From Los Angeles to San Francisco
- Great collections in some outstanding buildings.
- Strong on 20th-century painting and sculpture and American and Asian art.
- Based in Los Angeles and San Francisco with an overnight stay close to Hearst Castle.
Culture and California have long been thought of as contradictory concepts with much of the West Coast being characterised by an image of vulgarity and superficiality. Hollywood and hippies did little to ameliorate this, any more than big beaches pounded by an even bigger ocean. Not any more. JP Getty, Norton Simon, Armand Hammer, Henry Huntington, Los Angeles County: these are among the names which signify for the informed public that America’s West Coast is one of the greatest treasuries of art in the world.
The Getty Center remains the most newsworthy, though the new hilltop site is coming up for its tenth anniversary. With all the resources with which it is blessed, with Richard Meier’s designs, and the vast accumulation of art of the highest quality, this is one of the most sensational museum-builds for very many years.
Though modern art is a major theme of the tour, there is a sufficiency of Old Masters and historic decorative arts to satisfy those who can’t get to grips with the twentieth century. Asian art is also very well represented – there being only the Pacific between it and its place of origin. But even without the contents, the museum buildings themselves – some of them among the most significant architectural creations of recent times – would provide sufficient beauty to justify the tour.
It is a tour to, rather than of, the West Coast. There will be no Disneyland, no Universal Studios. But outside the galleries there is the fascination of life in the cities, very different from twenty years ago, and amazing contemporary architecture. Between the cities there is the landscape, vast, empty, glistening green, sometimes Mediterranean in feel, sometimes reminiscent of farmland in temperate northern Europe.