized by LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Planning Committee for the Munakata Shiko Centennial Exhibition, that show has been rescheduled for Dec. 5 to March 2. Compounding the space crunch, Smith said, is a small exhibition from the museum’s collection, organized to complement the “Lansdowne� portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, which will appear at LACMA from Nov. 8 to March 9 on a tour from the National Portrait Gallery.

When push came to shove, officials opted for the relatively inexpensive LACMA-organized shows and dropped “Vital Forms,� a pricier import from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

--SUZANNE MUCHNIC