Robert Irwin, pioneer of Light and Space art who designed Getty's Central Garden, dies at 95

LOS ANGELES — Dressed unassumingly in jeans, a chambray shirt, work boots and a baseball cap, Robert Irwin would stride into the university seminar room wearing one additional enhancement: The sober worker's uniform of a typical mid-1970s male artist was topped off with a sly and blissful grin.

This will be a pleasure, the smile silently signaled to the small assembly of students, all prepping for an imagined future as artists or art historians.

A casual seminar format was conceived by Irwin, one of the most important American artists of the late 20th century, who died in San Diego on Wednesday. He was 95.

Irwin's death was confirmed by Pace Gallery, which represented the artist. Irwin was the leading figure in Light and Space art that emerged in the 1960s, the only wholly original art movement to begin in Los Angeles.

His seminar aim was evangelical — to spread an artistic gospel to schools across the country. Like his paintings and installations, forged in a city historically identified with popular culture, the unusual project embraced a sense of being outside art's institutional norms.

The presentation had less to do with traditional lectures in college classrooms than it did the campus teach-ins of the recent Vietnam War era or the sweeping, crowd-pleasing intellectual rambles of an R. Buckminster Fuller, where seemingly unrelated elements would suddenly reveal themselves as an interconnected whole. Soon these college kids would be engaged with Irwin's wide-ranging, largely self-taught intellect on a surprising tour through Western art of the previous five or six hundred years — culminating, of course, with his own radical work.

Irwin didn't project slides of paintings