Surprise sprouts from a 'Seed'

Between 1900 and 1930, Los Angeles built the foundations of its singular metropolitan identity. The construction of a deep-water port, a regional transportation network and an aqueduct to bring water to the semi-arid desert laid the groundwork for a rapid, quarter-century transformation. L.A. went from small town to the nation's largest municipal territory. Fueled by a torrent of more than 1 million new residents, most from the Midwest, the city became, in H.L. Mencken's memorable words, "Double Dubuque."

Which is another way of saying: a gigantic conservative hick town. Which is also a way of saying: not a place where Modernist art was likely to find a congenial level of curiosity and support, except among a tiny cohort. And so it stayed until late in the 20th century.

At the Pasadena Museum of California Art, a modest yet intriguing new exhibition does a fine job of unearthing an important sliver of that early history. "A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953" assembles more than 50 paintings and a like number of works on paper -- most notably, watercolors -- to tell the largely forgotten story of a crucial forebear of today's numerous important L.A. art schools. It comes with an excellent catalog, written by guest curators Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick and Julia Armstrong-Totten and art historian Will South.

The Art Students League pretty much fell apart as a force by World War II, but it limped on until the early 1950s. If the show is not jam-packed with rediscovered masterpieces, it is replete with surprises.

Perhaps the most fascinating is the degree to which Asian aesthetics had a profound, still not fully understood impact on the early development of Modern L.A art. John McLaughlin, the first major abstract painter to emerge here after World War II, was deeply knowledgeable about Asian art, so the depth of the connection earlier in the century is provocative.

A thumbnail history of the Arts Students League goes like this. In April 1906, seven short months after voters approved an ambitious bond issue to pay for the Owens River aqueduct, two artists opened a school on the top floor of a downtown building on Broadway near 2nd Street. Hanson Puthuff, a commercial sign painter by trade, and Antony Anderson, who worked part-time as The Times' art critic, offered courses in life drawing from nude models -- a somewhat scandalous practice -- three days a week. Soon, classes in sketching outdoors from nature were added.