GOING HER OWN WAY; ARTIST'S PATH CROSSING WITH LACMA.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

From the outside, there's nothing remarkable about June Wayne's studio-home.

Situated in an aging commercial-residential neighborhood off Santa Monica Boulevard, a few blocks from Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, the monolithic structure melts into the surrounding anonymity of nondescript houses and a generic strip mall.

``That's done with malice aforethought,'' Wayne says, only half-jokingly, of her 5,000-square-foot abode, which she designed herself in 1967. ``I wanted it to be so banal people wouldn't notice it.''

But the appearance is deceptive. Once past the building's inscrutable exterior, you step through a courtyard into Wayne's airy, cathedral-ceilinged living quarters, which are anything but impersonal.

The floor space is dominated by a massive lighting table strewn with color slides. Overhead, huge windows pour light onto a collection of antique Latin American santos and Wayne's own mysteriously distinctive paintings and lithographs.

Not so long ago, the Chicago-born artist thought of abandoning her spacious Southern California digs and moving to Paris, because ``it's easier to be an eccentric'' there.

But at the start of her ninth decade on the planet, June Wayne is taking the long view of her situation. Nearly as famous for her independent, unconventional career path and outspoken, proto-feminist politics as for her art, she is doing what she's always done: standing her ground.

Her world

Showing a pair of visitors around, the 80-year-old artist is a much larger presence than her petite size would indicate. Funny, opinionated about everything, alternately self-assertive and self-effacing, Wayne is still a dynamic figure.

And although her environs have turned gritty lately, she has no intention of uprooting herself and leaving behind what she calls ``my neighbors'' - Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. De Mille and Hollywood Memorial Park's other habitues.

``Wherever my work is, is where I'm at,'' she says philosophically. ``I'm really not interested in being very visible. I have lived very quietly nearly all the time.''

Despite her passion for privacy, it may be hard for Wayne to disappear into her studio over the next few months. On Thursday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open a 50-year survey of her multifaceted career. ``June Wayne: A Retrospective'' will showcase Wayne's output of lithographic prints, paintings, tapestries and collages.

It also will explore Wayne's pivotal role in making Los Angeles an internationally regarded center for lithography as director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, named after the street where Wayne still keeps her studio. (Tamarind has since relocated to become the Tamarind Institute of the University of New Mexico.)

Under Wayne's energetic leadership from 1960 to 1970, the nonprofit Tamarind (launched with Ford Foundation money) almost single-handedly resurrected the method of printing from stone and metal surfaces, which had become a virtually extinct art form in the postwar United States. Subsequently, Tamarind-trained master printers and their students have branched out and started such ateliers as Gemini, Hamilton Press and L.A.-based Cirrus Editions.

Putting her own career on hold, Wayne drew together artists from around the world to make lithographs with master printers trained at Tamarind. Its ranks at one time included such artists as Ed Moses, Clifford Smith and Serge Lozingot. In organizing and administering such an ambitious group undertaking, Wayne drew on her own experiences as an artist for the federal Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

The road to LACMA 

Victor Carlson, LACMA's senior curator of prints and drawings, offers a twofold explanation of why it has taken 40 years for Wayne to get this retrospective, organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y.

``One is that June has always been a very, very independent and largely self-taught artist,'' he says. ``That means that she has not fallen into any of the art movements that in the past 40 years or so have had such publicity: op art, pop art, abstract expressionism, color field. None of those brackets explain her. And because she isn't bracketed, I think that a lot of critics have not known what to make of her.''

The second, ``more mundane reason,'' Carlson says, is that when Wayne founded Tamarind, she was still a fairly young artist who had done a substantial amount of work ``but had not, I would say, achieved her full potential.''

While such male contemporaries as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly and, on the West Coast, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha and others were solidifying their reputations, Wayne was taking her own art off the commercial market so as to avoid any conflict of interest with the Tamarind printers. When she resumed her career in the early 1970s, Carlson observes, ``there was a lot of catching up to do.''

To a degree, Wayne's recognition is still catching up with her reputation. Reviewing the current retrospective when it opened at the Neuberger, a New York Times critic described Wayne as a ``renowned but little-known figure.''

If Wayne finds such descriptions irksome, she's not complaining.

``I'm not implying that I'm neglected; I'm not,'' says the artist, who has had more than 70 solo exhibitions of her work in the U.S. and abroad.

``Right about now, I'm getting a lot of attention. I have no doubt that two years from now, the klieg lights will have gone somewhere else. So I'll have time to do all those nice paintings I have in mind.''

Different perspective

From the outset, Wayne has always gone her own way, maintaining an eccentric, outsider perspective both as an artist and as a woman outside the macho, self-absorbed theatricality of so much modern and contemporary art.

Raised by her divorced mother, Dorothy Kline, and her Russian immigrant grandmother, Wayne grew up in a household where, she has written, ``men vanished.'' She dropped out of high school at 15 and supported herself with various factory jobs.

She had her first solo exhibition in Chicago in 1935. These early paintings, using palette knives to apply jagged swatches of color, depict austere scenes of unemployed men and Chicago industry at the height of the Great Depression.

But it was only in the late 1940s, after studying in Mexico, working for the WPA and relocating to Los Angeles, where she did production illustration for the aircraft industry, that Wayne began creating the more stylized, surrealistic and illusionistic works for which she is widely known.

Influenced by everything from the writings of Franz Kafka and John Donne to organic chemistry, magnetic fields, atomic fission and DNA structure, Wayne developed what Neuberger director Lucinda H. Gedeon has described as a highly personal ``lexicon of symbols.'' Her works communicate neither through iconography nor simple illustration, but in more complex, expressionistic images that often combine scientific precision with an imaginative, experimental spirit.

Gedeon compares Wayne's outlook to that of Leonardo da Vinci, whose curiosity about science and nature could inspire drawings of intensely detailed flora and fauna, as well as fanciful renderings of preposterous war machines.

``Wayne's sights remain fixed with equal intensity on two sites - the smallest visible unit and the indeterminably vast vista - that together enfold microcosm and macrocosm,'' says an essay in the exhibition catalog.

Ironically, one of Wayne's most popular works, ``The Dorothy Series,'' is her least characteristic. Produced between 1975 and 1979, this 20-print suite pays homage to Wayne's mother, illustrating significant episodes from her life with prints composed of bits and pieces: family photographs, old report cards, scraps of writing, 1920s sheet music and so on, all bathed in a pastel atmosphere that affectionately keeps its distance.

Though she was pleased by the series' recent mobbed reception in Cincinnati, Wayne says she's ``really not interested very much in myself per se.'' She has no interest in ``being a personality,'' because ``I can't compete with Marilyn Monroe.''

``If you ask me what I would really want, I want to do my work and I would like a great big pot of money to do it with,'' she says, laughing.

THE FACTS

What: ``June Wayne: A Retrospective.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Thursday through Feb. 15, 1999. Museum hours are noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Wednesdays.

Admission: Adults $7, students and seniors $5, children/younger students $1, children 5 and under free. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) ``My Self'' (1985), lithograph by June Wayne

(2--Color) `I'm really not interested in being very visible. I have lived very quietly nearly all the time.'

June Wayne

(3--Color) Wayne's lifelong interest in scientific phenomena and natural forms can be seen in her 1972 lithograph ``Tenth Wave.''

(4--Color) Wayne used bits and pieces of her mother's personal artifacts to help create ``The Dorothy Series,'' a suite of lithographs she made between 1975 and 1979.

(5--Color) An acrylic titled ``Khis'' towers over June Wayne, 80, in her Hollywood studio-home. The lithography pioneer's works are part of a Los Angeles County Museum of Art retrospective that opens Thursday.

Michael Owen Baker/Daily News