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Booklist Review

A partial catalog of the ongoing exhibition mounted throughout La La Land brilliantly displays the vitality of the street-mural movement in its capital. Greater Los Angeles boasts about 5,000 public murals, thanks to anonymous graffitists, ambitious folk artists, and highly polished professionals. Their work has been sponsored by themselves, the city, the state highway department, businesses that want their blank walls gussied up, neighborhood associations, art galleries and organizations, and, most spectacularly, the Los Angeles Olympic Art Fund, which commissioned 10 enormous, freeway-wall paintings. Most of the examples Stefan Merken photographed are figurative, ranging from trompe l'oeils, portraits, and landscapes on the realistic end of the spectrum, to surrealist homages (e.g., the witty Magritte in Los Angeles) and montages celebrating ethnic pride on the expressionistic. They are also nearly all the work of pros; as Betty Merken remarks in her excellent introduction, ``graffiti. . . is another matter, another book entirely.'' Index. RO. 751.7'3 Street art-California-Themes, motives / Mural painting and decoration-20th century-California-Themes, motives / Mural painting and decoration, American-California-Themes, motives [CIP] 87-16433