LACMA Turns 60
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| LACMA postcard, about 1969. Everything you see here has been torn down. (Aside from Norbert Kricke's Space Sculpture, left of center) |
A familiar cliché holds that Los Angeles is a young city that got a late start in building cultural infrastructure. Maybe it's time to rethink that as LACMA marks its 60th anniversary.
The milestone isn't getting much fanfare. All eyes are on the impending debut of Peter Zumthor's transformed campus. But at its March 31, 1965, opening, LACMA was touted as the first major U.S. art museum built since the National Gallery of Art (opened 1941). It is, I think, still fair to say that LACMA is the nation's youngest big civic art museum of general scope. While such important institutions as Fort Worth's Kimbell and Miami's Pérez are newer, the former is a masterpiece collection of a few hundred objects, and the latter is contemporary art only.
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| Current ages of some metropolitan art museums |
LACMA's newness is pitched as an asset (think "unburdened by what has been.") It is equally handy as an excuse when Easterners complain about a spotty collection or a too-contemporary exhibition program. Yet LACMA is not so new as some suppose. It was spun off from the Exposition Park institution that opened its doors in 1913 as the Los Angeles Historical and Art Museum.
LACMA's origin story tends to write off the Exposition Park museum's art division. Prior to the Wilshire Blvd. museum, we're told, the paintings took a back seat to the dinosaurs and dioramas. Yet the Exposition Park museum managed to organize loan exhibitions devoted to Goya, Renoir, van Gogh, Rubens and van Dyck, and even, incredibly, Leonardo da Vinci. The Eurocentric focus aside, it's rare for today's bigger, better LACMA to do monographic shows of boldface art-historical names.
The Exposition Park museum attracted such astute and ambitious directors as William Valentiner and Richard F. Brown. It's true that Valentiner pronounced the collections "deplorable." He and his successors set about remedying that. Donations of art from William Randolph Hearst, "Buddy" DeSylva, and others justified building a museum just for art.
If you count its Exposition Park prehistory, LACMA is effectively 112 years old. That's not young—it's close to the median for big-city American art museums. It's time to admit that LACMA is a grown-up institution worthy of being judged alongside its peers.
Comments
I would counsel that LACMA focus not on "boldface" names, whatever they are, and instead prepare a show and monograph on less familiar masters whose greatness IS reflected in works that LACMA already possesses. That would go a long way toward making a meaningful contribution to the art-historical literature in English, and it would also convince Angelenos that LACMA's collection is important.
Pick any master, to name a selection:
Anton Raphael Mengs
Ernest Lawson
Simon Vouet
Sebastiano Ricci
Giorgio Vasari
Frans Snyders
Robert Henri
Narcisse-Virgilio Díaz de la Peña
Arnold Böcklin
Jan van Huysum
Jan Porcellis
Emmanuel de Witte
Alonso Cano
Hubert Robert
Charles Le Brun
Joaquin Wtewael
George Bellows
Pierre Subleyras
Tanzio da Varallo
> better LACMA to do
> monographic shows of
> boldface art-historical
> names.
> It's time to admit that
> LACMA is a grown-up
> institution worthy of
> being judged alongside
> its peers.
Between the still non-mature collections, the never-ending any-city-USA exhibits of contemporary art and the potentially wacky nature of the Geffen Galleries, LACMA being judged alongside its so-called peers is asking for audacious-type trouble. But a preview of the Geffen in the upcoming months may give the public a better idea of what the museum's future is going to be all about.
However, as with Urban Lights (which I originally yawned about compared with the kinetic-type moat and fountains of the old LACMA), I predict it will do well as a TikTok/Instagram/Snapchat-type place.
Is there a patron who would attach his/her name and money to advancing the rep of a lesser artist?
Is there anything new to be said about that artist? It is crucial to note that exhibitions are not just about displaying art, but highlighting recent scholarship or a new interpretation of the artist's work. They are lesser artists for a reason; their work does not foster prolonged study.
--- J. Garcin
That word appears nowhere in my message, and there's a reason: A "less familiar master" is in no way lesser, in my estimation.
The majority of Europe's great painters never have had a monograph treatment. Or, if they have, the title is in a language other than English.
I can't count the number of artists whose rich story is found only in thousands of American and British Ph.D. dissertations. LACMA could correct that. Excelsior!
To most public viewers of art, unless there's a frig magnet of a painter's work to buy in the museum shop, they're "lesser." Sad. You're missing out.
Guess what? Never gonna happen. But it's not just later arrivals, like the Californians.
Even the Met will never match Europe. And the Met's Italian paintings collection will never even match Washington's National Gallery, because the country's greatest and richest treasures in that field -- Kress, Widener, et al. -- all went to DC.
Be thankful, and grateful for what you have. There is so much to learn at LACMA. Own it.
> think their museum is a
> dump...
I'd be happy if they just stopped the years-long trend of "LACMA has transitioned to a de facto contemporary art museum...[b]ut not a very good one."
I like contemporary art as much as the next person, but too much of it in the museums of LA is becoming wearisome. It's the flip-side extreme of the Louvre. So many old-time artworks are piled into that place in Paris, they actually become sort of unpleasant. Analogous to a person wearing too much perfume becomes unpleasant.
However, I'd rather have too much than too little of a good thing. But a lot of the contemporary art in LA is best left to a museum like the Broad. As for MOCA on Grand Ave, it doesn't have enough on display, period.
Meanwhile, I'm curious what the Lucas museum will be all about. I kind of grimace that it might become a variation of Laguna's Pageant of the Masters, well-intentioned but neither fish nor fowl. But in its own way, LACMA and its Geffen Galleries may end up in similar company too.
The building's huge expanse of a sun-baked concrete roof could become a second (or third) level, but that will never happen. That's likely not even technically or logistically possible either. Not sure if Govan's insistence about a museum ideally having only one level is going to come back and haunt LACMA in the future.
Zumthor's design doesn't seem to do enough to make the Geffen more interwoven with the Broad, Resnick and Japanese (Price) buildings. As for Renzo Piano's central court (reminiscent of an LA grade-school cafeteria), I wonder how that will be affected by the Geffen? I thought Zumthor's plan should have somehow pushed that out and replaced it with the areas around the 2 pylons.
The other mis-take here is to think a dissertation on a lesser artist means he or she must be great. No, it just means that it is more convenient to write a dissertation on a lesser artist because there are more things to say simply by virtue of the fact that no one has ventured before. Plus, in some programs, arguments in art history are still heavily beholden to the practice of connoisseurship. One can practice connoisseurship with any object: comic books, toasters, etc. Significance or importance cannot be established through connoisseurship.
--- J. Garcin
The Met grew as the wealth/collections and sense of civic pride of its patrons grew. That was the main story that the Met told in its exhibition "Making the Met, 1870-2020." See the catalogue.
By comparison, LACMA's history is not so storied. So many missed opportunities: the Norton Simon Collection, the Arensberg Collection, the Annenberg Collection. Some bad decisions: selecting Pereira over van der Rohe. So many short-sighted patrons: Howard Ahmanson, the Ahmanson Foundation, and even Eli Broad.
If the Met is the model here, you can't build a great museum that way. LACMA will just have to figure out some other way. That's the thinking behind the Zumthor building. And for maybe the first time in its history, the patrons in LA (if not the public) saw the future and funded a promising idea for a great museum.
--- J. Garcin
> patrons: Howard Ahmanson,
> the Ahmanson Foundation,
> and even Eli Broad.
I disagree about those people or entities hurting LACMA. By contrast, folks like Michael Govan and their creative-political (not budgetary---which is somewhat excusable) embrace of contemporary art are hurting the museum way more.
Beyond that, some of the nature of LA vis-a-vie other cities, particularly of the Eastern US and Europe, is that it's relatively young. I recall a TV talk show host asking a celebrity about why that was and she quipped something like, "doesn't that have to do with the pilgrims?"
Cultural and economic trends during any period of time - or with roots in centuries - are unpredictable. Also, natural disasters affect outcomes too. I read that the long history of Rome has been as much affected by earthquakes as it necessarily has been by wars, pillage or famine.
The huge fires in January and things like the ailing movie-entertainment industry are flies in LA's ointment.
> to exhibitions of classical
> works skews to educational
> groups and older audiences.
I wonder what the attendance stats are for the various types of displays at LACMA, particularly in the Resnick building? For any museum, I believe impressionist art generally ranks as the most popular. For the TikTok or Instagram crowd, that and the type of stuff found at the LA Art Fair (LA Convention Center in February) will be more than good enough for LACMA.
Most of its special exhibitions, however, rarely seem as though they're must-see. They're more business-as-usual, more same-'ol, same-'ol. More like a LACMA version of Hauser & Wirth instead of a [insert name of top-caliber museum here].