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What Perenchio Could Mean for LACMA

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For a century at least, Hollywood actors, agents, and moguls have been buying School of Paris modernism. A few assembled great collections; many more assembled weak ones; and the one constant was hand-wringing over Hollywood’s failure to support L.A. museums. TV and film executive Jerry Perenchio is set to change that paradigm with his conditional bequest of an Impressionist and modern collection to LACMA. (Above, Edouard Vuillard’s “Sacha Guitry in His Dressing Room,” 1912, owned by Perenchio.)

The twist: The museum must fund, construct, and open its planned ($600 million-ish) Peter Zumthor building on schedule (c. 2023)—or else the gift may be rescinded. Back in 1971, Perenchio put up $5 million to get Muhammad Ali into the ring with Joe Frazier. Get ready for the Capital Campaign of the Century.

It’s not just a question of raising the money, formidable as that challenge is. The clock is ticking… Any delay could potentially invalidate the gift: an earthquake, a stock market crash, a construction workers’ strike, fossil discoveries on site, etc., etc. This week every museum director must envy Michael Govan, but they’re also praying their own donors don’t get the idea of gift-wrapping an ultimatum.

What could the Perenchio bequest mean to LACMA? The museum says it’s set to gain “at least” 47 works by 23 artists. It has released images of 10 works, and the press release identifies a few more by name. Some of those works are already well-known, having been lent to exhibitions and widely reproduced. It is possible to say that, in quality, Perenchio’s collection is in a league with those of Norton Simon, Walter Annenberg, and Leonard Lauder. The bequest would give LACMA its only major works by Manet and Caillebotte; its most iconic pieces by Monet, Degas, Bonnard, and Léger. It would double, or nearly so, the museum’s representation of Pissarro and Magritte. A 1909 cubist drawing, Picasso’s Head of Fernande, is one of the choicest of modern drawings, poised on the cusp of art history.

An obvious question is how the Pernechio works relate to the Janice and Henri Lazarof collection, acquired by promised gift and purchase in 2007 and also touted as a game-changer. Chronologically there is considerable overlap between the Lazarof and Perenchio collections. The Lazarof collection is bigger (130 v. 47 works) and ranges well into the mid 20th century. But—going by the images released—Perenchio has more star works, those rivaling the best of their kind anywhere.

Here’s a tentative survey of how the Perenchio bequest could one day augment LACMA’s collection.

Monet: LACMA presently has four Monet paintings. Perenchio would add three, making seven—and the three Perenchio Monets would be the ones visitors remember. LACMA stands to have the biggest and best holding of Monet west of Chicago.

Manet: LACMA has no paintings or drawings by Manet. Perenchio is bequeathing a major pastel portrait of M. Gauthier-Lathuille fils (below left). Because of the pastel medium, it can’t be on permanent view, but it’s a Manet worthy of a great museum. If Monsieur’s face looks familiar, he’s the earnest lover in Manet’s painting Chez Père Lathuille.

Degas: Perenchio proposes to donate two drawings and three posthumous bronzes by Degas. One of the drawings is the widely analyzed and reproduced Au Café Concert: La Chanson du Chien (1876). Though it’s a modest-sized work on paper, it ought to upstage LACMA’s one Degas painting, the Bellelli Sisters. The bronzes would double the museum’s holdings, and one of the Perenchio works is the nude version of the Little Dancer.

Caillebotte: LACMA has nothing by Caillebotte, the once-forgetten Impressionist whose few best works now command eight-figure prices. In 2011 the Boston Museum of Fine Arts paid $16 million for Man at His Bath (selling a Monet, a Renoir, a Gauguin, and five other paintings to defray the cost). Perenchio’s Caillebotte, A Soldier, must be a response to Manet’s Fifer. It might be the third most important Caillebotte in America (after those in Chicago and Boston)?

Pissarro: Perenchio’s three paintings would augment the three in the Lazarof collection and the bird’s eye urban landscape, La Place du Théâtre Français, that the De Sylvas gave the pre-LACMA County Museum. That would make 7 Pissarros in all—not bad, considering that Impressionist-rich Art Institute of Chicago has 10.

Cézanne: Perenchio’s juicy Cézanne landscape, House and Tree (c. 1874) was a stand-out of MoMA’s 2005 “Cézanne & Pissarro” show. So was LACMA’s Sous Bois of the 1890s. Were they one day united at LACMA, they could offer a super-concise survey of Cézanne landscapes, albeit without a Mont Sainte-Victoire. They would join a still life and a figure already in the collection.

Picasso: It remains a scandal that LACMA doesn’t have a cubist Picasso painting. The Perenchio gift won’t remedy that. It does include a painting of Marie Thérèse-Walter and six Picasso drawings, including the key 1909 Head. That relates to LACMA’s bronze Head of a Woman, from an edition cast half a century later. The Perenchio Picassos stand to complement the Lazarof holding of 20 Picasso paintings, drawings, and watercolors. (The museum’s most notable Picasso paintings will likely remain the blue-period portrait from the Bright bequest and the mini-Guernica, Weeping Woman with Handkerchief, donated by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mitchell.)

Bonnard: LACMA has just one Bonnard painting. Perenchio has two, one of them Après le Repas (1925). It has a fine old Hollywood provenance, having been owned by industry power couple William and Edith Mayer Goetz (Edith was daughter of Louis B. Mayer). When Après le Repas was sold along with most of the Goetz collection at Christies in 1988, a LACMA press officer told the L.A. Times: “It was not a collection we were expecting to receive as a gift.”

Léger: Perenchio is bequeathing two figurative Léger paintings and a late ceramic relief. Woman with Bouquet (1924, bottom left) will be the only fully realized example of Léger’s pneumatic-Art Deco style at an L.A. museum. It will complement LACMA’s more cubist Légers such as the 1918 The Disks, from the David Bright bequest, and the 1925 Composition in the Lazarof collection.

Magritte: LACMA has two Magritte paintings; the Perenchio gift would double that to four. Below center and right are Stimulation Objective No. 3 (1939) and Liaisons Dangereuses (1935). Thanks to the preeminent importance of Treachery of Images, already in the collection, LACMA’s representation of Magritte stands to rival MoMA’s holding of seven Magritte paintings.

Bottom line: Compared to other big American museums, LACMA’s holdings of impressionist and modern art have been anemic. That reflects the museum’s relative youth and an ego-driven history in which Norton Simon, J. Paul Getty, and Armand Hammer founded private museums rather than supporting the public one.

The Perenchio bequest won’t put LACMA on a par with Chicago or the great East Coast institutions. It will let LACMA’s early modern collection stand up to those of the Simon and Getty. Unlike those institutions LACMA presents contemporary art in the context of global art history. For that the Perenchio bequest would be pivotal. Today’s transnational postmodernism remains indebted to the avant garde revolution that occurred in Europe during the period that Perenchio has collected.


War and Peach

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European armor is a decorated shed; Japanese armor is a duck. That’s one takeaway of LACMA’s “Samurai: Japanese Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection.” The decoration on European armor is usually a two-dimensional skin on a functional form. In Japan, helmets take on exuberant sculptural forms crafted of papier-mâché, leather, and lacquer. The helmets in “Samurai: Japanese Armor” comprise a wunderkammer of natural forms: a peach, a shell, bamboo, the moon and stars.

Above are helmets shaped like an eggplant and a scallop shell. The scallop is a visual pun. Viewed from the side, it resembles a fish.

This helmet adopts the delicate spiral of a paper nautilus. This is not the chambered nautilus that Edward Weston photographed but the fragile egg case of a mollusk found in Japan (and California).

This helmet has a schematic diagram of the Big Dipper (Hokuto Shichisei, the “Northern Ladle”).

The supernatural imagery of Samurai helmets also has its roots in the natural world. This helmet decoration is a fish-bird hybrid.

One Western parallel might be nose art, which takes the readymade sculptural form of military aircraft fuselages as support for ferocious naturalia. Nose art originated with Italian and German pilots in the first World War and remains an active folk medium.

The Dog With the Pink Leg

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Move over Wegman Weimaraners and Koons pups. The dog of the moment is skinny and has a hot pink leg. She’s a living conceptual art piece called Human, part of the Pierre Huyghe retrospective that opens Sunday in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion. “Human” was a sensation of Documenta 13 and the subject of countless selfies at the Pompidou and Museum Ludwig. The dog is one reason the museum requires timed tickets to see the show. Here’s all you need to know about Human.

What kind of dog is Human?

Human is an Ibizan hound, bred in ancient Egypt and said to be one of the oldest of surviving breeds. The dog became extinct in Egypt, however, and modern specimens descend from dogs on the Western Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Ibizan (or Pharaoh) hounds have a respected place in art history. They were the presumptive model for depictions of Anubis, jackal-headed god of mummification and the afterlife. (Shown, a recumbent Anubis from Late or Ptolemaic period, Metropolitan Museum.)

How is Human around large swarms of bees, and museum visitors?

Cool. (Another Huyghe installation involves thousands of bees.) Ibizan hounds are friendly, inquisitive, and intelligent. Videos show visitors petting Human. In previous showings, and probably at LACMA, Human had a sheltered place to go when she needed some quiet time.

What makes Human’s leg pink?

Red food coloring.

Why is Human’s leg pink?

Huyghe said it “breaks the form of ‘dog,’ makes you look at it as something else.” The color “makes me think of the Sex Pistols. It’s very punk, that color.”

What if I want my own Ibizan hound?

Well, be prepared for the lecture on how you shouldn’t get a dog just because you saw it in a relational aesthetics piece. Ibizan hounds require lots of exercise. It’s advised that they need plenty of space to run and an owner who can devote an hour a day to exercising them. There is an Ibizan Hound Club of the United States.

Are there any pictures of Human resting on a mink stole?

Yes.

Hammer Is Building a Bridge to Itself

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The Hammer Museum is building a bridge across its courtyard. It seems that many visitors were missing the permanent collection galleries on the east side of the building’s loop. The bridge, designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture and named for former Senator and museum chairman John V. Tunney, is set to open February 2015. The Tunney Bridge will help correct a problem that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Edward Larrabee Barnes’  building has always been confusing to first-time visitors. As a 1991 review in the L.A. Times complained, “The whole way one enters the museum is downbeat and confusing.”

In the Beaux-Arts era museums had grand steps leading up to a grand entrance. There is only one museum like that in the region, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. But its grand entrance has not been an entrance for many years. It leads into a rotunda with no provision for ticketing. NHMLA was built in a genteel age when taxpayer-supported museums were free.

NHMLA is now directing visitors to a flashy new entrance (via a bridge).

The County’s other flagship museum, LACMA, has also accreted entrances over the years. Making sense of its campus is one of the main arguments for the Peter Zumthor redo. The Zumthor building will have multiple entrances by design. One might lead to Chinese galleries, another to American galleries, etc. It remains to be seen whether the public will embrace this clever idea or simply want to know which entrance is “best.”

The Getty Center was built in a single billion-dollar campaign and ought to be perfect. Except… Richard Meier doesn’t like signs. This defensible stance is harder to defend in a big complex combining public and private elements. The Getty has helpful folk greeting tram debarkees—and pointing out which building is the museum. It has recently taken to plastic signage underfoot, nudging visitors to the Exhibition Pavilion.

Ultimately, all of this reflects a prevailing architectural and museologic philosophy. Museums should be non-hierarchical. They should not enforce an Alfred Barr circuit; not privilege one type of art, or one experience of art, over another.

This is a libertarian philosophy (even if most espousing it cringe at the mention of Ayn Rand, or Rand Paul). The visitor is given total, existential freedom to invent his or her own experience. But the human reality is that total freedom is not all it’s cracked up to be. Most of us, most of time, welcome a “curated” heads-up—just as long as we can opt out. The Hammer’s bridge might be a modest step in that direction.

A Warhol “Marilyn”& More for LACMA’s 50th

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Los Angeles Confidential has a feature on “The Ladies of LACMA.” That would be Lynda Resnick, Jane Nathanson, and Ann Colgin. The interview, by Degen Pener, drops several hints about future gifts to LACMA. In April 2015 the museum is to celebrate its 50th anniversary with an exhibition of 50 art gifts (promised, mainly). That will include works from the conditional bequest of Jerry Perenchio and a lot more besides. Pener asks the three collectors what they’re planning to give and gets a mix of specifics and coyness.

On the specific side, one of the gifts is already on view. Ann Colgin and Joe Wender have promised Mary Weatherford’s love forever (cave) for MW, 2012 (top), a painting in LACMA’s current “Variations: Conversations In and Around Abstract Painting.” It will become the museum’s first work by the California-native artist.

Jane Nathanson says that she and husband Marc “will be donating most of our art to LACMA and we are giving some for the 50th anniversary.” This would be a major win. Jane had been on MOCA’s board and is now on LACMA’s, occasioning much speculation. The Nathanson collection is focused on the pop movement.

“One of the pieces that will be going to LACMA,” says Nathanson, “is a very early Double Marilyn by Andy Warhol.” Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962—during the Ferus Gallery’s show of Warhol Soup Cans. Coincidentally Warhol had just started doing photo-silk screen paintings of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty. He switched his production to Monroe and did over 20 paintings of her in the following months. All appropriated a publicity still from the 1953 film Niagara.

The only Double Marilyn I found in a quick web search is a 1962 painting sold at Christie’s London in 2008 (right). It’s described as “one of the early images on this theme,” but I can’t say whether it’s the Nathanson one. LACMA has two Soup Cans and a set of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Boxes, but no Marilyn. Even Eli Broad doesn’t have a Marilyn.

Lynda Resnick, to Pener: “I just told Michael [Govan] to come over and pick what he wanted and he did, and then I thought, well, there’s no sculpture represented. So then I said, ‘Michael, pick a piece of sculpture.’ Of course he picked the single-most important thing we have, which is what he should have done and we are thrilled.”

In the past Resnick has spoken of dividing her and husband Stewart’s collection among the Philadelphia Museum of Art, LACMA, and the Getty. If Govan got first dibs, that would be another coup. A highlight of the 2010 LACMA exhibition, “Eye for the Sensual,” was Elizabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun’s Portrait of Marie Antoinette. For what it’s worth, Los Angeles Confidential has a photo of the three art patrons, chez Resnick, with Marie Antoinette as backdrop.

The Resnicks’ tastes have lately moved beyond Rococo. They have added a Hans Memling Christ Blessing (lent to the Huntington for a 2013 show). Jesus or Marie Antoinette? Either would be a fantastic addition to LACMA’s European painting collection.

As to sculptures, my guess for ”the single most important thing” is Houdon’s The Kiss.

Palmer Hayden’s Harlem (in L.A.)

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LACMA’s Archibald Motley show is accompanied by an installation of related works (“LACMA Collects: Scenes from the Great Migration”). Among them is Young Girl Reading, a late (1960) painting by Harlem Renaissance artist Palmer C. Hayden. Bequeathed by Joan Palevsky in 2006, and shown for the first time, it becomes the museum’s first painting by Hayden.

Hayden was just a year older than Motley and, like him, made an early Paris sojourn into a moveable feast. Hayden and Motley’s most famous self-portraits, from 1930 and 1933, share a similar composition (and berets). Young Girl Reading looks back to the color of Matisse and the slouch of Balthus. LACMA also has a 1968 Hayden watercolor (not on view), another Palevsky gift.

That makes two Haydens at LACMA. Would you believe that another L.A. institution has 40 Haydens, most dating from the apex of the Harlem Renaissance?

They’re at the Museum of African American Art. Disambiguation: not the California African American Museum in Exposition Park. The Museum of African American Art operates on a nano-budget in a Macy’s department store in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. The artist’s widow, Miriam, bequeathed 40 Haydens, several iconic (Below, Midsummer Night in Harlem, 1938, and His Hammer in his Hand, 1944-7.)

That was a vote of confidence to an institution founded in 1976 and so-far dependent on a retailer’s largesse. It must have also been a reflection on the disinterest of larger museums in art by blacks. For the most part MAAA shows local artists. Its Haydens deserve to be better known.

Zumthor on Black and White

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“It might not be black. It might even be white. In fact it was white—all last week it was white. But then I woke up one morning, and it was black again. And now I’m pretty sure that’s right.”

—Peter Zumthor on his LACMA building, in a Sarah Williams Goldhagen article in the Architectural Record (behind pay wall)

Raymond Roussel, Godfather of Conceptualism

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Pierre Huyghe, now subject of a LACMA show, has credited Raymond Roussel (above, 1877-1933) as a key influence on his work. Roussel was an eccentric poet, novelist, and playwright who was much admired by Duchamp and the Surrealists. That connection has received much attention; not so his relevance to conceptualism. Yet it’s easy to see why Huyghe finds him interesting: Roussel’s books are largely descriptions of imagined artworks incorporating living beings.

It was Roussel who conceived (in print) a giant earthworm that plays Hungarian waltzes by hurling droplets of water at the strings of a zither; a wind-powered machine that constructs a mosaic out of human teeth; an aquarium containing the animated head of French revolutionary Georges Danton. Compare that to what you’ll find in LACMA’s Resnick Pavillion: a statue whose head is an active beehive; a film of a monkey, wearing a human mask and wig, acting as a waiter in a post-apocalyptic Japanese restaurant; an aquarium in which a hermit crab inhabits a reproduction of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse.

“Raymond Roussel is the most fortunate young millionaire of Paris,” reported the Cleveland Plain-Dealer in 1910. “He’s so rich he doesn’t know what to do with his money.”

One way to look at it: Roussel was the J. Seward Johnson of French literature. Like Johnson he used his inheritance to pursue his creative ambitions. Unlike Johnson, Roussel was despised by the masses and celebrated by the avant garde.

Roussel’s self-financed 1912 theatrical production of Impressions of Africa provoked riots (the year before Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring). One of the attendees was Marcel Duchamp, who later declared: “Roussel showed me the way.”

Giacometti said that his early work, The Palace at 4 A.M. particularly, was directly inspired by Roussel’s novel Locus Solus. For Jean Cocteau, Roussel was “genius in its pure state.”

Roussel didn’t return the affection, complaining, “People say I’m a Dadaist, but I don’t even know what Dadaism is!”

It’s said that literature lags  the visual arts by 20 years. Roussel might have been 20 years ahead—though his appreciation by other authors peaked well after WWII. Roussel was celebrated by Foucault, Robbe-Grillet, and Perec. John Ashbery learned French just to read Roussel.

There is a literary component to Huyghe’s LACMA show. The attentive visitor will encounter books by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Philip K. Dick (all of whom might be connected to Roussel, though there is no book by Roussel himself, unless I missed it.)

Roussel created words, not objects. Of course, well into the 1970s, conception art was typewritten words on paper, to be realized if and when. Wrote Sol LeWitt, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Roussel’s posthumously published essay, “How I Wrote Certain of My Books,” could be considered the first manifesto of conceptualism. In it he revealed the secret formula behind his literary production. Roussel would select two sound-alike words or phrases (like maybe grandfather’s clock and grandfather’s claw) and free-associate a suitably bizarre way of juxtaposing the two. In hindsight, the method evokes the games of  John Cage and Charles Gaines. Roussel’s “novels” are little more than catalogs of wunderkammers of objects inspired by this method. Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus are all description and no plot, and barely even involve the passage of time (an anti-narrative vision that Warhol was to realize in film with Empire).

For his New Impressions of Africa (1928)—a poem having nothing to do with the similarly named novel and play—Roussel hired a detective agency to find a suitable artist to supply illustrations. The agency found Henri-a. Zo, an otherwise forgotten Salon artist and illustrator. Zo was commissioned to create illustrations from Roussel’s cryptic instructions.

The methodology is close to that of John Baldessari’s commissioned paintings of the 1960s. Below is Zo’s response to Roussel’s demand for “A waterskin in the desert, with water gushing from a hole seemingly deliberately made by a traitor’s sword. No people.”


The Broad Goes Big

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The scaffolding is now off the Broad’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro building. The latest press release says the Grand Avenue museum will have “more than 50,000-square-feet of public gallery space.” That figure has been creeping upward even during construction. It includes the original, column-free space on the third floor (35,000 sf.) plus another 15,000 sf. now planned for the first floor. The building’s total area is 120,000 sf.

Speaking just of public exhibition space: How big is 50,000 square feet? Well, it’s twice the size of the Broad’s neighbor, MOCA Grand Avenue (which claims 24,509 sf. of “actual exhibition space.”) It’s almost as big as the Geffen Contemporary (about 55,000 sf.)

It’s about the size of Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum, also opening in 2015 and said to be 50,000 sf. The Whitney will have another 13,000 sf. of outdoor exhibition space. The Broad has a 24,000 sf. public plaza, but it doesn’t sound like art will be displayed there.

The Broad’s exhibition space is between that of LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion (45,000 sf.) and Broad Contemporary Art Museum (about 60,000 sf.) It is half the total size of the immense Hauser Wirth & Schimmel commercial gallery space planned for downtown (100,000 sf.—presumably, most of that for exhibitions.)

(Shown: a rendering of Robert Therrien’s Under the Table on the Broad’s third floor; Gary Leonard’s photo of the Broad as it now looks.)

“Hollywood Costume” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures

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Motion pictures are the pre-eminent visual art form (and literature) of our time. How should museums present movies?

Anyone interested in that question should see three current L.A. exhibitions. As it happens, all are presented by or in association with a not-disinterested party, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. “Hollywood Costume” is the first exhibition on-site at the future home of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. A block away, LACMA, an encyclopedic art museum, is showing “Haunted Cinema: German Cinema in the 1920s.” The Skirball Cultural Center, which focuses on Jewish history and culture, has “Light & Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933-1950.”

The LACMA show is primarily  addressed to those who haven’t seen (m)any German Expressionist films but have intellectual curiosity about them. The films are shown as looping digital clips, some at disappointingly low resolution. Still, that gives you an idea of what The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari looks like. LACMA adds another attraction in the form of  ontemporary architecture. The gallery design by Amy Murphy and Michael Maltzan, which loosely references expressionist stage sets, is worth seeing just for itself.

The Skirball show foregrounds cultural history. Knowledge of Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard is assumed. The exhibition explores how the filmmakers’ personal journeys as German-Jewish exiles informed Hollywood film noir, a language that has come to be understood as characteristically American. (Right, a still from 1944’s Double Indemnity.)

“Hollywood Costume” is the most populist of the three. Curated by Deborah Nadoolman Landis for the Victoria & Albert Museum, it is directed primarily to those already familiar with the films referenced. You’ve seen Django Unchained… here is Django’s outfit. You’ve seen The Wizard of Oz… here are the ruby slippers.

With all the city’s wax museums and studio tours, you might think that “Hollywood Costume” would be redundant. It’s not. For one thing studio theme parks and wax museums always seem dated. They have to recoup their investments in displays built around films now half-forgotten. As a temporary exhibition, “Hollywood Costume” can be more of the moment. The show’s 150 costumes span most of the Hollywood film industry’s history, from the 1920s to the present, but most of the older costumes are from films that remain relevant to contemporary tastes. The L.A. presentation includes costumes from a number of 2013 films (The Butler, The Wolf of Wall Street, Dallas Buyer’s Club, The Great Gatsby).

One problem with costume exhibits is the mannequins. They should be neutral frames, but a mannequin that isn’t quite right becomes an exercise in unintended surrealism. The problem is compounded with costumes worn by famous people. “Hollywood Costume” addresses this by showing slow-motion video loops of actors’ heads above the costumes. It must be inspired by GIFs and Bill Viola’s ultra-slow-mo tronies. It doesn’t seem derivative, just apt.

Every museum talks up video screens, interactivity, and social media. “Hollywood Costume” is a museologic future that works. One high-tech cliché is table projections. An image is projected onto a tabletop in a dark room. AMMPAS uses the technology to represent a costume designer sitting around a table with an actor or filmmaker, having a conversation about the creative process. The virtual humans are video interviews projected onto the backs of chairlike forms. The table is a blank (white) slate with a few 3D elements. Above is an installation built around Edith Head’s costume design for Hitchcock’s The Birds, with a Tippi Hedren interview and two shadowy lovebirds.

I don’t believe that museum exhibitions have to educate—which is just as well, for “Hollywood Costume” doesn’t. Oh, it tries to educate. The overriding messages (there aren’t many, for easy memorization) are that every detail of film costume has been carefully considered; that costume design is a collaboration; that film costumes do not have to be “realistic” so much as seem realistic to the audience. I should think that anyone with a Netflix subscription would know or could guess this. Furthermore, the gallery texts (and audio) keep repeating these same soundbites. I suppose this must have been motivated by research showing how little attention the average visitor pays to gallery texts.

You will learn some trivia factoids about specific films and costumes (Meryl Streep studied costume design and gives costumers hell; Quentin Tarantino insisted on Little Joe’s jacket, from Bonanza, for Django.) That’s about it.

“Hollywood Costume” and the LACMA and Skirball shows confront a common paradox. The average feature film runs ~90 minutes. The average museum visitor is willing to look at a given object for ~15 seconds. Dealing with that is a challenge, but the AMMPAS, LACMA, and Skirball shows demonstrate the multiplicity of strategies.

LACMA Lends Islamic Collection to King Abdulaziz Center

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LACMA will be lending 130 highlights of its Islamic collection to the 2016 opening of the Snøhetta-designed King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The loan, which will include the debut of LACMA’s recently acquired Damascus period room, is to run for two years.

That’s a long time, raising the question of whether the art is being rented out, Boston MFA-style. The King Abdulaziz Center is a private museum funded by the oil company Saudi Aramco—said to be the world’s wealthiest corporation. However, unlike many of the other starchitect-designed museums sprouting in the Middle East, the King Abdulaziz Center doesn’t have a significant permanent collection. Thus LACMA presumably isn’t expecting reciprocal loans. The LACMA press release says that the Damascus room’s conservation is “organized in partnership with” the King Abdulaziz Center.

Assuming the Center opens on schedule, the two-year loan would run through 2018—by which time LACMA could have embarked on its own construction project. It’s possible that LACMA’s historic presentation of Islamic art will be off-view in Los Angeles for quite some time.

Meanwhile on January 31, LACMA’s Islamic galleries will open the first substantial presentation of the museum’s growing collection of contemporary art from the Islamic world. Among the objects is Saudi artist Nasser Al Salem’s neon piece God is Alive, He Shall Not Die (blue) (2012).

Tacita Dean’s “J G” to LACMA, Met

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LACMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have jointly acquired Tacita Dean’s J G, a film inspired by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and British novelist J.G. Ballard’s short story, “The Voices of Time.” The anamorphic 35-mm film was shown at the Hammer Museum last winter.

L.A. Catches Up to East Lansing (or Not)

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“Los Angeles is finally catching up to East Lansing,” begins a story in the Lansing State Journal. The piece refers to the Broad, understood (in East Lansing) to be a me-too response to the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, designed by Zaha Hadid. The article includes an online poll asking “Which Broad Museum design is superior?” The “East Lansing original” is winning by a large margin—not surprising for a Lansing newspaper.

Not mentioned is the context: Some L.A. critics have lately come down hard on Diller Scofidio+Renfro’s veil, claiming the final result compares unfavorably to the digital renderings. Also not mentioned: The one and only original Broad museum, the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA.

LACMA Reveals Resnick, Nathanson Gifts

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LACMA has announced major gifts of art from the Resnicks and Nathansons, in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary. Jane and Marc Nathanson are promising eight blue-chip contemporary works (above right, Warhol’s Double Marilyn, 1962). Lynda and Stewart Resnick will be giving four European pieces, including the Hans Memling Christ Blessing that was a latecomer to the Huntington’s 2013 show of Renaissance portraits. These gifts, along with many others, will be on view in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion April 26 to Sept. 7.

The Nathanson gifts focus on Pop art and its legacy. They include James Rosenquist’s Portrait of the Scull Family (1962, above), George Segal’s Laundromat (1967-67, below) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Interior with Three Hanging Lamps (1991); plus works by Frank Stella, Gilbert & George, Julian Schnabel, and Damien Hirst. The Rosenquist, Schnabel, and Hirst are the first major works by the artists in the LACMA collection.

The Resnicks are giving Boucher’s Leda and the Swan and Ingres’s The Virgin with the Host. Boucher is not much to contemporary taste, and you may think that L.A. already has plenty. LACMA alone has six Boucher paintings. None are like this one, though. LACMA’s Bouchers are split between oil sketches and irregularly shaped over-doors meant to be viewed from a distance. Leda and the Swan is a finished cabinet painting intended to be inspected closely. The palette is darker and moodier than usual, and the paint handling is worthy of Chardin. If Boucher’s art is treacle, this is its richest, most caramelized reduction.

Until last year, LACMA had no Ingres at all; with the Resnick gift it will have two. The Virgin with the Host, an homage to Raphael, was originally commissioned by czar-to-be Alexander II. Ingres thought it so successful that he regretted it going to Russia, which he regarded as Art Siberia. Ingres ended up making several variations for other patrons (much as he did for his Odalisque). A related painting, without the green curtains and with saints instead of putti, is in the Metropolitan Museum.

Last December I commented on a report that Michael Govan, given his pick of the Resnicks’ sculpture collection, chose “the single-most important thing we have, which is what he should have done.” I speculated that that would be Houdon’s marble  of The Kiss (wrong!) It was a two-foot bronze of Giambologna’s Flying Mercury, his most famous image and also featured in LACMA’s 2010 show of the Resnick collection, “Eye for the Sensual.” My first thought was that the Resnicks own Teleflora, and its competitor, FTD, uses an amusingly bastardized version of Flying Mercury as its logo. I wondered whether they might have bought a Flying Mercury as a joke. Copies of Flying Mercury are legion. They were produced by Giambologna, his studio, and some very talented followers. It is hard for the greatest connoisseurs to tell what’s what—Henry Clay Frick was fooled. “Eye for the Sensual” was a single-collection show, an exercise intended to encourage the sort of donations that have just been announced. In such situations, you have to wonder whether curators tactfully avoid challenging a collector’s cherished attributions. Connoisseurship always offers the cover of ambiguity.

But if Govan is convinced that this is an authentic Giambologna, then that’s prima facie evidence that current scholarship says it is. Flying Mercury is poised to become the museum’s star Renaissance sculpture.

Groundhog Day

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“Los Angeles is knocking hard on the door of the elite club of art-world cities.”

The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, 2015

“The Broad, sharing the Grand Avenue block with the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Frank Gehry’s shimmering Walt Disney Concert Hall, is not just a $140 million building. It’s at the core of a cultural boom… Long the center of the movie industry, the region is now becoming a magnet for artists, dancers, musicians and a murderer’s row of museum leaders.”

The Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2014

“We used to always be the wild stepchild out in the desert. Now, we’re being adopted.”

Mark Bradford in the 2014 Post article

“It takes time for these things to evolve. And now we’re there.”

Eli Broad in the Post

“Of course, its abundant light and space have always drawn a certain kind of artist—members of the Light and Space movement, for instance… But now… it seems that everyone, major figures and young guns alike, wants to call L.A. home.”

The New York Times, Aug 19, 2014

“[Mat] Gleason sees L.A. finally coming into its own as a place for world-class collectors to buy art.”

San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Aug. 8, 2014

“Cultural leaders in downtown expressed optimism about the role [the Broad] will play in revitalizing the area. Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art… said the Broad will be ‘transformative’…”

Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8. 2013

“No one is suggesting that Los Angeles is about to supplant New York as an art capital…”

The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2011

“There is no question that Los Angeles has become the contemporary-art capital of the world.”

—Eli Broad, Dec. 6, 2010, in The New Yorker

“…pomegranate-juice magnates, billionaire museum builders and celebrity-packed boards are turning the city into a world-class art center”

The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29, 2010

“Los Angeles, a city of suburbs in search of a center… came one step closer to finding one.… Whether a single building, however grandiose [Disney Hall], can transform downtown Los Angeles is an open question.”

The New York Times, Oct. 20, 2003

“The Getty Center should make Angelenos in general feel a little better, in part by making Los Angeles seem more like a real city.… obviously, the Getty Center will enable culturally ambitious citizens to weather the Woody Allen jokes.”

The New Yorker, Sept. 29, 1997

“Q. What’s the difference between Los Angeles and a bowl of yogurt? A. Yogurt has a live culture. Time to pension off that oldie…”

Robert Hughes, Jan. 12, 1987, in Time magazine

“The City of Angels used to be a place where culture feared to tread. But today the traffic slowing down to neck-crane along Wilshire Boulevard is not looking for stars but admiring the shimmering complex of pavilions [LACMA] surrounded by a moatlike reflecting pool of vastly more substance and value than was ever to be seen in a DeMille superset.”

Time magazine, April 2, 1965

(Above: A school group at the early LACMA, viewing Norbert Kricke’s Space Sculpture. Top of post: Jordan Wolfson’s Female Figure.)


Islam Meets Neon

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“Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East” surveys LACMA’s collection of contemporary Islamic art, said to be the largest in an American museum. The installation starts with two neon pieces, unrelated yet complementary. Iranian/Parisian artist Arash Hanei’s Too Khali [Void] (2011, above) makes concrete the word for nothing. Saudi artist Nasser Al-Salem’s God is Alive, He Shall Not Die (blue), 2012, is a mirrored box multiplying the name of God to infinity.

The text-based art of the West almost never celebrates the beauty of the Roman alphabet. In the 1960s John Baldessari hired So. Cal. sign painters to achieve typographic banality. The pure beauty of Arabic script remains central to many of the works being produced in the Islamic world.

“The Clock” to Run Overtime

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LACMA is planning to show Christian Marclay’s The Clock for two months this summer. The world’s most accessible conceptual video has mostly been shown for its 24-hour running length only. But the Museum of Modern Art had The Clock on display for a month in Dec. 2012 to Jan. 2013. At LACMA The Clock will be on view during regular museum hours in the Art of Americas Building, July 5 to Sept. 7, 2015. Additional screenings will run the full 24 hours.

Antonio Mancini, the Last Realist

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LACMA has put on view a work by the artist that John Singer Sargent considered “the greatest living painter.” That wasn’t Cézanne, nor even John Singer Sargent. It was Antonio Mancini (1852-1930). The painting at LACMA, Dolce melodia (“Sweet Melody”, 1900), was auctioned at Christies last May and is on loan from an unidentified private collection. It is unusual in subject, paint handling, and format (6.5 feet wide by 20 inches high).

It shows a nude boy reclining on a table or mantle as an elderly violinist plays. There’s a hint of Degas in the violinist’s cropping. Mancini met Degas and Manet in 1870s Paris, and his early, realist works of starving waifs were considered akin the better-known Parisians’ ballerinas and beggars. For later works such as this, Mancini used a self-invented variant of Dürer’s perspective machine. He viewed his subjects though a frame with strings stretched in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions. Mancini then painted onto a similar string framework pressed flat against his canvas. The strings left a grid pattern in the sculptural paint surface, proof of the artist’s devotion to absolute realism in paintings that verge on illegibility.

A Renaissance Odd Couple Remains a Mystery

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LACMA has reunited a Paolo Veronese painting cycle in “Four Allegories by Veronese: A Rediscovery and a Reunion.” The museum bought two of paintings in 1974 as a gift of the Ahmanson Foundation. They were always an odd couple: a river god-looking guy in classical dress and a younger, bearded man in Renaissance drapery. It was known that the two were part of a series of four, as copies of whole cycle exist. Recently the two other Veronese originals have been identified in Turin. The four paintings were reunited in two recent Italian exhibitions and are now being shown in the U.S. for the first time.

The Turin paintings are a female figure representing Sculpture and a a turbaned male clutching an armillary sphere. The Turin man fits in easily with the LACMA paintings (“Dudes and Their Navigation Instruments”). It’s harder to figure how Sculpture fit into the scheme.

W. R. Rearick identified the three male figures as as the Greco-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (LACMA), Islamic philosopher-scientist Averroës (LACMA), and Zoroaster (Turin), based on attributes in woodcut illustrations to a 1556 edition of Vitruvius. With its colors and balletic pose, Averroës is the most engaging of the set, but it’s the least historically accurate. The philosopher, who lived in Spain and Morocco, is usually depicted with a beard and turban. His most famous imaginary portrait is in Raphael’s School of Athens (with turban but without beard). The bare head and mannerist costume of LACMA’s Averroës is a departure. In fact, the Turin man might pass as a more conventional Averroës. (Left to right: Raphael’s Averroës, LACMA’s Veronese Averroës, and Veronese’s Zoroaster.)

But the identification of the Turin man as Zoroaster has to be right. He’s shown holding an armillary sphere, a kind of celestial globe, and stands next to a terrestrial globe. Those are Zoroaster’s attributes, as seen in The School of Athens (where the sage appears close to Raphael’s self-portrait).

It remains uncertain who commissioned the cycle or why. A gallery text mentions the theory that the three sages were intended for the Marciana Library, Venice, but were ultimately rejected as unsuited to Jacopo Sansovino’s architecture. Veronese might have added a fourth painting—the outlier Sculpture—to make a set more appealing to another patron.

(Below, an Italian armillary sphere, too fancy to have gotten much use, c. 1600.)

Larry Sultan’s Mom Is a Meme

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