I sometimes wonder if, when Marcia Weisman hooked up with, among others then Mayor Tom Bradley and City Councilman Joel Wachs of Los Angeles (at a political fundraiser) and talked about LA's need for a contemporary art museum, what she really wanted was something along the lines of a kunsthalle, albeit one with the trappings of a civic institution — or, more broadly, a cross between a salon and this sort of independent art space with continually changing, wide-ranging curatorial agendas — in other words, a place where like- (or not) minded people with an interest in the visual and plastic arts might converse and confabulate their ideas about emerging trends in contemporary art on the continuously shifting tectonic plates of culture and technology. It can be argued that the Hammer Museum has achieved exactly this extremely sociable yet aesthetically and intellectually rigorous blend of artistic, social and cultural institutional roles. MOCA has become something else again — the museum as a kind of supermarket of ideas in the visual and plastic arts — the kind of ‘big tent' perfectly evoked by MOCA's first space, the Geffen Contemporary.

But even in its ‘marketplace of ideas' aspect — an aspect perhaps heightened here by the significant works of conceptual art well-integrated into MOCA's collection — a museum is expected to be a repository for things of enduring significance — ideas, objects; historical artifacts; and, in art, almost universally, that bright elusive butterfly we call the masterpiece.

It is a very fine collection — not short on masterpieces; and its depth in certain artists' work is remarkable for an institution of its relative youth. By now, everyone knows how formidable MOCA's Rothko collection is; also its Franz Klines—thank you, Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Rauschenberg combines and collages are among the artist's best. The Panza Tapies and Fautriers, are probably among those artists' best works. It is hardly surprising that MOCA would have strong collections of local artists, including Mike Kelley and the inexhaustibly prolific Raymond Pettibon, but the smaller holdings of Sam Francis and Ed Moses paintings and works on paper are also probably among those artists' best work. If there is less ‘depth' in other artists' works — as an acquaintance was quick to point out one afternoon at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary, where the survey comes full course — those works are also not infrequently masterpieces (e.g., Anselm Kiefer's 1984 Departure from Egypt).

Four collections in particular were crucial in the formation of this foundation: the collection of Marcia Simon Weisman, the core of which was her share of the larger collection she shared with her ex-husband, Frederick Weisman; the aforementioned Panza Collection; the collection of Beatrice and Phillip Gersh, the Hollywood agent, and the gifts and bequests of Rita and Taft Schreiber, another Hollywood agent turned political kingmaker. Schreiber's politics may have been dubious, to put it mildly, but the modest collection he assembled with his wife, Rita, was impeccable. Selections from the Schreibers' collection, including a 1939 Mondrian and two imposing Giacometti Tall Figures (from a group of ‘standing' and ‘walking' figures he created in 1960) form a kind of entrée to the pre-Warhol prelude Schimmel and company have composed in the first few galleries of the survey: the Mondrian with its flat ‘realism' of primaries, its grid broken into the jagged rhythms of the here and now; the Giacometti standing women with their implied distance and attenuation, embodying the vast gulf between presentation, perception and representation—as if to foreshadow the tabula rasa we will be faced with after Jasper Johns' ‘mapping' and Andy Warhol's movie-making.

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