LACMA is  the 4th-most Instagrammed museum in the world. Michael Govan has lately adopted this as a talking point, crediting the public artworks Urban Light and Levitated Mass for the ranking. The Instagram list, based on the most geotagged locations for the photo-sharing app’s images in 2014, runs:

1. Louvre
2. Museum of Modern Art
3. Metropolitan Museum
4. LACMA
5. Hermitage
6. Centre Pompidou
7. British Museum
8. Victoria & Albert Museum
9. Tate Modern
10. Art Institute of Chicago

Most of these institutions have big public artworks or architectural icons, like Pei’s Louvre Pyramid. The current LACMA campus may be a little deficient in Instagram-worthy architecture, but its public artworks result in hundreds of posts each month. Urban Light draws crowds who don’t necessarily know who Chris Burden is but understand it well enough, as a free public stage for enacting dramas of their own devising. Photos of Levitated Mass, on the other hand, tend toward the ridiculous. A large proportion of #levitatedmass shots are goofy images of people holding up the boulder. It’s your call whether that’s a travesty of Heizer’s austere intentions or whether the vernacular photos complete the piece.

In a recent panel of museum leaders at the Music Center, Govan argued that museums’ “digital strategy” need not be limited to apps and websites.  ”When I first came to LACMA… a trustee raised their hand and said, ‘So why then are you spending millions of dollars planting street lamps and trees and moving 350 ton rocks when you can be on digital media?’ I said, ‘Well, you have to take your Facebook picture from somewhere.’”

The Art Tribune is reporting that LACMA has bought a major Gian Lorenzo Bernini portait bust at TEFAF.

Ursula Schlegel first identified the bust as a Bernini in 1992. It appeared in the Getty’s 2008 Bernini portraiture show. The bust measures 21.5 inches high and is believed to be a late work, dated 1670-75. That would make it roughly contemporary with the hyperreal Bust of Gabriele Fonseca and the (rejected) model for an equestrian statue of Louis XIV.

The Art Tribune’s Didier Rykner praises the bust’s “vivacity of expression and movement.” The sculpture is less finished on the back, implying that it was intended for a niche or tomb monument.

The acquisition promises to be another coup for LACMA’s European art curator J. Patrice Marandel. How many curators in this day and age can brag of adding Bernini, Watteau, David, and Ingres to a collection that didn’t have them? The bust will add star power to an under-appreciated set of Italian baroque sculptures and paintings assembled over the past few decades. As far as I can tell, it will become the only securely attributed Bernini sculpture west of the Kimbell. The Getty’s Boy with a Dragon, bought as a youthful work by G.L. Bernini, is now assigned to his father, Pietro Bernini—presumably in collaboration with his teen-age genius son.

It has been speculated that the LACMA bust is a posthumous portrait of Pietro Bernini. There is no consensus about the sitter, though, and for now it’s being called Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman.

UPDATE. The Los Angeles Times says the bust is a gift of the Ahmanson Foundation, in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary. The seller, identified as Benappi in The Art Tribune, is Mehringer.  (The Turin and Munich galleries have merged and are doing business as Mehringer & Benappi.)

Last night Christopher Hawthorne hosted “A Debate Over the New LACMA” at Occidental College. There was some discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of William Pereira’s 1965 LACMA complex, which would be razed for Peter Zumthor’s new building. The most memorable analogy was supplied by architect Mark Lee.

“For me Pereira is a bit like the Bobby Darin of architecture. He’ll do something that is really great, like ‘Up a Lazy River’ and ‘Mack the Knife,’ and something really bad like ‘Splish Splash.’ The great ones are like Transamerica Tower and Marineland. LACMA, I have to say, is closest to ‘Splish Splash.’ I think we have to be strategic in terms of what to preserve.”

The debate is archived on the Oxy site.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened to the public on April 1, 1965. See how many museum supporters, celebrities, and artworks you can recognize in these photos by Ralph Crane of LIFE magazine, now archived in the Google Cultural Institute, LIFE Photo Collection.

Christopher Knight may have just solved a mystery. What became of Norbert Kricke’s Space Sculpture, the modernistic centerpiece of LACMA’s 1965 campus? (You’ll find the apparent answer here.)

So OK, here’s my favorite LACMA 50 mystery: Whatever happened to the painting originally considered LACMA’s greatest—Goya’s The Marquesa of Santa Cruz as a Muse?

Today LACMA does not possess any Goya painting, much less a sensuous life-size masterpiece. From 1958 through 1965+ it thought it did. The Marquesa had been purchased for a princely sum from a ducal collection and was the career-capping achievement of LACMA’s founding director, Richard Fargo Brown. At top is a photo of the painting by Ralph Crane of LIFE magazine, shot during LACMA’s opening festivities. Time and chemistry have run it through a rose-colored filter. Below is a more impressionistic Crane view with better color fidelity. These images and others are preserved online in the LIFE Photo Collection at Google Cultural Institute.

The pre-LACMA County Museum purchased the Marquesa in 1958. This was a big enough deal for Time magazine to run a feature on it. The April 14, 1958 issue reported,

The Los Angeles County Museum is the West Coast’s largest, but until recently its shortcomings have given Los Angeles a reputation in the art world as the city of lost opportunities.… This week the Los Angeles County Museum had something worth crowing about. Up on the wall of its softly lighted Spanish Gallery went a handsome new acquisition with a resounding title and glamorous history: Portrait of La Marquesa de Santa Cruz as Euterpe, Muse of Lyric Poetry by Spain’s famed Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes… For generations in the hands of the Dukes of Wellington, the Muse is also a handsome tribute to the scholarship, energy and tenacity of bustling 41-year-old Richard Fargo Brown, who in three years as head of the museum’s art division has brought it new vitality and stature.…

Goya’s Muse is not only one of his best, but for years was also his least-known painting. He painted the young Marquesa about 1804, when she was one of the leading lights of proud Spanish intellectual circles and a member of the group that welcomed the Duke of Wellington as a national hero when he arrived to drive out Napoleon’s troops. The victorious Wellington returned to London in 1814, carrying hundreds of gifts showered upon him by the grateful Spanish. Among them was the Muse. For generations it hung almost forgotten in impressive Stratfield Saye House, the Wellington family seat near Reading, In 1952 Spain’s Duke of Alba visited Stratfield, and spotted the painting, told Ric Brown, then a Harvard Ph.D. studying in Europe, about it.

For five years Brown kept tabs on the painting, in January of this year got his board of governors to pay a Manhattan dealer $270,000 for it—the biggest sum spent by the museum in years. Says Brown, enthusiastically, “It’s the second-best Goya this side of the Atlantic. It’s a major painting, monumental, beautiful and appealing. Goya’s handiwork shows in every stroke.”

Brown (above left) told Time that the “best” Goya painting in America was The Forge, at the Frick Collection (right).

A Los Angeles Times article on moving the county museum’s art collection from Exhibition Park to Hancock Park mentioned that the Goya was the most important painting of all, requiring special protocols that could not be disclosed in a newspaper.

LACMA’s first guidebook, published on the occasion of its 1965 opening, identified the Marquesa as “one of our most valuable recent acquisitions, and a magnificent example of the art of Goya.…The painting bears Goya’s signature on the lyre-box.… The pearly translucence of the flesh tones, the gossamer drapery, the solidity of the grape-leaved head-dress all directly reflect in technique the thinking of an original and daring artist.” The purchase was credited to the fund set up by electric utility tycoon Allan C. Balch, used for many big-ticket acquisitions of the period. Dimensions are given as 49-3/4 by 81-3/4 inches.

The Marquesa is absent from the museum’s second, 1977, guidebook and all subsequent catalogs, print or online. Over the years I have tried to piece together what became of it, without luck.

UCLA’s Research Library has printed and bound volumes of an index to the Los Angeles Times. I checked every year from 1965 to 1977. Nothing about the Marquesa going AWOL. A peripatetic and very incomplete skim of the Goya literature has not helped.

I’ve asked a few LACMA people about the Marquesa. Naturally, this was way before their time. I asked Suzanne Muchnic, who is writing a much-anticipated history of LACMA. She has spent untold hours reading monumentally boring minutes of LACMA board meetings. The Goya isn’t mentioned. In the official record, the Marquesa of Santa Cruz is She Who Must Not Be Named.

It’s hard to assume other than that qualified scholars concluded that the LACMA Marquesa wasn’t an autograph Goya and that the museum kept this as quiet as possible.

Downgrades, sadly, are one of the hazards of collection building. Brown is the usual protagonist of early LACMA histories, battling a boorish and ego-mad board. He wanted Mies van der Rohe to design LACMA; the conflicted board settled on William Pereira. Fed-up to here, Brown accepted an offer from Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum shortly after the LACMA opening. There he commissioned Louis Kahn to create one of the world’s most admired museum buildings and bought many great artworks, among them Goya’s suave portrait of the Matador Pedro Romero (left).

If anyone can enlighten me further, post a comment or send an e-mail. For now I will close with this incredible postscript.

In 1983 the Getty Museum was offered an opportunity to purchase the most expensive painting in the world. It was, hold onto your hat, Goya’s Portrait of the Marquesa de Santa Cruz!

It wasn’t the LACMA picture. It was like the LACMA picture, down to Goya’s signature on the lyre box. The offered painting differed in many details, however, such as a sinuous lock of hair across the bosom. The $12 million asking price far exceeded anything ever paid at the time.

The seller was U.K aristocrat Lord Wimborne. Unlike the Wellingtons, he was not parting with a dynastic heirloom. Wimborne had taken title to his Goya only shortly before, for $1 million, in a complex deal entailing a Spanish seller, a Swiss middleman, and Wimborne’s Liberian-registered family trust. The Spanish vendor had exported the painting by declaring a value of $160,000, an amount more consistent with a copy than an original.

Wimborne was hoping to flip the painting for more than ten times what he’d paid for it, within weeks of acquiring it. Cynics would call that evidence of complicity in a shady deal. Given the U.K’s strict libel laws, I prefer to think of it as proof of a good eye.

The Goya was shipped to Malibu for the Getty’s consideration. The museum passed over concerns about its export. In 1986 Wimborne put the painting up for auction at Christies, which estimated its value at about $15 million. Spain protested, and Wimborne came to a last-minute deal to sell it to the Spanish state for $6 million. Though that left him a very nice profit, Wimborne was said to be “horrified to learn of the doubtful authenticity of the painting’s export documents.”

Wimborne’s painting is now shown at the Prado as a quintessential Goya. The LACMA painting is… where?

[FOR THE INCREDIBLE ANSWER CLICK HERE!]

I’ve just spoken with LACMA’s Patrice Marandel on the museum’s erstwhile Goya painting, Portrait of the Marquesa of Santa Cruz. He confirms that LACMA sold the painting in 1978. The capper: At least until late last year, the Marquesa was in the collection of Imelda Marcos.

That’s the former beauty queen who married Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and became a famous collector of shoes—and art.

The photo above, by Steve Tirona, may be a better picture than the downgraded Goya. The throne. The chihuahua. The bullet hole in the mirror. Though the kitsch was staged—to promote an online store started by Imelda’s fashion-model grandson, no less—the off-kilter Marquesa is the same one that once hung at LACMA. It’s a bizarre end to the story of the painting that was considered LACMA’s most important when the museum opened 50 years ago.

Marandel did some research on the painting’s history and supplies this chronology (it involves many of LACMA’s early boldface names). Founding director Richard “Ric” F. Brown had followed the Duke of Wellington’s Goya Marquesa for some time, as it was apparently one of the last great Old Masters not in a museum. When he learned it was for sale, in 1957, Brown informed the museum board and urged them to buy it. The price was $350,000. Acting on behalf of the museum, Norton Simon negotiated the price down to $270,000. The purchase was endorsed not only by Simon but by many connoisseurs elsewhere, among them Theodore Rousseau of the Metropolitan Museum, Seymour Slive of Harvard, and William Suhr.

Time magazine ran a glowing feature on the buy in Feb. 1958. But two months later, on Apr. 13, the Los Angeles Times‘ art critic Arthur Millier wrote a piece dismissing the purchase.

Brown wrote a three-page rebuttal. It’s in the museum archives, though it may not have been published.

Millier was a critic, not a Goya expert. But Goya specialists Jose Lopez-Rey and Italo Faldi agreed. It “has nothing to do with Goya,” objected Lopez-Rey. He and Faldi believed it was a copy and not even Spanish. Both suspected it was by an 18th-century French painter.

Over the next decade, critical opinion turned against the painting, and by 1972, the LACMA board was talking of selling it. LACMA European art curator Charles Millard sought opinions. They were discouraging.  Even the Duke of Wellington, who sold the picture to the museum, admitted it was not one of his favorites.

In late February 1973, the Duke paid an unannounced visit to LACMA. A receptionist described him as “quite distinguished.” The Wellington Goya was no longer on view, however. Millard wrote that they hoped to have it back on view in a month or so.

In December 1973 conservator Ben Johnson (like Arthur Millier, not to be confused with a similarly named playwright) wrote Millard that LACMA director Ken Donahue “has mentioned… a couple of times that the Board is anxious to dispose of the Goya.”

The final straw was the museum learning of the version that would be offered to the Getty in 1983. In 1974 it was in the Felix Valdes collection, Bilbao. Millard asked for photos of the Bilbao painting, and the comparison seems to have settled the matter.

Marandel agrees. When you look at both, he says, it’s evident that the Bilbao version (now in the Prado) is superior.

In late 1977 London dealer Marlborough told LACMA it had a buyer for its Goya, at $750,000. Peter Fusco so informed Ken Donahue. But Pratapaditya Pal, the curator of South Asian art, asked, “My only question is why should a dealer pay that much for a painting that is not by Goya? If it is by him, then why do we want to get rid of it?”

The painting was shipped to London. Marlborough reported, however, that it had been unable to find a museum buyer. It offered only $350,000 for the painting.

Edward Carter, the great collector of Dutch art, advised the museum to accept that price. It did in early 1978.

In 1986 the Getty Museum’s Myron Laskin informed Scott Schaefer (of LACMA, later of the Getty) that LACMA’s so-called Goya was in the collection of Imelda Marcos.

Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in February 1986. Philippine authorities took possession of what assets could be found, including Imelda’s trove of 2700 pairs of high-fashion shoes. She had also assembled a collection of sketchy paintings attributed to big Western names: Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, El Greco, Velázquez, van Gogh, Picasso, etc., etc. Needless to say, those rich attributions drew raised eyebrows. The Frick Collection’s Everett Fahy called them “outrageous.” Many of the works had been purchased, for bargain prices, from the New York gallery of LACMA board member Armand Hammer. The works were intended for the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Imelda spoke of building a world-class encyclopedic collection for the Philippine public, but it seems that most of the art purchased for it ended up in her private residences.

”She’d come and pick things up whenever she wanted, even in the middle of the night,” said Metropolitan Museum of Manila director (and artist) Arturo Luz. ”There was no accounting, no questions asked.”

Where is the ex-LACMA ex-Goya Marquesa now?

A September 30, 2014 BBC story said that another cache of Marcos artworks were ordered to be seized by Philippine authorities. It names “Francisco de Goya’s portrait of the Marquesa de Santa Cruz” among them—along with “Pierre Bonnard’s La Baignade Au Grand Temps, Vase of Red Chrysanthemums by Bernard Buffet, Joan Miro’s L’Aube, and one of Camille Pissarro’s Jardin de Kew series. Mrs Marcos is said to be a keen art collector, and her lawyer said that the court order and seizure were ‘highly questionable’ and there would be an appeal.”

P.S. About Steve Tirona’s photo at top of the post: Imelda’s daughter, Imee, commissioned Tirona to shoot some images of Imelda to promote a line of fashion accessories created by her son, Martin. Tirona produced a series of five images, dated 2009. “I was intimidated when I first started shooting her,” Tirona said. “But then I was surprised at how comfortable it was.… She told me, ‘People called my husband a dictator, but the real dictator here is the photographer, telling me to do this, do that.’”

Below, another view of the Goya over the couch, taken by Gunther Deichmann at Imelda’s Manila home, May 2007. The Marquesa’s neighbor seems to be a portrait of Imelda herself.

(c) Gunther Deichmann

Dark since Hello Kitty Con 2014, MOCA Geffen has made an deft segue to “William Pope.L: Trinket.” (You can never have too many friends! to The Friendliest Black Artist in America.) The main event, never far from the visitor’s consciousness, is Trinket, a 55-foot long, 51-star American flag flapping in the wind of industrial fans. The stripes, detached at the far end, will fray to threads as the show runs. First realized in Kansas City in 2008, Trinket was inspired by a Fox News kerfuffle over candidate Barack Obama’s appearing in public without a flag pin on his lapel. It is political art, surely, and many connect the MOCA version to the war of police v. unarmed black males. Pope.L is more oracular, speaking of “a post-Vietnam malaise as the aspirations of the ’60s fell short.”

Trinket also bears comparison to the high-low trope of American flags in ruin.

The primary point of departure must be the “Star-Spangled Banner” now in the Smithsonian. Dating from the War of 1812, it is relic as much as flag, revered for its incompleteness. Though some of the holes were earned in battle, the flag mainly fell victim to patriotic souvenir-hunters clipping pieces of it. Flags scarred by bullets or time have since become a staple of popular art. A ruined American flag is now a screenwriter cliché for establishing post-apocalyptic settings.

A similar image appears on the cover of Johnny Cash’s 1974 album, “Ragged Old Flag.” The spoken-word title track articulated “silent majority” anxieties over Watergate and 1960s youth culture. Its message is that traditional symbols matter, even when the country is going to hell in a hand basket. That is the comedy, and tragedy, of this American life.

Flags and entropy are the main ingredients of Yukinori Yanagi’s best-known project. His flags are sand paintings, encased in clear plastic and functioning as ant farms. The insects progressively tunnel through the colored sand, reduce national symbols to chaos. Like Pope.L’s Trinket it’s an exercise in serious absurdity.

Another Pope.L work at MOCA takes on flag-like qualities. Polis or the Garden or Nature in Action is an installation of hundreds of onions, painted the colors of flags, and set on tables to form an array of rectangles. Already sprouting green, the onions will wither by the time the show ends June 28. Polis or the Garden rhymes with the Hudson River School’s conception of America as a New Eden. The latter is, coincidentally, the subject of a concurrent LACMA show whose gaudy pièce de résistance is Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. Pope.L and Cole propose that nations sprout, bloom, and decay.

Cole’s pupil Frederick Church is best known for monumental landscapes, but his most reproduced image was the 11-inch Our Banner in the Sky (1861)—a wind-torn Old Glory created after Fort Sumpter had split the American nation in two.

(c) Gunther Deichmann

“I like the modern. I like the abstract. I like them because they get me to thinking. You know, sometimes I do not understand them. But I like things that I do not understand because they make me more curious. I do not claim to be a technician or scientist in the arts. But, as I always say, when I like something I like it even though I have no reasons for it. Just like friends. There are friends you like without knowing the reason. There are paintings you like but you don’t know why. There are paintings that are exciting, very exciting, and there are paintings that are very tiresome.”

—Imelda Marcos

Above, a 2007 Gunther Deichmann photograph of Imelda Marcos’ Manila home, showing Bernard Buffet’s Vase with Orange Chrysanthemums alongside photos of the Marcoses with Mao, Saddam Hussein, and Fidel Castro.

LACMA is previewing “50 for 50,” an installation of gifts, mostly promised, in honor of the museum’s 50th anniversary. Opening this Sunday, April 26, it will offer free admission that day only. Many of the biggest donations have already been covered in the media and this blog. In this post I will focus on gifts that haven’t yet received attention. (Above, a 1970 Donald Judd tension box promised by Pamela and Jarl Mohn.)

The Sixties: Steve Tisch is pledging one of the greatest paintings of the 1960s that’s not yet in a museum—Vija Celmins’ T.V. (1964). It’s from Celmins’ L.A. period, and it’s even better than MoMA’s Gun, from the same year.

The museum is clearly making an effort to ensure that every major 1960s-generation L.A. artist is properly represented. Bank of America has donated DeWain Valentine’s 1970 Red Concave Circle (above, with David Hockney‘s The Jugglers). The Hyundai deal made possible the acquisition of Robert Irwin’s Miracle Mile (not in “50 for 50″ but on view in BCAM’s ground floor) and James Turrell’s Light Reignfall (psychedelic centerpiece of the 2013 Turrell show). The Panza family, locally associated with MOCA, have donated three Bruce Nauman holograms, two on view. They were conceived as part of LACMA’s Art and Technology project.

Suzanne Kayne is giving a 1995 Rauschenberg acrylic on mirrored aluminum that will be the museum’s first painting by the artist. And as reported elsewhere, Jane and Marc Nathanson are pledging an impressive group of New York Pop works, including a Warhol Double Marilyn, a late Lichtenstein Interior, and LACMA’s first Rosenquist.

Africa: There are three major gifts of African art, all transformative for the the museum’s small collection. The people’s choice is an 18th-century Serpent Headdress from the Baga peoples, Guinea, pledged by video game entrepreneur Bobby Kotick. It is one of eight such headdresses collected by Hélène and Henri Kamer in 1957. Others are at the Met, the Menil, and the Louvre. Formerly owned by Pierre Matisse, it was auctioned—as “A Magnificent and Highly Important Baga Serpent”—by Sotheby’s in 2008 for $3.3 million.

The museum is debuting a unique set of Ethiopian crosses in bronze and iron, dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Three are Byzantine-intricate, one is super-minimal, and one is folksy-simple. Few American museums have anything of the kind. (This is a gift of the museum to itself, bought from deaccession funds.)

Also on view is a Kota/Ndassa Janus Reliquary, of mid-19th century, promised by Terry and Lionel Bell.

Europe: The big news is gifts by the Resnicks (Memling, Giambologna, Boucher, Ingres) and Jerry Perenchio (Impressionist and modern); plus that Bernini portrait bust bought with Ahmanson funds.

There’s more! Suzanne Deal Booth is promising a panel painting by Taddeo Gaddi, the collaborator of Giotto’s. Crucifixion with the Madonna and Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1360, was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2000, going for over four times the estimate ($690,000) on the strength of its condition and provenance. It had been owned by sculptor René de Saint-Marceau, whose salons were attended by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. There is no Gaddi in an L.A. museum.

Perenchio isn’t the only collector pledging a Monet. Wendy and Leonard Goldberg have promised Monet’s Two Women in a Garden (1872-3). LACMA has no Monet from the classic Impressionist 1870s. In this one, sunlight casts disco-ball highlights on figure and ground.

Perenchio is the elephant in the room. He is promising almost 50 Impressionist and modern works. To make things interesting, the gift is contingent on LACMA tearing down the museum and building Zumthor’s replacement before the clock runs out. “50 for 50″ presents a mere tease of the Perenchio collection. There are six works, not necessarily the six most important. “50 for 50″ includes the superlative Degas pastel, At the Café-Concert, and a counter-intuitive Vuillard in the same medium, Sacha Guitry in His Dressing Room.

I’ll reproduce two female portraits from the Perenchio collection that have so far eluded the paparazzi: Toulouse-Lautrec’s study of Jane Avril (1893), and Kees Van Dongen‘s Before the Mirror (c. 1911).

The Gilbert and Smooke collections are considered to be ones that LAMCA “lost.” But both families have remembered the museum’s birthday. Arthur Gilbert’s family and foundation, along with Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross, supplied funds to buy Paul Storr’s silver version of the Stowe Vase, a Roman antiquity in LACMA’s collection.

Terri and Michael Smooke have promised a painting by Emil Nolde, Russian II (about 1914). It will join many Nolde works on paper, but only one early painting, in LACMA’s presentation of German Expressionism.

America:  LACMA has few 20th-century works by African-Americans, and practically nothing by self-taught artists or those active in the South. That is set to change with five pieces by Sam Doyle, Josephus Farmer, Clementine Hunter, Herbert Singleton, and Purvis Young, all promised by Gordon W. Bailey. In this area, LACMA stands to go from zero to hero.

Bailey lent the paintings in the museum’s recent Sam Doyle show. The Doyle in “50 for 50″ is a portrait of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson. Shown above and below are painted reliefs by Farmer (The Plague of Death in Egypt, 1970s) and Singleton (Who Do We Trust, 1990s). Elsewhere these artists are mostly encountered in museums dedicated to folk or African-American art. When these objects come to LACMA, they will be displayed in the context of an encyclopedic collection. For now “50 for 50″ offers the opportunity of seeing a Singleton in the same space as a Donald Judd and a Purvis Young hung next to a Hans Memling.

Latin American art: The rediscovered Casta painting by Miguel Cabrera rated front page coverage, above the fold, in the L.A. Times. Here it’s displayed above a lacquered trunk, from the same nation and century, given by Ronald A. Belkin.

Asia: LACMA is weak in Chinese painting. Sharon and Robert Blumenfield have given a Ming portrait by Zhang Hong, (1626). The artist created the remarkable album of garden landscapes already in the collection. There is a set of five exceptional fin-de-siecle Japanese cloisonné vessels promised by Donald K. Gerber and Sueann E. Sherry. Below is a chrysanthemum jar by Hayashi Kodenji, c. 1900.

Contemporary Art: Among the gifts are a Glenn Ligon coal dust painting, Kiki Smith’s Jersey Crows (1995, in BCAM and outside in the garden), and a large Mark Grotjahn that was recently in the museum’s “Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting.”

Oceania, Photography, and American Design: The East Coast still pegs Los Angeles as the land of cars, surfboards, and the beach. Well… LACMA has been promised the Holy Grail of surfboard history, Duke Kahanamoku’s redwood board, c. 1920s. It’s part of Mark and Carolyn Blackburn’s collection of surfing ephemera and 5,000 vintage photographs of Polynesia.

A separate gift of Martha and Bruce Karsh comprises 35 mid-century travel posters promoting Southern California. The example at lower right is by Stan Galli, late 1950s.

For most of its history LACMA has relied on a few benefactors, often women, who funded needed acquisitions. Meanwhile a succession of alpha male collectors commanded the limelight, gave LACMA directors and curators the most grief, and didn’t always donate their collections.

“50 to 50″ suggests that LACMA is moving to a constellation of civic-minded collectors with smart, diverse, and adventurous tastes. Thumbs up to that.

Stephanie Barron’s latest rethinking of German modernism is “New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933.” Debuting at the Museo Correr in Venice in May, it will appear at LACMA Oct. 4, 2015 to Jan. 18, 2016. Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and August Sander will be shown alongside about fifty artists less known in the U.S. Among them is Carl Grossberg, a Bauhaus-trained painter who specialized in making industrial machinery look menacing and beautiful. “New Objectivity” is to include Grossberg’s Paper Machine (1934) and Yellow Boiler (1933).

The Internet’s new toy is #HowOldRobot. It’s an online app, devised by Microsoft, that guesses the age and gender of anyone in an uploaded selfie. Of course, it works with artistic photographs too, and with many paintings and sculptures, I’ve found. (Shown, Diane Arbus’ Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967.)

The algorithm isn’t perfect, and that’s part of the fun. Warhol’s Double Marilyn registers as a 59-, make that 60-year-old drag queen. (Monroe was 36 when she died.) The jeune fille of Manet’s Spring is neither so jeune nor so fille, says the robot.

Spring is a profile. Some profiles are not even recognized as faces, while others give dodgy results. Animals are ignored. So are extreme abstractions (African, cubist). Some fragmentary sculptures work, but open eyes seem to be a requirement (#HowOldRobot didn’t recognize Messerschmidt’s Vexed Man or Goltzius’ Sleeping Danae). Androgynous faces are often assigned to the opposite gender, as are some not-so-androgynous ones. It’s not hard to fake out the robot with make-up or attitude.

Fun quasi-facts: One of the putti in the Resnick Ingres is a 46-year-old man. From 1978 through 2000, Cindy Sherman aged minus four years.

UPDATE: I just learned that the Huntington’s Tumblr account discovered #HowOldRobot before I did. Click for the real ages of George Washington, Pinkie, and Father Time. While I’m at it, a tip of the hat to @UncleDynamite, whose Twitter feed clued me in to the meme. Dynamite age-checked another artwork currently on view at LACMA.

Three posts on Fist of Light, The Reason for the Neutron Bomb, and Shoot.

Meet Urban Light’s Evil Twin

Under the Big Black Mushroom Cloud

Chris Burden Meets Regis Philbin

LACMA has opened two drawing exhibitions. One, on Ed Moses, features many newly promised gifts from the artist. The companion show is on Moses’ L.A. contemporaries of the 60s and 70s. Among the surprises in the latter are two Ed Kienholz watercolors he bartered for cash and merchandise. These invite comparison to “Boggs notes,” the hand-drawn replicas of U.S. currency that J.S.G. Boggs has more recently traded for goods.

Shown are Kienholz’s For 10 Screwdrivers (1969) and For $251.00 (1972). Kienholz made similar watercolors to swap for food, horses, a Timex watch, a Mercedes, a Rudi Gernreich dress, and a John Baldessari artwork.

One tale—though it sounds apocryphal—is that the city tried to shut down Kienholz’s 1969 show at Eugenia Butler Gallery on the grounds that the bartering was a scam to evade paying sales tax.

Chris Burden’s passing has occasioned discussion of whether his multifarious art has an overall narrative. What connection could there be between, say, Shoot and Urban Light?

All interested in that puzzle will want to see Burden’s last completed work, Ode to Santos Dumont. LACMA is debuting it in the Resnick Pavilion from May 18 to June 21. It’s a quarter-scale (40-foot) replica of the dirigible that Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont flew around the Eiffel Tower in 1901. Burden’s blimp travels in stately circles for about 15 minutes until its minuscule engine runs out of gas. There will be several performances a day, and the work is viewable throughout museum hours.

Here is a selective listing of Burden pieces on flight.

747 (Jan. 5, 1973)

Two years after Shoot, Burden did a performance in which he shot at a jetliner: “At about 8:00 a.m. at a beach near the Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.” (Photo by Terry McDonnell.)

Coals to Newcastle (Dec. 17, 1978)

Burden used rubber-band powered model airplanes to fly two California-grown marijuana joints across the border into Mexicali, Mexico.

The Flying Kayak (1982)

Burden fitted a kayak with aerodynamic wings, suspended it from a gallery ceiling, and lofted it on wind created by electric fans. A film loop of blue sky, projected on the wall in front of the kayak, produced a steampunk virtual reality effect. (Photo by Mary Frampton.)

The Flying Steam Roller (1996)

A 12-ton steamroller, connected to a pivot arm, is driven at high speed. A counterbalance moves outward from the pivot, causing the steamroller to lift off the ground and spin in a circular orbit until its momentum is exhausted.

When Robots Rule: The Two-Minute Airplane Factory (1999)

Created for the Tate Gallery, it was to be an assembly line that produced and flew rubber-band airplanes. The device never worked as intended, leading to speculation that that was exactly what Burden intended. (I’d guess it was an honest failure. Burden likened his works to scientific experiments.)

Ode to Santos Dumont is perhaps closest in spirit to the Flying Steamroller, equally a pendant and an antithesis. The 12-ton steamroller is massive and terrifying; the dirigible is zero-weight and lyrical.

Burden said of his art,

“It’s about trying to frame something. And draw attention to it and say, ‘Here’s the beauty in this. I’m going to put a frame around it, and I think this is beautiful.’ That’s what artists do. It’s really a pointing activity.”

Burden is pointing a gun (the surest way to get someone’s attention in the L.A. noir universe), or pointing out the powers that be, or pointing at something we don’t see as beautiful because we’ve not been given permission to see it as beautiful. Burden has brought the dirigible into the white cube and—as was said of another mourned American—attention must be paid.

It’s not the most Instagrammed thing in LACMA’s “50 for 50,” but one object lays claim to being “the most extensively interpreted work in the history of art.”

That would be Albrecht Dürer’s Renaissance puzzle-picture Melencolia I. The 1514 engraving has been decoded by centuries of art-minded conspiracy theorists.

A summary of just the Melencolia I magic square literature would be a marvel of paranoiac-critical criticism. The magic square is the 4×4 matrix of numbers at upper right, next to the hourglass and bell. Random numbers? Hardly.

Horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they add up to 34. The two cells at bottom center give the print’s date, 15-14. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives, and ask not for whom the bell tolls.

Every other anomalous detail of Melencolia I has been scrutinized. Why is the dog so skinny? Is the angel a dude? “I think I see a weird face in the polyhedron.” Why is the title misspelled? Why Melencolia I, promising sequels that never got green-lighted?

Dürer was proud of Melencolia I and produced many impressions. Others were printed after his death. The plate gradually wore down, and the lines lost their sharpness. LACMA says “the best examples of Melencolia I are praised for their delicate silvery tones represented in this remarkable impression.” It’s promised by Herman and Ruth Engel, who have given prime sheets by Northern Renaissance printmakers and Rembrandt.

LACMA already has an impression of Melencolia I from the Balch collection, donated in 1949. The British Museum has two impressions, but I’m not aware of another American museum that does.

Famed for his engravings and woodcuts, Dürer did just six etchings. Last year the Getty Research Institute acquired an early impression of Dürer’s greatest etching, Landscape with a Cannon (1518). It’s hailed as one of the first landscape prints.

That is to say, it’s a naturalistic outdoor view with no obvious subject. The most prominent figures are Turks, whose Islamic state was the enemy of Dürer’s middle Europe. The European weapons were already obsolete. It’s not clear who won, who lost, or whether there was a battle.

Close observers will spy Dürer’s most minimalist horse.

LACMA keeps scoring 50th anniversary gifts. The latest is from Barbra Streisand, who collects American art. She has promised to bequeath John Singer Sargent‘s Mrs. Cazalet and Children Edward & Victor (1900-01).

The sitter’s husband, William Marshall Cazalet, was as cosmopolitan as Sargent himself. His French Huguenot family had been twice-exiled, to Scotland and then England. Cazalet made a fortune in Czarist Russia. He asked Sargent to paint portraits of himself and his wife to fit two carved frames in the dining room paneling of his country home, Fairlawne. The frames could not be “adjusted”—they were attributed to Grinling Gibbons.

The Fairlawne frames were large even for a grand-manner portrait, being 65 by 100 inches. After visiting Fairlawne in 1899, Sargent proposed that Mrs. Cazalet (née Maud Lucia Heron-Maxwell) be portrayed with her two young sons, and Mr. Cazalet with his horse.

Sargent did Mrs. Cazalet and Children first. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1901. Sketch magazine cartoonist Harry Furniss took note of it as “The Lady Ventriloquist.” (It’s center left in the image.)

Streisand bought Mrs. Cazalet in 2002. Mr. Cazalet, with the horse, was last auctioned at Christie’s in 2007.

The Streisand painting will join three major Sargent portraits in the Greater Museum of Los Angeles. LACMA’s Portrait of Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis is a decade earlier. Mrs. Davis was the wife of the ex-mayor of Worcester, Mass., and perhaps wouldn’t have been able to afford Sargent in 1900. Sargent warned the Cazalets that he’d just raised his price to 1000 guineas for a full-length.

The Hammer Museum’s great Dr. Pozzi at Home is earlier yet (1881), as is the Huntington’s almost full-length Mrs. William Playfair, 1887. Mrs. Cazalet shows a later phase of Sargent’s portraiture, dating from the apex of his fame.

The Streisand painting is also set to be one of a great quartet of large American figure paintings, 1900-ish, at LACMA. The museum now has Thomas Eakins’s Wrestlers (1899)—the antithesis of a society portrait—and John Alexander White’s suave painting of his wife (1902). The Streisand Sargent will also complement a 1904 Robert Henri, Spanish Dancer (below), that was promised on the occasion of LACMA’s 40th anniversary by Abby and Alan Levy.

LACMA’s Art of the Pacific gallery is showing a selection of photographs from the newly acquired Mark and Carolyn Blackburn collection. Among them is a set of pictoralist images by Caroline Haskins Gurrey (1875-1927). At top is The Calabash, also identified as Italian-Hawaiian.

Born in Oakland, CA and active in Honolulu, Gurrey was commissioned to produce a series of photographs of Hawaiian and mixed-race children for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition in Seattle. They were famous at the time, presumably as an Island equivalent of Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian. Gurney’s work was largely forgotten and has only recently been rediscovered. Gurrey’s project demands comparison with the Latin American casta paintings that have lately intrigued historians, collectors, and museums.

“Casta” pictures document and classify children of mixed ethnicity, with an agenda that remains unclear. Gurrey was representing Hawaii to the mainland, much as Casta painters were representing Latin America to Spain. In both cases the artists must have felt that the mixture of races was a subject that demanded addressing. In 1909, “miscegenation” was a crime in 30 U.S. states, including California.

The Seattle expo works are now in the Smithsonian. In 1917 Gurrey reprinted nine negatives. The nine 1917 images are now shown in a grid at LACMA. They document admixtures of Hawaiian ancestry with that of India, Ireland, China, the Gilbert Islands, and Tahiti. The sitters were students at the Kamehameha Schools, set up by landowner Bernice Bishop to educate children of Hawaiian blood.

Shown here are images of The Calabash and Full Hawaiian from the Smithsonian website… but the 1917 Blackburn prints look fresher.

Caroline Haskin Gurrey’s single most renowned work is The Boy and the Lobster. In 1902 the Honolulu Commercial Advertiser wrote,

Is the new Petersen Automotive Museum (by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates) too Vegas for the Pritzker-ified Museum Mile?

You can begin to judge for yourself, as most of the Petersen’s stainless steel ribbons—intended to suggest automotive streamlining—are now in place. It’s sure a cry for attention. But so are two of the immediate neighbors, the gold-leaf column of Albert C. Martin, Sr.’s May Company department store, and the Googie kitsch of Louis Armét and Eldon Davis’ Johnie’s Coffee Shop.

Who is Noah Purifoy? A major East Coast curator admitted drawing a blank, earlier this year. LACMA’s “Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” ought to put an end to that. It will also come as a revelation to Purifoy fanboys/girls. (Above, No Contest [Bicycles], 1991).

Purifoy is better known for his legend than his objects, which are rare in museum collections. He was a designer of mid-century modern furniture; the first African-American to graduate from Chouinard (later CalArts); the sculptor who intuited that Watts rebellion embers would be the most potent material of post-1965 California assemblage; an activist who put his art career on hold to improve the world.

By age 72 Purifoy was disillusioned about the latter and too broke for L.A.’s notoriously affordable studio rents. With help from friends, he moved to the High Desert to inaugurate his late style. About 120 of these late environmental works comprise the Noah Purifoy Foundation’s Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. Like Gesamtkunstwerks by Heizer, Turrell, and Judd, it’s a magnum opus that relatively few have seen.

Ed Ruscha supplied the cash to buy most of Purifoy’s desert compound. “The idea of taking found objects and putting them in the harsh conditions of the desert added a strange dimension to his work,” Ruscha said. Andrea Zittel said it was Purifoy who convinced her to establish a High Desert base.

For “Junk Dada,” LACMA’s Franklin Sirmins has managed to borrow six monumental sculptures from Joshua Tree. Don’t miss the two shown outdoors (as intended) by the Resnick Pavilion (not exactly intended).

There’s much more, including a reunion of rare surviving works from the post-Watts “66 Signs of Neon” show. New to me was Purifoy’s plastic period. In the months before Watts, Purifoy was working in plastics, the medium favored by so many L.A. sculptors. Two elegant examples here are the antithesis of the art Purifoy became known for. Law and Order fits somewhere between Joseph Cornell and Alexis Smith (and the cop-show title still has political bite). Nearby is a Larry Bell-like box with lasers zipping inside of it—well, actually a flourish of day-glo plastic. After Watts burned, Purifoy never used anything new or clean or perfect in his art.

LACMA has a big new gift—the question is, where will it put it?

As reported in the Los Angeles Times and Art Newspaper, Leonardo DiCaprio is giving the museum John Gerrard’s Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada), a massive installation showing a video-game simulation of an actual solar-power site. The piece is all video screen measuring 24 feet high by 28 feet long. (And while you can’t tell in the photo above, it’s not a flat screen. It’s a chunky block.)

The 24-foot height is about that of Tony Smith’s Smoke (which fills the Ahmanson Building’s atrium) and is about four feet taller than the tallest ceiling in BCAM. It ought to just fit in the Resnick Pavilion (which manages to hold a dirigible). The Resnick ceilings are said to be 30 feet high.

But Solar Reserve was intended to be shown outdoors. It was a sensation when shown in the courtyard of Lincoln Center last fall. So LACMA might show it outside, in the company of Urban Light and Levitated Mass.

What’s not not clear to me is whether any video screen is rugged enough for long-term al fresco display. I also wonder how much energy a 37-foot (diagonal) video screen consumes. Urban Light is powered by solar cells (is there enough spare energy to run Solar Reserve too?) The question isn’t impertinent. Solar Reserve seems to say something about scarce resources, and DiCaprio spoke at the U.N.’s Climate Summit last year.

If Lincoln Center is any indication, Solar Reserve should be popular. In case you’re still not clear on the concept, here’s a video of the piece with the artist’s comments.