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A collection of California painting goes on view Thursday at the County Museum of Art. It might change some old prejudices. No, it's not the latest thing in downtown deconstruction or Santa Monica sand pictures. It's 57 works from the collection of Linda and Jim Ries. They live in Encino. He practices law. They used to dabble in whaling stuff, but 10 years ago they started up with indigenous painting.
What they have wrought is titled "A Time and a Place." It scans art made during the first half of the century, most of it around here. Looking at it is a bit like visiting somebody else's grandparents. One is perfectly free to decide that the best thing they are is quaint and hopelessly out of date. One is equally free to recognize that these are folks full of mellowed wisdom who have ways to entertain us and things to teach us. One of them is that the past is not fixed but fluid. When our view of it changes, that tells us we have changed, or times have changed, or both.
The first section of the show is devoted to art until recently scorned as the sentimental spawn of fuddy-duddies. When one looked at this sort of thing back in the '60s, the knee-jerk reaction was to sneer it off as "Laguna Beach permanent wave painting," reactionary daubings by people who believed in an outfit called "Sanity in Art" and thought all modernism was a Commie plot.
Today, it looks different. Today, the first thing one sees in it is not the painting but the pictures-a field of poppies near Pasadena, a tent pitched for the weekend at Mission...