Golden Coast Meets The East End In Parrish Exhibit

Curator and Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel has known of Beth Rudin DeWoody for quite a while.

But it wasn’t until this past autumn that he flew across the country to, for the first time, match a name to the art aficionado’s face, and view just a fraction of her immeasurable contemporary collection.

The words “treasure trove” popped to mind when he crossed the threshold of her Manhattan apartment, Mr. Pagel said during a telephone interview last week. There were no wallflowers in that collection, as everything was a stand-out piece, he added.

“She lives with her art,” Mr. Pagel said. “It’s right there. Everywhere. Some collectors might have one thing here and one thing there, and they’re all super precious and they want you to look at them forever. Here, it’s just 100 things all over. And it wasn’t like, ‘Here’s a famous artist and I have a small little drawing.’ It was all great stuff.”

Upon closer inspection, Mr. Pagel saw that an obvious chunk of Ms. DeWoody’s collection revolved around Los Angeles-based art from the early 1950s through the mid-1980s—a period of unprecedented development in California. It was a snapshot of a place in a time, he said, through the eyes of New Yorker.

And with that visit this past fall, “EST-3: Southern California in New York,” the Parrish Art Museum’s newest exhibition, was born.

The show, which Mr. Pagel is guest curating, focuses solely on Ms. DeWoody’s Los Angeles art from her New York collection. The title, said aloud as “EST minus three,” is a cheeky nod to “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,” a Getty Center-initiated series of more than 60 exhibitions across Southern California, which examines the emergence of Los Angeles as an art center.

Mr. Pagel described the Getty tour as “an overloaded buffet of Los Angeles art for the last six months,” but an idea that could use a fresh coast and new set of eyes. Parrish Art Museum Chief Curator Alicia Longwell said she immediately welcomed the idea, seeing it as a chance to get a taste of Los Angeles art without having to travel 3,000 miles.

The exhibit will occupy all of the Southampton museum’s galleries. It is a “sensual, physical, scrappy and refined” show, Mr. Pagel said, that includes 160 pieces by well-known artists, such as Larry Bell, John McCracken and Craig Kauffman, while not excluding a few lesser-known names.

“One of the things that most excited me about Beth’s collection was that she took the core of Los Angeles’ most famous artists and really added the other ones to it, whose work is really important but their artistic reputations aren’t as nationally or internationally known,” Mr. Pagel said. “That was really cool for me. That strand of minimal, hard-edge painting is often overlooked outside Los Angeles. Karl Benjamin, Fred Hammersley, John McLaughlin. And she has six pieces of each.”

Mr. Pagel is organizing the show into three groups: people, places and things. Though not particularly academic, it’s a user-friendly, flat-footed approach to the artwork, he said.

A piece from Billy Al Bengston’s “Dentos,” a series that deliberately used dented and defiled aluminum sheets, will anchor one of the main walls, the curator said. He described it as resembling a “car accident” with an iconic “chevron” in the middle—or a centered image of sergeant stripes.

“It’s elegant and battered,” Mr. Pagel said. “To me, that’s where the humanity of the work comes in. It makes you think this thing’s been around the block and looks good. It becomes a metaphor for life. You may not be as good looking as you used to be, but you don’t give up. When you get knocked down, you do get back up.”

For Ms. Longwell, the exhibit was something of a discovery, she said.

“By and large, these are artists that have remained on the West Coast,” Ms. Longwell said. “We know about California color and light, but we don’t know about this world as much as they do. There are similarities between the Los Angeles artists, who were inspired by the landscape and light of the West Coast as well, and our East End artists. It’s wonderful to get a perspective from a distance away, look at something else and think about the context. For everyone who comes, it will be something new.”

“EST-3: Southern California in New York,” an exhibition of Los Angeles art from the New York Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, will open on Sunday, March 4, at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and remain on view through June 17. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 3, at 6 p.m. at the museum and will feature a screening of the behind-the-scenes film “Inside the Museum: EST-3,” followed by wine, hors d’oeuvres and a conversation between Ms. DeWoody and exhibition curator David Pagel. Admission is $10, or free for members. To make reservations or for more information, call 283-2118.