The Los Angeles County Museum of Art lost a prized contemporary artwork two years ago when Craig Kauffman's "Untitled Wall Relief" took a plunge in Paris.
The pink and yellow lozenge-like sculpture was part of "Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital, 1955-1985" at the Pompidou Center, home of France's primary museum of modern and contemporary art. Kauffman's vacuum-formed Plexiglas work, measuring 52 by 72 by 15 inches, hung on a gallery wall for 130 days as 300,000 people toured the sprawling survey of L.A. art history. But on July 15, 2006, two days before the exhibition closed, the artwork crashed to the floor and the lower left corner broke into a dozen pieces.
Recriminations appeared in the press. The French museum assumed full responsibility for l'incident and launched an investigation. Although the cause of the mishap was never determined, the Pompidou paid the L.A. museum the insured value of the piece, $60,000.
And that was that, or so it seemed.
But pending final approval, LACMA will use the insurance money to buy a new version of the artwork, "Untitled Wall Relief (cast by the artist from the irreparably damaged 'Untitled Wall Relief,' 1967), 2008" -- thanks to the Pompidou.
"We thought that out of respect for the artist and his work, it was our duty to ask him if he would consider refabricating a similar piece," Alfred Pacquement, director of the Pompidou's museum, wrote in a recent e-mail exchange. Although the Pompidou had fulfilled its legal responsibility through its insurance, Pacquement called Kauffman, offering to pay his expenses if he could replicate the original.
A year and a half after the artist accepted the challenge, the work is done. It will go on view Dec. 4 at LACMA. And if curators, conservators and trustees give their approval at committee meetings on Dec. 19 and Jan. 21, the museum will purchase the new sculpture for $60,000. That's about half what a comparable work might bring on the market, but Kauffman said he made the replica with the understanding that it would go to LACMA.
"It's not a miracle," he said of the surprising turn of events, "but it's pretty lucky."
Kauffman, a Los Angeles native who has lived in the Philippines since the early 1990s, emerged as an abstract painter in the 1950s and began working with spray-painted, molded plastic in the mid-1960s. Although he has made many other bodies of work -- Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts recently presented a retrospective of his drawings -- he is best known for the luminous early reliefs, often seen as a seductive strain of Minimalism or an offshoot of car culture. And in a recent show at Frank Lloyd Gallery, he revisited his signature work.
