One of the unexpected dividends of the Getty’s far-reaching “Pacific Standard Time” series is the cross-pollination of audiences and institutions; another is focused historic perspective. The Pacific Asia Museum, not known for modern-art exhibitions, is playing host to a modest retrospective of the influential Pasadena Art Museum. The former was initially housed in the Pacific Asia’s building, hence the title of the show: “46 N. Robles: A History of the Pasadena Art Museum.” It’s a nifty piece of site-specific heritage in the form of a mixed media art survey.
Long before the Los Angeles County Museum of Art debut in the 1960s, the Pasadena Art Museum mounted important modern-art surveys. From the late 1920s, downtown L.A. had a modernist cell centered on the Jake Zeitlin bookstore, and the Westside was where many of the European intellectual exiles lived. Pasadena was seen as a culturally sleepy bedroom community, albeit one with wealthy families. In 1942, the Pasadena Art Institute combined with the one-year-old Pasadena Museum of Art and took over 46 N. Los Robles Ave., keeping the name Pasadena Art Institute. The name changed to the Pasadena Art Museum in 1954.
