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| Rogier van der Weyden, Virgin and Child, about 1460. The Huntington |
Rogier van der Weyden's
Virgin and Child is the most important Early Netherlandish painting in Los Angeles. Yet it's often missed by Huntington visitors, more focused on
Blue Boy, corpse lilies, and whatnot. The van der Weyden painting is almost never loaned, but it will make a 30-mile trip to the Getty Center for "The Holy Family at Home" (Sep. 22, 2026–Jan. 10, 2027). The exhibition is built around Gerard David's
The Holy Family, acquired by the Getty in 2023. It brings together manuscript illuminations and panel paintings demonstrating the development of the theme in northern Europe.
The van der Weyden was featured among international loans in a 2013 show, "Face to Face: Flanders, Florence and Renaissance Painting." That was organized by the Huntington, so the painting didn't leave the campus.
Comments
I didn't fully realize just how weak LACMA in particular has been until I browsed over the special exhibits hosted during merely the past few years by the Met on 5th Avenue.
Govan and his staffers, however, couldn't care less. Although they've been thumped on for several years by the now-retried art critic of the LA Times, they do things like having people ride bicycles and skateboards in their new main building.
If a contemporary artist riffs on a van der Weyden, LACMA might purchase that work and hang it near their piece that riffs on ancient Egyptian statuary, not far from an object that riffs on ancient Indian statuary, All surrounded by lots and lots of barren gray concrete walls and barren gray concrete floors.
... The Getty ranked #5. The Getty ranked below the Art Institute/Chicago, MoMA, and the Met. The Met was #1.
The highest-ranked college museum was the Yale Art Gallery (#24).
--- J. Garcin
The Whitney is too high.
I love distemper as a medium.
Similarly, I hope the Met's rank derives also from its stand-alone Lehman and Linsky Collections.
Indeed, when the Met soon subsumes the Neue Galerie Collection, I would be prepared to venture that no other collection but the Louvre's could rival it.
SFMOMA has fallen off too, not even top 30?
LACMA top 10 is about right.
> of pace if you disappeared
> from the comment section.
You mean me? How rude.
Unless you're Ted G or J Garcin posting without a sig line, you generally don't bother responding to this blog's entries. W Poundstone's site deserves lots of replies or commentary.
X or Instagram has posts that receive lots of comments from readers, Youtube has single videos that generate thousands of replies. A Facebook account last year had an entry about the preview of the vacant Geffen Galleries that received way more readers' commentary than I saw elsewhere.
As for the way LACMA is rated, I've seen its collections through the years described as paltry or unimpressive. Such as the description given this week by a writer for architectmagazine .com---okay, maybe not into the subject of the visual arts per se, but close enough.
Unlike other museums, particularly ones built even in smaller cities during the age of Beaux-Arts, LACMA have never had a professional setting. So whether its collections are A grade or C grade, the clunky Pereira-era backdrop or now the flaky Zumthor-era backdrop gives artworks on display an automatically reduced or less impressive quality.
LACMA has gone from "tract house" to "parking garage."
However, even though museums like Fine Arts Houston or Institute of Arts Minneapolis (much less the A-ranked ones) have long had a more first-class setting than LACMA, I'd rate today's LACMA as less of a slog. It's not the too-much, too-much overkill of a Louvre.
But I can see casual visitors to art museums finding themselves less impressed by LACMA (1965-2026) than, for comparison, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (1924-2020).
Wikepedia:
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is the oldest art museum in Texas... The first museum building was opened to the public in 1924... By gallery space, it is the ninth-largest museum in the world, and the second-largest art museum in the Americas. Following an eight-year campus redevelopment project in the 21st century, the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building opened in 2020. [End quote]
^ LACMA has described itself as the largest art museum west of the Mississippi. If I'm not mistaken, Houston is west of the Mississippi too.
"You mean me? How rude.": He should trademark that.
@Ted ... The Hater's, beloved MFA Houston was #28, 18 places below LACMA.
--- J. Garcin
*
Quite surprised Nelson-Atkins didn't make the list. Another outstanding collection, on par with Cleveland, to my mind.
Frick could never achieve that.
> Houston was #28, 18 places
> below LACMA.
Speaking of haters, I recall your dismissing the Ahmanson Foundation, an organization that has donated - via mainly by providing funds - some of the most important artworks in LACMA's collection. Which means you therefore ipso facto dismiss the quality of LACMA's collection.
It also implies you dismiss the advice of various curators and directors of LACMA who through the decades have worked with the Ahmanson Foundation too. But since you've implied it's of rube caliber, hee-haw, sooie, sooie, and [insert banjo music from the movie Deliverance here].
And lists of the best this or top-25 that are so affected by personal taste/experience, regionalism-provincialism and politics/power plays, their objectivity is always open to question.
I wish there was one here at the Met.
... At the Met, it's the Death of Socrates. At MoMA, it's Red Studio. At the Barnes, it's the Joy of Life...
--- J. Garcin
...At the Met, it's "The Marriage Feast at Cana" by Juan de Flandes (Netherlandish), ca. 1497; or instead "Portrait of a Man, Possibly an Architect or Geographer" by Peter Paul Rubens, 1597. [They're both tiny.] Both ex coll. Linsky.
The Met's no longer exists, taken over by the Costume Institute..an acceptable trade-off.