What the Geffen Leaves Out

Not at the Geffen: Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles, after 1739. LACMA, gift of Ahmanson Foundation

LACMA's Geffen Galleries opened in late April with expanses of bare concrete wall and empty floor space. If you've not seen it since then, a lot has changed. As of mid June, there are hundreds more artworks on view, along with numerous empty or half-empty display cases awaiting installation.

That makes it hard to address one of the key questions about Michael Govan's thematic installation philosophy. Will it manage to keep nearly all the most interesting, significant, and popular pieces on view? (I speak of light-tolerant sculptures, paintings, and ceramics that aren't on loan or installed elsewhere on the LACMA campus.) The concern is that prize works may remain in storage because they don't happen to fit the current set of themes. 

William Ahmanson, president of the Ahmanson Foundation, preferred a more traditional display. "Our greatest concern," he told the Los Angeles Times, "is that the public has access to the art we've provided throughout LACMA's history." In 2020 this disagreement boiled over with the Ahmanson Foundation halting its support of LACMA acquisitions. 

Since the Geffen Galleries opened, Govan's installation strategy has been met with critical praise (mostly) and public acquiescence (at least). But some of the misgivings have proved pertinent.

Of about 139 Ahmanson Foundation gifts of European painting and sculpture listed on LACMA's collection site, 47 are now on view in the Geffen. That's about a third of the total. The ratio seems small, given that the Ahmanson trove is not a typical private collection with many lesser or idiosyncratic choices. Nearly all the Ahmanson gifts were chosen by LACMA curators and purchased with foundation money, often 7-figure sums.

Even more striking are a handful of big-name omissions. Not in the Geffen's inaugural display are LACMA's only paintings by Titian, Watteau, Chardin, and Canaletto. All are Ahmanson gifts. The Chardin Soap Bubbles (top of post) is superlative, arguably better than the versions in New York and Washington—which are always on view at those institutions, barring loans or conservation treatment.

Titian, Portrait of Giacomo di Andrea Dolfin, about 1531.

LACMA's Titian was good enough for sculptor Antonio Canova, who owned it in the early 19th century.

Gerrit van Honthorst, The Mocking of Christ, about 1617

Also missing are two Ahmanson Dutch paintings by artists who aren't household names: Hendrik Goltzius' The Sleeping Danäe and Gerrit van Honthorst's The Mocking of Christ. Both are world-class masterworks that would easily rate wall space at the Rijksmuseum.

John Singleton Copley, Portrait of a Lady, 1771. LACMA

The same applies to other areas of collecting. LACMA has three paintings by John Singleton Copley, the consummate portraitist of early America. Each is a solid museum picture, and not one is currently on view. 

John Frederick Peto, HSP's Rack Picture, about 1900

Absent is the collection's one masterpiece of American trompe l'oeil, HSP's Rack Picture by John Frederick Peto. It was selected by LACMA curators and purchased with funds supplied by Cecile Bartman, the institution's greatest patron of American painting.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Daniel in the Lions' Den, 1907–1918 

Henry Ossawa Tanner's Daniel in the Lions' Den was important enough to lend to the Huntington during Geffen construction. It's LACMA's most notable work by an African-American artist prior to the Harlem Renaissance, and it's still off view.

Why didn't Titian or Tanner make the cut? Unlike a traditional museum, the Geffen has no default space for 16th-century Venice or early 20th-century American expatriates in Paris. Instead is it organized according to changing themes like "Grandeur in Sacred Spaces" and "Labor and Leisure in the American Metropolis." As a secular portrait of an obscure sitter, the Titian is not especially grand or sacred. Other Renaissance portraits, by Petrus Christus, Holbein, and Tintoretto, are also left out of the inaugural installation. (And yes, they're the only paintings by these artists at LACMA.)

Not just a Biblical illustration, the Tanner is an allegory of Black America, drawing on Frederick Douglass' description of emancipation as "escaping from a den of hungry lions." Tanner studied with Thomas Eakins, whose Wrestlers (bought with Bartman funds) is in the "Labor and Leisure" room. But the Tanner is a picture of lions, not labor or leisure; and it's set in the ancient past, not the modern metropolis. That apparently disqualifies it this time around. 

The appeal of the thematic approach is that it presents artworks in novel contexts. Each installation is a new shift of the kaleidoscope. I don't see that this premise depends on keeping a tranche of important works off view for each rotation. As it is, most of the themes are fluid and open to interpretation. If curators hung the Titian portrait next to the two Veronese allegories in "Mediterranean Crossings," would any visitor say hey, that doesn't fit the theme!? 

"Mediterranean Crossings" with newly installed artworks