Los Angeles County Museum on Fire

Burn Notice

2010-08-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (this blog, not that painting) has moved to ArtInfo. Just click on the new address (blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire) and you're there.

Beach Reading

2010-08-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

LACMA's new Alex Katz, Round Hill (small detail above), features a literary product placement: a copy of Troilus and Cressida, specifically the Pelican Shakespeare paperback. It falls into the small category of paintings that incorporate books as prominent subject matter. As Sontag said, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Paintings of books have always intrigued art's interpreters—more than anyone else—for these works appear to promise that a mere text can unlock the mystery of art.
Vincent van Gogh may be the best-known painter of books to today's audiences. He slipped contemporary novels into the foreground of many of his floral still-lifes. A unique example of an all-book subject is Still Life with Bible (1885) in the van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Generations of critics have held it up as an emblem of the artist's conflict between old-time religion and modern secularism. The small yellow softcover is Emile Zola's La Joie de Vivre. Hollywood would adapt/mangle that conflict into Lust for Life (1956).
Not so long after Van Gogh, the American John Frederick Peto invented a different sort of book painting in which he effaced titles and all other distinguishing marks from books. (Left, In the Library, Timken Museum, San Diego.) Peto presented books as victims of chance, decay, and entropy. In the twentieth century, text became a ubiquitous element of painting, from cubism to pop to postmoderism. But it was mostly low-brow, pop-culture texts, from signs and ads and movies, that drove the century's art. John Baldessari's 1968 photo-painting of Artforum magazine (This is Not to Be Looked At, MOCA) is the polar opposite of Van Gogh's earnest homages. In this respect, Peto looks more contemporary: He Photoshop'ed out book titles the way that contemporary practitioners coin art by erasing texts from magazine ads and TV commercials.
What did Alex Katz intend by painting Troilus and Cressida into his 1977 beach idyll? The play is a revisionist account of the Trojan War, the oldest tale in the Western tradition. When Katz painted Round Hill, the educated viewer would have seen the book as a signifier of advanced taste, and not just because the play was relatively little-known. A decade before Katz's painting Joyce Carol Oates wrote,

"Troilus and Cressida, that most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays, strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential are themes of the twentieth century.… Shakespeare shows in this darkest and least satisfying of his tragedies the modern, ironic, nihilistic spectacle of man diminished, not exalted.… This is tragedy of a special sort—the 'tragedy' the basis of which is the impossibility of conventional tragedy."

In recent years, productions of Troilus and Cressida have proliferated and have sometimes drawn sell-out crowds. What's interesting is that Katz was ahead of the literary curve, or at least on top of it. Van Gogh wasn't, and practically no once since would have even cared to be.

Change of Address

2010-08-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

Next Monday, August 23, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire is moving to ArtInfo. Aside from a design refresh and some heftier servers, nothing will be changing. LACM on Fire will continue to offer a unique perspective on Los Angeles art and institutions, now in the company of blogs by Tyler Green, Jason Edward Kaufman, Homa Nasab, and Andrew Russeth. ArtInfo will host the complete archives as well as all new posts. Check here for further details. The new address is blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire. Once the link is active, all you'll have to do is click and change your bookmarks.

Brooklyn Curators Sign “Work of Art”

2010-08-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

Followers of Bravo TV's Work of Art may have noted that the Brooklyn Museum's curators have kept the reality show at arm's length. The series' grand prize was of course a one-artist show, and Abdi Farah won it. His exhibition opened this weekend in Brooklyn. The art is, uh, about what you saw on TV. The surprise is that the museum's curators are now embracing the zeitgeist. Two large text panels flanking the entrance are credited to the museum's Charles Desmarais and Eugenie Tsai. The copy has the unnaturally cheery affect of a political prisoner forced to write upbeat letters to home. "Desmarais"—if it is Desmarais—writes,

"Though it may seem an unconventional presentation, contests such as Work of Art are not unfamiliar to art museums. In nineteenth-century France, the principal route to prominence for an artist was to enter his or (rarely) her work in a competition held every year or two at the Louvre… [Goes on to argue that the Paris Salon = reality TV.] Work of Art is a direct descendant of the juried-exhibition tradition… [Goes on to name check the TV show jurors, known to anyone who's taken the subway to Brooklyn for this goddamn thing.]

"The world changes constantly, and art changes with it, as do the ways audiences engage with art. Reality television—in this case, the on-camera interactions between artists, critics, and dealers—offers a dynamic new way for viewers to encounter works of art."

You might have feared/hoped that the winning artist would be as profoundly embarrassing as was Work of Art itself. Not really. Farah's work may be pegged as "art school," serious and fashionably derivative. He's 22, OK? The floor sculptures, of fallen youths wearing tennis shoes, vaguely recall Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman. It could have been so much worse, and it's not.Work of Art has occasioned "end of civilization" hyperbole. The fact is that artists less seasoned than Farah land museum shows every year, for reasons less public but no less absurd. Brooklyn's Farah show is more defensible than LACMA's 2002 exhibition of Farrah Fawcett (and Keith Edmier, also more-or-less inspired by a TV show).
Farah, Farrah, whatever. The Brooklyn Museum's presentation of contemporary art has never been stronger. Across the hall is a survey of late Warhol. Drawn from Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, it's far from definitive, but it makes a compelling case for the post-1968 Warhol that not many love. On the floor below is Kiki Smith, plus a newish presentation of contemporary art from the permanent collection. It's impressive and strong in Brooklyn artists, artists of color, and women artists. A great Francis Bacon hangs amongst artists who are—for now—less famous than Abdi Farah is.
In a saner world, a single Farah might have been slipped seamlessly into this survey. Farah's fallen figures can be read as the road kill to the art world's up-and-down fame game—as a sardonic denouement to another Brooklyn work, Kehinde Wiley's 2003 ceiling painting, Go.

The Puzzling Paradox of Broad’s Basement

2010-08-12T04:43:00.000-07:00

"If 90% of your work is in storage you need to begin lending it to other institutions. Get art out of the basements."
—Eli Broad, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums, New York

The Hilbert Hotel is always full, yet it always has room for one more guest. It appears that Eli Broad has taken a leaf from this famous paradox (or maybe he saw Inception). Broad has an equally mind-bending plan for getting all the nation's art out of museum basements. Just lend it to other museums.
Museum #1 wants to show the great art it's got in storage. To do that, it must find a place to put the art it's already displaying in its exhibition galleries. It lends that art to Museum #2. This means that Museum #2 needs to free up space, so it lends the art it was exhibiting to Museum #3. And so on, and so on.
This isn't Broad's idea, it's David Hilbert's. His hotelkeeper can always free up a room by moving every guest from room N to room N+1. Needless to say, Hilbert was a mathematician, not a hotelkeeper. There's a fairly serious catch. Hilbert's scheme works only when the hotel has an infinite number of rooms.
Broad has long struck the quasi-populist note that evil, elitist museum directors are scheming to put art (Broad's art!) in storage. He's used this versatile talking point to justify yanking his collection from BCAM and building yet another museum to house it. (The new museum will reportedly be smaller than BCAM: Broad is a man of many paradoxes.) Broad talks as if everything in his 2000-piece collection can and must eventually be on permanent view. The art that's not in his planned museum will be lent out, notwithstanding the fact that this would require the equivalent of about ten Whitney Museums, sitting empty out in the hinterlands.
The bottom line is that there is more art than museum space to show it. Thus museum installations, particularly of contemporary art, are ever-changing and (to use the fashionable term) "curated." What's so bad about that?

Glendale and Kitsch

2010-08-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

Look up "kitsch" in the dictionary — the Grove Dictionary of Art — and you'll find that Los Angeles is mentioned.

"Straightforward printed reproductions of famous paintings are not in themselves kitsch, but objects that adapt high art images from one medium to another are paradigmatically kitsch, for instance plastic or fibreglass sculptural renderings of Dürer’s Study of Praying Hands, Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495–7; Milan, S Maria della Grazie) executed in tapestry, or stained glass, such as that at the Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Los Angeles…"

OK, the Forest Lawn Last Supper is as good an example of kitsch as you could ask for. It's the work of twentieth-century stained glass artisan Rosa Caselli Moretti (her surname ironically evocative of Giovanni Morelli, founder of connoisseurship). But no, Moretti's Last Supper isn't in Los Angeles. It's in Glendale. Same difference? Well it's hard to imagine the Grove saying the "Monuments of Passaic" are in New York.
Also in Glendale is Ernesto Gazzeri's unforgettably titled sculpture, The Mystery of Life, a Forest Lawn "original." To the art world, neither Gazzeri nor his sculpture are nearly so well known as Garry Winogrand's 1964 photograph of the marble group. The usual title of the Winogrand photo is Forest Lawn Cemetery, Los Angeles. There is unquestionably a treasure trove of kitsch in Los Angeles, and there's even another kitsch-packed branch of Forest Lawn within city limits (in Hollywood Hills)… but maybe it's time to give Glendale its due?

National Brotherhood Week

2010-08-06T03:42:00.000-07:00

[The Museum of Tolerance promotes tolerance] "just as building health clubs promoted health."
—Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Jerusalem branch of L.A.'s Museum of Tolerance, which is built on an ancient Muslim graveyard. Schwarzenegger spoke at the 2004 groundbreaking. Since then hundreds of skeletons have been exhumed from the site.

Mr. Cut-Up

2010-08-03T15:53:00.002-07:00

New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art is doing a show on Brion Gysin, the artist who's best known for his collaborations with Beat writer William S. Burroughs. An entire room is given over to a loan from LACMA, The Third Mind. This was one of the most unusual acquisitions of legendary photography curator Robert Sobieszek. An avid Burroughs fan, Sobieszek managed to buy it even though it barely qualifies as photography. It consists of collages for an illustrated book that Burroughs and Gysin intended to publish. The "photos," such as they are, are tiny snapshots or pictures clipped out of newspapers. When The Third Mind was shown at LACMA, in Sobieszek's 1996 "Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts," the spotlight was on Burroughs' involvement with the visual arts. The New Museum show reveals Gysin as an interesting artist in his own right — and most likely the primary creator of the collages in The Third Mind.
Why isn't Gysin better known? At age 19, he got a chance to appear in a Surrealist group show in Paris. Gysin's works were to be hung alongside those of de Chirico, Duchamp, Man Ray, Tanguy, Picasso, Dalí, Ernst, and Magritte. Not a bad debut, right? The day before the opening Andre Breton decided he didn't like Gysin's art. He demanded that the works be taken down. Gysin's career never recovered.
Ironically, Gysin is best known for his influence on literature. It was he who invented the cut-up technique that Burroughs used to scramble his prose. Gysin's most famous aphorism is now common wisdom: "Writing is fifty years behind painting," he said. But that may be his second-most famous text. Gysin also submitted the recipe for what's come to be called Alice B. Toklas' brownies.

Clara and Louise

2010-07-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

LACMA has just doubled its representation of pre-1800 women artists. The latest Ahmanson Foundation gift is a still-life by Louise Moillon, Basket of Peaches, with Quinces and Plums (after 1641). It joins the museum's sole other female "Old Master," Clara Peeters, and might help to make sense of the peculiar painting by Moillon's lesser-known brother that the museum bought last year. There are two other Louise Moillon still-lifes in Pasadena, acquired by the prescient Norton Simon.
The Ahmanson Foundation must be on a Louise kick. Not yet on view is a 2009 gift, Jean-Joseph Carriès' Portrait of Loyse Labbé (more often spelled Louise Labé). Made around 1887, it's an imaginary portrait of the great female poet of the French renaissance. Labé, daughter and husband to wealthy ropemakers in Lyons, was also known as La Belle Cordière ("the Beautiful Ropemaker") and the French Sappho. Like Joan of Arc, she dressed like a man and fought for the Dauphin. There also seems to have been a famous whore nicknamed La Belle Cordière, and a 16th-century urban legend claimed the courtesan and the poet were the same. Even more improbable is a more recent scholarly theory claiming that Labé did not write the poems published in her name. They were supposedly the work of a consortium of male poets. Labé and her mystery must have appealed to Carriès, who also lived in Lyons. His stoneware bust makes an interesting comparison to the roughly contemporary sculptures of Jean-Léon Gérôme now at the Getty. Both artists reacted to the age of photography by creating hyperrealist sculptures that can be offputting. It's hard to say whether the long-dead Labé would have appreciated the batwing outline and beatific expression Carriés gave her. (Sarah Bernhardt apparently had no problem with the kitsch atrocity that Gérôme created in her image.) Unlike Gérôme, Carriès used realism as a vehicle for a pessimistic and philosophical imagination. He found a congenial subject in Labé, a woman about whom everything we know may be wrong.

How LACMA Got “The Wrestlers”

2010-07-24T14:34:00.000-07:00

Thomas Eakins' The Wrestlers is the greatest American painting in LACMA's collection. Amazingly, it was once the greatest painting in two other museums' collections — both of which sold it to raise money. MOMA doesn't deaccession Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Why did two museums sell The Wrestlers?
LACMA curator Ilene Susan Fort now gives the back story in an unusually candid article, "Wither the Wrestlers?" published in June's American Quarterly. (Unfortunately, it's not online.)
Eakins painted The Wrestlers in 1899 and gave it to the National Academy of Design in 1902. It was a "diploma picture," a gift required of newly elected academicians. The NAD has thereby assembled a considerable collection of American art, which it exhibits in a small museum in Manhattan. In 1968 the NAD put The Wrestlers on the market, and in 1970, it was snapped up by the Columbus Museum of Art. They too sold it in 2005. Meanwhile, LACMA patron Cecile Bartman was thinking of buying the museum a Hopper. (Edward, not Dennis.) When The Wrestlers became available, she recognized its capital importance and funded the purchase in 2006.
What makes this history particularly puzzling is that Eakins has never really been out of favor. Museums dumped Hudson River and trompe l'oeil paintings in the early 20th century, believing them to be irrelevant in the modern age. Yet Eakins' reputation sailed ever higher. The soaring market value of Eakins' paintings must have tempted NAD and Columbus to sell. Still, that can't be the whole explanation.
It turns out the NAD wasn't crazy about Eakins' gift. Fort cites a 1930 letter in which NAD's secretary, Charles C. Curran, tried to talk the College Art Association out of borrowing The Wrestlers for a show: “I cannot say that it is a very fine example of his work.” Curran proposed instead the “much finer” self-portrait (pictured), which remains in the NAD collection.
The NAD is a funny place. It's housed in the Fifth Avenue mansion of Archer Milton Huntington, the possibly bastard son of Arabella Huntington. (The father may or may not have been Collis P. Huntington, uncle to Henry.) There's no permanent space for the NAD collection. As the years went by, the NAD became a bastion of conservative, representational art. Many New York museum goers have never been there.
That must be why there wasn't much of an outcry when The Wrestlers left New York. The NAD said it needed the money to conserve and frame paintings for exhibition. Fort reports that two Academy members, artists Joseph Hirsch and John Koch, protested — but that was about it. The NAD required that the painting be sold to a museum. The lucky beneficiary was the Columbus Museum of Art.
Columbus has one of the best U.S. museums for a city of its size (over 700,000). Its American collection is arguably better than LACMA's. Up until 2005, there was no "arguably" about it, not when Columbus had The Wrestlers and LACMA didn't. Then Columbus sold the great Eakins. The reason was an opportunity to purchase the collection of politically edged representational art assembled by Chicagoans Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller. The Schillers collected many of the overlooked artists the NAD champions — Rockwell Kent, George Tooker, Ivan Albright — as well a greater number of lesser figures (pictured, Tooker's Lunch, 1964).
Was it a good trade for Columbus? It's hard to overstate how fantastic the Schiller trove is — but no, you shouldn't trade away the picture that put Columbus on the map.
In the American Quarterly article, Fort writes,

"Was the selection of Wrestlers based solely on market value, or was there another determining factor? The museum has remained silent on the matter, explaining only that the painting was “increasingly isolated from the collection.” I would like to suggest that Columbus chose Wrestlers over any other realist painting because of the changing scholarly perspectives on the artist.… With this new perception, the two figures struggling in a wrestling hold come to symbolize the artist and his own psychological battles, among them, Eakins the straight man versus the homosexual. Although Internet sources rate Columbus a “gay friendly community for travelers,” and the region has a significant gay and lesbian population… the questions raised by Eakins’s biography and by the suggestions of homoeroticism in his work have tended to isolate art such as this. The painting thus became an image inappropriate for a moderate-size art museum in middle America."

If Fort is right, homophobia landed LACMA the best American painting west of… uh, another Eakins painting of naked guys in Fort Worth. But with Eakins, nothing is simple. His homosexuality (like that of John Singer Sargent) is a matter of plausible conjecture, not fact. In fairness to Columbus, they swapped The Wrestlers for Schiller works by Tooker and Paul Cadmus, who have to qualify as "gayer" than Eakins.
Like any great work of art, The Wrestlers resists any single reading. The last of Eakins' sporting pictures, it's the most engimatic — five figures, and nobody's face is visible. You can find echoes of Eakins' pictorial puzzle-making in Tooker's faceless crowds and in Edward Biberman's Conspiracy (c. 1955, below). Biberman, brother of a blacklisted screenwriter, based it on the McCarthy hearings and that era's closeted antihero, Roy Cohn.

CalArts, OMG!

2010-07-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

In 1970 CalArts hired John Baldessari to teach what became his legendary post-studio art class. LACMA's Unframed blog has reminiscences from Baldessari and famous students. For a completely different take on early CalArts, check out this incredible 1964 video. Walt Disney was trying to raise funds to build his dream school of the arts, then proposed for a site opposite the Hollywood Bowl. He did a short promotional film, The CalArts Story, that was presented at the premiere of Mary Poppins. The titles alone are jaw-droppers. The echt-plummy voice of Sebastian Cabot ("Mr. French") leads the viewer on a survey of L.A.'s cultural meccas, existing and planned. There's the pre-Disney Hall Music Center, the not-yet-open "County Art Museum" ("it will attract to its galleries the finest of the world's art treasures"), the never-opened Hollywood Museum, and of course, CalArts. The students' retrosexual outfits are as amazing as Cabot's ruminations on art and society. "The well-trained artist is a decidedly useful member of society."… "Our treasure is talent—a natural resource as precious as diamonds, as valuable as rubies."
Whatever happened to that annual CalArts fashion show?

The Art Trap

2010-07-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

In June The New York Times proclaimed that "Brooklyn Museum's Populism Hasn't Boosted Crowds." Populism is dead? Nope, long live populism. LACMA recently announced it will be hosting the MoMA-organized Tim Burton show (above). MOCA is is showing the art of Dennis Hopper, whom posterity will remember as a great actor, and is enmeshed in a goofy soap opera deal with James Franco, who may or may not be so remembered. On the East Coast, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is doing a show of Norman Rockwell as collected by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and the Metropolitan Museum is drawing crowds with Ringo Starr's gold snare drum.
Museum populism raises two distinct questions. Should populist exhibitions exist? If they should, do they have to be in art museums?
There's more consensus on these issues than you'd think from the tone of the debate. First of all, nobody says there shouldn't be "Star Wars" shows. They should exist as long as somebody's willing to pay for them. The somebody could be the public attending the show, or it could be a billionaire willing to foot the bill. The prime example of that is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who built Seattle's Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. Allen's museum is currently touring a show called "Out of this World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television" that's touching down in some otherwise serious art venues.
To put it another way, the free market should decide how many populist shows we have. But anytime someone mentions the "free market," you've got to ask who's doing the accounting. Museums are non-profit for a reason. With very rare exceptions, exhibitions are not cash cows, and that includes the populist ones. These shows typically occupy galleries funded by another generation's philanthropists, who intended more serious and elevating fare. The venues receive favorable tax treatments on the premise of being educational. Populist shows co-opt the labor of museum staffs, also funded for different and loftier purposes. When museums claim that a motorcycle or movie memorabilia show was a financial success, they usually count restaurant and gift shop sales, new memberships, and so on, without a too-rigorous accounting of what these sales might have been with a more serious show. It's easy for any business plan to succeed when it doesn't count costs, or opportunity costs.
Should populist shows be in art museums? The core audience for a motorcycle show does not care that it's being installed next to Kandinskys, in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed temple of high culture on Fifth Avenue. They'd just as soon it was in a Las Vegas casino, as that show eventually was. The core ("elitist") audience for art museums is, of course, the one that complains about populist shows. They'd rather see Dennis Hopper and Tim Burton's movies than their installations.
That leaves only one micro-constituency for having populist shows in art museums: directors of art museums. While they're at least as elitist as their audiences, they have to consider the numbers. Building attendance is one of the few metrics of a museum director's success. They therefore make an argument that practically no one else does — the "Art Trap" argument, to quote James Franco. It holds that the populist shows will lure crowds who don't normally go to art museums. Once there, they'll realize the museum isn't such a forbidding place; it's for people just like them. A significant fraction will wander through the galleries, looking at real art. Some will become hooked. They'll come back for more serious shows. Maybe they'll become members. It's the old bait and switch.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work. It does work for car dealers. If everyone who watches General Hospital signed up for MOCA membership, that would fix the museum's financial bind, and MOCA's core audience would be pragmatic enough to applaud Deitch's genius. Of course, it's doubtful how many soap fans would segue easily to Latin American light and space and William Leavitt.
It's ultimately an empirical question whether populism works. That's why the Brooklyn Museum history is worth pondering. In his tenure, Lehman has had a deeper, more consistent commitment to populism than almost any other major art museum director. He did shows of Star Wars, hip-hop, rock and roll photography, and Annie Leibovitz. In Lehman's first full year, 1998, the Brooklyn Museum's attendance was 585,000 a year. It soon took a nose dive and has fluctuated ever since. In 2009 attendance was 340,000. The opening of glass-enclosed court in 2004 was supposed to make the museum Brooklyn's living room, and triple attendance. It didn't do much of anything. The only real trend is a steady modest increase due to "First Saturdays," free admission date nights with a bar and movies. It's doubtful whether many First Saturdays people pay much attention to the art. Subtract the First Saturdays numbers and the total attendance trend is down.
The one encouraging number in the Times piece is for ethnic diversity. In 2009 over 40 percent of visitors identified themselves as people of color. That's presumably higher than it was, though still low, given Brooklyn's population. Another way to encourage diversity, which has mostly eluded the Brooklyn Museum, is to put on serious shows by artists of color. (The notable exception is the Brooklyn-organized Basquiat show in 2005.)
"It's the one thing that frustrates me more than almost anything else," Lehman said of the lagging attendance. "I've always felt, 'Where are all the people who should be here?' It's a good question. Brooklyn — like Los Angeles — has became a center of the creative community. The answer is pretty obvious: They're taking the subway to more serious shows in Manhattan. Hereafter, anyone who wants to defend museum populism as a way of building attendance will need to start by explaining why it failed in Brooklyn.

Getty Wins Girtin, Loses Cozens?

2010-07-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

The Telegraph is reporting that the Getty Museum bought a Thomas Girtin watercolor, Durham Cathedral and Bridge, at Sotheby's last week. The sale featured the collection of British fertility doctor Ian Craft, well-known across the pond for his arguably ethical egg-trading schemes. The Getty paid 265,200 pounds. The Telegraph speculates that the museum was also an underbidder for the auction's highest-priced work, a John Cozens watercolor of Lake Albano that went for an incredible 2.4 million pounds. The winner of the Cozens was Baron David Thomson, son of the Anglo-Canadian tycoon who outbid the museum for Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents in 2002.
Between that and the pending purchase of Turner's Modern Rome, the museum is showing unusual interest in British art. Girtin and Turner were the Matisse and Picasso of British watercolors. Girtin died at age 27. Turner said, "had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved."

Bert Cooper’s Freaky Octopus Picture

2010-07-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

Mad Men is one of the few TV series in which the creators know something about art (unlike, say, Work of Art). Not only are the Sterling Cooper offices a wet dream of mid-century modern design, but one of the characters is an art collector. That's founding partner Bert Cooper, played by Robert Morse. He's an Ayn Rand-reading Japanophile who covets Rothko as well as traditional Asian art. Cooper's most recherché prize, revealed on the third season's opening episode, is a print of a woman being ravished by two octopuses. Gloating over the acquisition, Cooper asks, "Who is the man who imagined her ecstasy?"
Art historians are still asking that question. There's no mystery about the creator of Cooper's print: It's Katsushika Hokusai, otherwise known for The Great Wave. The octopus print, from 1814, is usually known in the English-speaking world as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. But Hokusai didn't invent the motif of woman having sex with octopus. It's found in netsuke of the 17th century, and its inventor is unknown.
LACMA has a rare pre-Hokusai woodcut of the theme from c. 1773-4, a gift of the late Max Palevsky. Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus by Katsukawa Shusho, above, is more understated than Hokusai's orgy. There's no indication that the woman wants the mollusc's attentions. It's simply a monster-menaced damsel. Hokusai's version is not only more "sensual" (as Cooper describes it) but more feminist (as no one on Mad Men would think to describe it). The woman is enjoying herself more than the octopuses are. Perhaps the message is, tentacles are better than men.
The Bushnell netsuke collection has several related pocket sculptures, all probably post-dating the Hokusai print. A Diving Girl and Octopus, attributed to the Kikugawa family, mid 19th-century, is notable for the post-coital face on the octopus.To many Westerners, any representation of a woman coupling with an octopus will be pornographic. The title of the James Bond flick, Octopussy, barely made it past censors, and the 1990 film Henry and June incurred the first-ever NC-17 rating because it showed the female lead looking at a postcard of the Hokusai print. Not unlike the world of Mad Men, modern Japanese culture blends the button-down salaryman with the libidinous rake. As a pop-culture trope, sex with octopus has probably never been more prevalent than it is in today's Japan. There it mostly falls under the rubric of hentai, the naughty brand of anime. The Western art world knows hentai largely via Takashi Murakami and works such as Miss Ko2 and My Lonesome Cowboy (the pictured sculpture, featured in MOCA's "© Murakami", made $15.2 million in a 2008 Sotheby's auction). Murakami's sculptures are no more louche than the popular hentai imagery in comics, videos, video games, and websites. As to the recent history of so-called tentacle rape imagery, it's hard to top the matter-of-fact tone of this paragraph from the Wikipedia article, "Hentai."

"The Urotsukidoji anime series was created by Toshio Maeda in 1986 and released in America in 1992 by Anime 18. It is most famous for being the first in the tentacle rape genre, though only one scene in the first OVA actually contains any tentacle rape. Tentacle rape was not present in the Urotsukidoji manga, but was featured in a series that he would publish years later called Demon Beast Invasion. Demon Beast Invasion created what might be called the modern paradigm of tentacle porn, in which the elements of sexual assault are emphasized. Maeda explained that he invented the practice to get around strict Japanese censorship regulations, which prohibit the depiction of the penis but apparently do not prohibit showing sexual penetration by a tentacle or similar (often robotic) appendage. Maeda went on to create La Blue Girl, which departs somewhat from its predecessors by lightening the atmosphere with humor, lightly parodying the tentacle rape genre."

In American literature, tentacles have often been a metaphor for the capitalist system. That was the conceit of Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901), a muck-raking tale inspired by the darker side of museum-builder Henry Huntington's Southern Pacific railroad. Over a century later, Rolling Stone characterized Goldman Sachs as a "giant vampire squid." On Mad Men, Bert Cooper says the Hokusai reminds him of the advertising business. We're apparently intended to see it as an emblem of the seductions of our polymorphous consumer economy. Will satisfying the consumer's lust ever make her happy?

Lost in Translation

2010-07-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

Clever: At LACMA's gift shop for "John Baldessari: Pure Beauty," erasers bearing the word WRONG.
Not so clever: At the Met's shop for "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum," similar erasers imprinted with a Picasso signature.

Making the Mammals Dance

2010-07-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

Natural history museums are often dark, windowless, and confusing. Given that, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's new mammals hall is a revelation. Airy and flooded with daylight, it's one of the most appealing museum spaces in Los Angeles.
The hall is a refurbishment of one of the 1913 museum's three wings. The Romanesque arched windows are original fabric; the high-tech skylight is new. To take advantage of all that light, "The Age of Mammals" mixes taxidermy specimens into a palette of bone white and La Brea black. It sounds a little dubious, but it works. The fossil skeletons remain the main attraction, standing up to the cuddly animals and some big-ass flat-screens.The new installation includes objects not shown before, such as its centerpiece, the Simi Valley Mastadon (above). In recent years, suburban real estate development in the hills has been a major source of finds. That's an unintended postscript to the display's environmental pleading.
There's a lot of text, on printed panels and video, but it's sometimes unclear what's real and what's not. Like Italian panel paintings, fossil skeletons are usually a patchwork of the real thing and artfully concealed restoration. It's common practice to show casts of fossils, as NHMLA does here with the famous proto-human "Lucy." A visitor who patiently read the labels could go away thinking this is the real Lucy. It's not, of course. Lucy is owned by the National Museum of Ethiopia, and even it shows only a plaster replica. LACMA would never show a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in a way that might allow a visitor to confuse it for the original. Why shouldn't natural history museums be as forthcoming?
The mammal hall adjoins L.A.'s old-school museum moment, the Rotunda. It often stands in for Eastern museums in movies. (In Spiderman, it's where Tobey Maquire is bitten by a radioactive spider.) In the original museum plan, three wings radiated off the Rotunda, one each for science, history, and art. Julia Bracken Wendt's sculpture of Three Muses served as a kind of guidepost. The Rotunda now has a curiosity cabinet exhibit of unusual objects from the collection. On the upper floor is a mini-retrospective of the equally curious American painter Charles R. Knight (1874-1953). Brooklyn-born and legally blind, Knight used special glasses to achieve success as a commercial illustrator in New York. He's best known for iconic paintings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, created for natural history museums nationwide. Knight probably influenced the movies more than Jean-Léon Gérôme did. Special effects maven Ray Harryhausen credited him as an influence. Knight did the La Brea murals for NHMLA (they're now at the Page Museum), which impressed the young Harryhausen. The Rotunda exhibit is a much more modest set of small paintings, Life Through the Ages. Knight did several versions of the set, of which this is the last, created in the mid 1940s, just as abstract expression was starting to change how Americans looked at art. It's possible to see echoes of early Rothko or Baziotes in some of Knight's undersea fantasies. Otherwise, his references are more traditional. Knight presents the distant past as a mix of German romantic snowcapes and Highwaymen tropic paradises. His work is half-naive, half as knowing as a fashion illustration. Like much fashion imagery, Knight's pictures force the comparison to surrealism — what else can you call mid-20th-century imaginings of nature turned strange?
The museum's renovation included much needed work on the stained-glass dome designed by Walter Horace Judson (below). The art wing once boasted an even more celebrated stained glass ceiling by Louis Comfort Tiffany. In 1946 legendary art curator William R. Valentiner organized a loan show of paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck. Valentiner didn't want the Tiffany ceiling's parti-colored light falling on his precious Old Masters. He ordered the Tiffany stained glass discarded — not “deaccessioned,” just ripped out and thrown in the trash. Said Valentiner: “Everybody agrees that it is an ugly feature.”

Tale of Two Cities

2010-07-09T08:18:00.000-07:00

“Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino is a view from above the city from the Capitoline Hill – a view that Emmeline Hallmark, head of Sotheby’s British painting department, said in an interview Wednesday is not unlike the view the Getty itself commands of Los Angeles." —Los Angeles Times

Above, a small detail of the Turner showing livestock at the base of Roman ruins — symbol of the passing of empire. Below, a Getty Center goat above the 405 Freeway — token of "green" land management practices.

Getty Got a Turner, or Maybe Not

2010-07-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Getty Museum was high bidder for J.M.W. Turner's fantastic Modern Rome—Campo Vaccino, auctioned for $45 million at Sotheby's. The Getty press release talks like it's a done deal. Ditto for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal (where Thomas Kren volunteered the unusual-for-Getty detail that the museum hadn't reached its bidding limit). The L.A. Times is more skeptical ("Getty Museum ready to buy J.M.W. Turner masterpiece for $49.9 million--if Brits won't match the price.") Under British law, a U.K. museum or even a private collector could pre-empt the sale by matching the price. The question is, will any British party be willing or able to raise $45 million in this economy?
It can be argued (from an American perspective) that the last thing Britain needs is another Turner. The artist bequeathed the cream of his output to the British nation. It is now at the Tate Gallery (which has about 300 Turner paintings and 30,000 works on paper) and the UK National Gallery. As with Spain and Velazquez, Britain clutched Turner to its bosom too tightly for the artist's own good. Turner's international profile would be a degree higher, were there a few more major Turners not in Britain. You can go to New York and see rooms of Rembrandts and Courbets and Monets. But the Met has just three Turners, and only one of them great. The Huntington Library, that shrine to British art, has two Turner oils.
Britain's museums have modest acquisition funds. They block export when they are able to tap into patriotic sentiment to raise the huge sums required. "Patriotic" need not entail "British." Over the years, the British have claimed country house Raphaels, Titians, and Canovas as patrimony (and in each case, foiled the Getty). Turner is an authentic Englishman. The British are not likely to be less territorial about that.
Still, it's tough to imagine the Tate launching a $45 million campaign to buy its 301st Turner. Modern Rome would make more sense for the London National Gallery, and still more for the National Gallery of Scotland (NGS), Edinburgh, where the painting was on loan since 1978, and which owns no Turner oils. Another Turner painting of Rome is on loan to the NGS from the Earl of Rosebury, the collector who lent Modern Rome.
Edinburgh's population is roughly that of Long Beach. Nevertheless, Edinburgh's and London's National Galleries are jointly raising 100 million pounds to buy two Titians from the Duke of Sutherland, Diana and Actaeon (bought last year) and Diana and Callisto (above; they're still raising the money). In March, when the Modern Rome sale was announced, The Scotsman quoted an unidentified NGS spokesperson: "We are not in a position to acquire it. We have a strong collection of 19th-century British art. We are obviously sorry to see it go, but we have been delighted to show it over the last 30 years."
The $45 million bid was also heavy lifting for the Getty, which hasn't bought anything in that price bracket for over two years. Not in question is what Modern Rome—Campo Vaccino could mean to the Getty collection, if it ever lands there. It would be the Getty's greatest British picture, and the most important work of the Romantic movement. Modern Rome would connect the dots between the antiquities at the Villa and the later art at the Getty Center. Canova's The Three Graces was supposed to do that. The Getty's deal to buy the Canova was nullified in 1994, when its sale price was matched by the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Gallery of Scotland.

Outside the Box at the Japanese Pavilion

2010-07-06T17:06:00.001-07:00

Bruce Goff's organic architecture was made to complement the nature-inspired art in LACMA's Japanese Pavilion. Conservation practice has interposed a profusion of little Lucite boxes between Goff and old Japan. It's welcome news that LACMA is showing its spectacular new Haniwa Horse on a rectangular catwalk, vitrine-free, with no reflections. It becomes only the third free-standing statue in the Pavilion, joining two wood (human) Bosatsus of c. 1100 and later 12th century.
Also on view is the comparably rare set of Oribe plates (below), probably too pocketable to show without glazing.

Terror of the Wax Museum

2010-06-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

LACMA's newly installed room of 18th century Italian painting includes a handsome pietre dure cabinet from the Florentine Ducal Workshops. The cabinet isn't so surprising as the name on the label. It's a loan from the collection of Arthur Gilbert (above right, with wax effigy on left. More on that in a moment.) For longtime museum followers, that's like a voicemail from a half-forgotten, particularly vengeful ex. London-born and Beverly Hills-based Gilbert was one of LACMA's most toxic trustees. A typical Gilbert sound bite, from 1993: “I think everything in the Anderson Building [then the modern and contemporary wing] is junk.” LACMA put up with Gilbert because, in 1975, he promised his capacious collection of historic European silver, pietre dure, micromosaics, and snuffboxes to the museum. The micromosaics rivaled the holdings of the Vatican and the Hermitage. The silver and gold was, well, silver and gold. Gilbert loved guesstimating its current value, always much more than he'd paid and favoring values well into the nine figures. For years, Gilbert's collection was on loan to LACMA, glistening under spotlights in sepulchral, windowless spaces. Gilbert had this kooky, Twilight Saga idea that his artworks shouldn't be exposed to daylight of any kind.
Then in 1996, Gilbert withdrew the loan and revoked the gift. Like many another LACMA trustee, he had convinced himself that the museum did not truly appreciate his collection ("In a nutshell, the place is run by three trustees who are only interested in contemporary work"); that it was a great injustice to the public when any piece was not on permanent view; and that the remedy — naturally, for the sake of said aggrieved public — was to establish a new museum named after said aggrieved trustee.
Gilbert fielded offers from other U.S. museums and his native Britain. The collection would have made sense at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But Gilbert hated the V&A. "It's like a junk shop," he snarked. He finally got the Brits to establish "The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection" in London's stately Somerset House (above). Gilbert donated the collection, the Queen Mother formally accepted in 2000, and Gilbert was duly knighted. He said: "I am not an altruist. And when I die what I have will go to the people of the world, whether they like it or not."
Curious words, and prescient. How much of an audience is there for a boutique museum of 800 works of 16th- through 19th-century European decorative arts of the fussy/precious persuasion? The Somerset House display attracted 200,000 the first year. Then attendance flatlined. It wasn't something the public wanted to see twice.
Gilbert's Somerset House curator, Tim Schroder, had planned a space for changing shows, to encourage repeat visitors. But in a "vigorous exchange of views" Gilbert floated his own idea for the space: a wax replica of Gilbert himself in a simulation of his Beverly Hills office. Gilbert's second wife commissioned the figure from the company that supplied the Hollywood Wax Museum. The Brits bit their tongues, and the waxwork was displayed just as the Gilberts wanted. Another Gilbert opinion/suggestion/demand was that everything of solid gold should be in a separate room, away from mere silver. Art history should defer to the periodic table. Also, advised Gilbert, "most of this stuff should be shown without any light at all."
Gilbert died in Los Angeles in 2001. The collection remained on view in Somerset House through 2008. It was then booted out to make room for — d'oh! — the very sort of contemporary art that Gilbert despised. Gilbert's collection was transferred to — double d'oh! — the Victoria and Albert Museum. Given 17 rooms in Somerset House, it was compressed into four rooms at the V&A. Key pieces were moved elsewhere in the museum, to be shown next to related works.
All of that made perfect sense. Gilbert's collection ran from the sublime to the ridiculous. He loved reproductive micro-mosaics, those copying paintings. His favorite piece of all was a snarling George Stubbs Tiger, rendered in tiny little glass shards. He had a mosaic after an Alma-Tadema.
The V&A now seems to be in the process of farming out Gilbert pieces to any qualified institution that will take them. According to the V&A website,

"Some pieces from this vast collection, including objects made by Paul de Lamerie, will be incorporated into displays elsewhere in the V&A, including the Whiteley Silver Galleries. Some of the silver will be returned on loan to the historic houses for which it was originally made, to Uppark, West Sussex; Belton House, Lincolnshire; Erddig, Wrexham; Shugborough, Staffordshire, and Dunham Massey, Cheshire. Hardstone (pietre dure) objects from the collection will also be on show to the public at the Cliffe Castle Museum in West Yorkshire. Further examples from the collection can also be seen at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton."

In restituting pieces to their country house origins, the V&A is nullifying the activity of Gilbert the collector. That may not be a terrible thing, but it's hard to imagine Gilbert approving. (Was anything proposed by a curator ever to Mr. Arthur Gilbert's taste?)
The moral of the tale is that art finds its level. In the long run, when we are all dead, objects will be displayed and appreciated, or not, according to how much future audiences care to look at them. Collectors and their attorneys are virtually powerless to change that.
The cabinet at LACMA, left, is neither Gilbert's best nor worse. It's good enough to enhance a room with works by the Tiepolos, Canaletto, and Sebastiano Ricci; plus a fantastic rococo mirror that trumps it all. The label describes the Gilbert cabinet as a long-term loan [to LACMA, triple d'oh!] from the Gilbert Collection, on loan to the Victoria and Albert. Somebody at LACMA must have mad diplomacy skills.

The Unbearable Wrongness of Palm Trees

2010-06-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine a world in which everything is the exact opposite of what it is. That's the prolific algorithm behind much modern fiction, used by writers as different as Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. Anyone wanting a visual equivalent should see "John Baldessari: Pure Beauty," a 150-object survey now filling the second floor of LACMA's Broad Contemporary Art Museum. In his text paintings of 1966-1968, Baldessari upturned the rules of composition, technique, and taste. (Above, LACMA's Wrong.) One might think that the use of a palm tree in Wrong was incidental. In fact the LACMA show traces Baldessari's use of palm tree imagery over four decades. Why palms? "I like banal images and I can’t think of anything more banal than a palm tree and an ocean," Baldessari said, speaking of his room-sized installation Brain/Cloud. The role of palms in Baldessari's art is something like the bowler-hatted gents in Magritte, a deadpan embodiment of everyman's taste. In North American culture, palms appear in photos of vacation destinations, of tropical "paradises," and of Hollywood. They symbolize unintellectual hedonism. Palm trees are culture-free, despite growing in Rome and figuring in Old Master interpretations of the Flight into Egypt. There are palms in Gauguin's paintings, though not nearly so many as you might think. Gauguin was equally entranced by the unfamiliar forms of pandanus and breadfruit. Not many palms are to be found in the "Eucalyptus School" of idyllic California landscape painting, either. The equation of palms with paradise cannot be too much older than the "Mad Men" and Highwaymen (pictured, Highwayman James Gibson with a torrid Florida landscape).
At times, palms have been an embarrassment to the more high-minded Angelenos. During the long gestation of the Getty Center, the leadership agonized over whether to have palms on the campus, in no small part over concerns about what New Yorkers would think. The Getty folks ended up giving palms the pollice verso. Baldessari represents the next phase in the evolution of an oppressed minority. Hip-hop used the n-word, gays called themselves queer, and Baldessari made L.A. art with palm trees. The palm trees were intrinsically "wrong" subject matter, discomforting to East- and West Coast viewers. The LACMA venue of this traveling show adds yet another layer of nuance. Under ex-New Yorker Michael Govan, LACMA has reverted to palm tree boosterism. In a 2009 piece in the Huffington Post, Govan or his web minions wrote that "the palm tree has become a powerful cultural object, an iconic image that has drawn legions of people to a beguiling version of paradise." That sentiment finds expression in Robert Irwin's palm garden at LACMA, an apparent irony-free zone. The "curated" palms now butt against Chris Burden's Urban Light. The streetlights even look a little like palms, stark and sociopathic, with a fillip on top.
For Baldessari on Brain/Cloud, see a video on LACMA's Unframed blog. For still more on the aesthetics of inversion, check out the Superman comics' Bizarro Code: "Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"

Bernini + Kitsch = ???

2010-06-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

This summer the UCLA Hammer Museum courtyard is showing Greg Lynn's Fountain, molded from kids' shark and whale toys. It's So. Cal.'s latest translation of Bernini's Trevi Fountain into a lowbrow idiom. Compare Hollywood's Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters' Trevi Fountain.
L.A. might also be implicated in the Orlando Disneyworld/Epcot's Neptune Fountain (bottom), generally understood to be a cost-saving abbreviation of the Trevi. It places a version of Bernini's central figure among dolphins rather than sea horses. In another departure from the source, the architecture is painted Golden Girls peach.

Innocent Eye Test

2010-06-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Getty has done a number of shows resurrecting the reputation of once-successful artists. The latest installment is "The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme." If the intention is to promote Gérôme as an A-list nineteenth century artist, good luck with that. Today Gérôme has two audiences, art historians who use him as a whipping boy for colonialism and racism, and a contemporary bourgeois viewership not so different from the one that made Gérôme a success in his lifetime. In the Venn diagram of art appreciation, the intersection of these circles is just about nil. Surrounding the circles is the larger universe of those who think Gérôme is kitsch, interesting or not so much.
Which type of Gérôme lover/hater are you? Stare deeply into the eyes on the cover of the June 1985 National Geographic. You will appreciate Gérôme in proportion to how much you like Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl."
At any rate, that's the gist of Gérôme's fascinating imperialism: "Those people" are different from us and yet almost the same. Hey, some of them are good-looking.
There's a frisson in contemplating Wagner's antisemitism because we care about Wagner's music. Gérôme? Eh. How worked up can you get about the political incorrectness of the mediocre? You deal with that every time you grab the remote.
It's something of a puzzle why the Getty did this show. They have only one Gérôme, an oil sketch of the artist's early The Age of Augustus. The Getty sketch barely registers here. Were they bent on revisiting a once-successful academic painter, why not Winterhalter, Tissot, or Alma-Tadema? The real pity is that the show, organized by the Musée d'Orsay and the Getty, isn't going to Baltimore's Walters Art Museum. It was until the stock market crashed and the Walters had to bail out. Many of the show's most unforgettable paintings come from Baltimore. One is Diogenes, below. Landseer dogs putting the puppy eyes on the original cynic. They sure don't paint 'em like that anymore. A motivation for bringing the show to Los Angeles must have been the Getty Research Institute's 2008 acquisition of an amazing trove of Orientalist photographs. In the middle of the galleries is a sampler of this collection and a few loans, connecting the photos to Gérôme's paintings. This may be the most conventionally satisfying part of the exhibition. The photos raise the same Western gaze issues as the paintings, and the GRI has 4500 of them.
One of the show's revelations is what a radical bad boy Gérôme was to his contemporaries. Think Manet, Maurice Cattelan, and South Park. Conservative critics hated paintings like Jersusalem (above) because it thumbed its nose at solemn subject matter and the lofty expectations of art. The crucifixion is reduced to a shadow as the eye looks somewhere else. It must have been the visual equivalent of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's 2000-Year-Old Man.

Reiner: I asked you, did you know Jesus?
Brooks: Yeah, sure. I've seen him, right, sandals, 12 guys followed him around. They all came in my candy store. They never bought anything, they asked for water.

Another running theme is the Hollywood connection. Ridley Scott credited Gerome's Pollice Verso (above) as an inspiration for his film Gladiator. This is a fascinating visual genealogy, though it doesn't elevate either Pollice Verso or Gladiator to the next aesthetic level.
In paintings like the Walters' The Duel After the Masked Ball (1857-9, above left), Gérôme placed hyperreal figures against a hazy scrim of a background. It resembles the weird technique of American painter and sculptor William Rimmer in works such as LACMA's The Sentry, above right, c. 1872. Rimmer's 21st-century critical esteem, what there is of it, vies with Gérôme's — a fact that would have astounded both.
Six Flags should design its roller coasters like this show. Just when you think you've seen it all, the floor drops out from beneath you in the last room. This is Gérôme the sculptor. Yikes. There's a phase of contemporary sculpture that explores transgressive bad taste — Nathan Mabry's Dead Men Don't Make Sculpture comes to mind. Gérôme's sculpture is the mother of all bad taste, but its audience was the opposite of Mabry's. The polychrome nudes scandalized critics and were snapped up in reproduction by the middle classes.
Is there anything by Gérôme that's good in the usual sense of "good"? A candidate is a gem of a portrait of architect Charles Garnier, a friend of the artist. It's almost as perfect as a painted portrait could be. The well-deserved exclamation point at the end of this long, strange show is Gerome's Optician's Sign of 1902 (top), made for a competition of artist-designed shop signs. This uncharacteristic work was admired by Salvador Dali and conceivably inspired Manuel Alvarez Bravo (right, Optical Parable, 1931). Yes, it's easy to say that the "surrealist" quality is retrospective and that Gérôme didn't, couldn't, have intended what we appreciate about it now. For once, Gérôme was way ahead of his time.

Who Bought Smoke?

2010-06-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

Next to the object itself, the most incredible thing about LACMA's $3 million-plus acquisition of Tony Smith's Smoke is that the donor elected to remain anonymous. That's got to set a new world record for emotional maturity by a LACMA trustee.
This caps a stellar week of LACMA acquisition news: the Haniwa horse, the Boone ceramics, and now the Smith. Getty, Met, move over already.

More Zhukova Fabulousness

2010-06-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

"Dasha Zhukova, the Russian James Franco?" ArtInfo has the guts to ask that question in a photo feature on LACMA trustee and mega-socialite Dasha Zhukova (above left, with galpal Camilla Al Fayed — her dad owns Harrod's). Two exciting new facts: Dasha is "an authority on homepathic medicine" and "she collects DVDs about human anatomy!"

LACMA’s Haniwa Horse

2010-06-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

The L.A. Times predicts that LACMA's newly acquired Haniwa horse will be an icon of the Japanese collection. Dating from the 6th century, it may be the largest such terracotta horse known. Curator Robert Singer seems to have hit on a winning formula: LACMA trustees will open their wallets for cute animals. Besides fitting into the menagerie, the horse has connections to modern art and contemporary pop culture. L.A. native Isamu Noguchi helped spark the modernist appreciation of Haniwa sculpture. After encountering Haniwa sculptures in Japan, Noguchi made somewhat more abstract figures in terracotta (right). To mid-century collectors, Haniwa figures were an Eastern counterpart to Cycladic idols, so archaic they were consummately modern. A 1958 Time magazine piece likened the Haniwa aesthetic to cubism, and that must have been high praise for the kind of people who read Time in 1958.
Two decades later Nelson Rockefeller was hawking popularly priced reproductions of modernist and older masterpieces. The most popular offering was a faux Haniwa head priced at $75. It sold over a thousand copies, more than Rockefeller's equally fake Picassos and Giacomettis.

Today Haniwa are a major part of Japanese youth culture. An approximate American analogy might be the mummy mythos, in which Hollywood transforms static museum relics into vengeance-seeking wraiths with merchandising possibilities. The Haniwa figures, which were made for tombs, include humans as well as animals and ritual objects. (LACMA's other Haniwa sculpture, a seated warrior, was acquired in 1958, left). In fictional treatments, the sculptures house still-active spirits of the dead. Of course, Haniwa have it all over mummies in the cute department. In Japan, Haniwa appear on a staggering variety of merchandise. In the contemporary iconography, a Haniwa is a winsome everybeing holding a hand to its head. The hollow eyes and mouth recall the Munch spook of the Scream movies. (Pictured, a YuGiOh card and an image from Japanese TV's Telepathy Shojo Ran.)

“Outside the Box” at the Hammer

2010-06-14T17:46:00.001-07:00

Despite the title of the UCLA Hammer Museum's "Outside the Box: Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988-2010," it's the boxes that rock. Jacob Samuel started in the somewhat precious tradition of artists' books of etchings, bound and unbound. He evolved as the art did. The prints on view, jointly acquired by the Hammer and LACMA this April, are mostly blue-chip and occasionally familiar. The boxes are perfect fetishistic-pomo objects. Above is Wangetchi Mutu's Eve (2006), housed in rarest zebrawood. Fine Baldessari prints have trouble competing with Samuel's mesmerizing black plus sign of a box.
Giving extra credit for imagery not too similar to the artist's more famous and expensive work, Ed Ruscha's Blank Signs (2004, below) is a standout. Consider it a rebuttal to David Hockney's Pearblossom Highway?

Future Imperfect

2010-06-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

"I personally believe we are and will continue to become one of the strongest museums in the world with one of the biggest audiences in Los Angeles."

—LACMA's Michael Govan, in interview with Jason Edward Kaufman

Dia:Beacon for a Day

2010-06-10T10:06:00.001-07:00

For today only, LACMA is displaying Walter De Maria's 2000 Sculpture in the new Resnick Pavilion (which otherwise doesn't open until October). The single work runs the length of Renzo Piano's new building. The De Maria is on loan from the Walter A. Betchler Foundation, Switzerland. As usual, admission is free from 5 to 8.
In its bare state, the building's interior evokes Michael Govan's old home of Dia:Beacon (which also has a Robert Irwin garden outside of it). It's tough to judge whether any of that effect will remain once it's installed with exhibition walls. The light seems more subdued than in the top floor of the Broad building (probably because of the dark floor and absence of white interior walls).
The installation has a brief label for the De Maria and a much bigger one for Lynda and Stewart Resnick. The Resnick label gives a shout-out to numerous Resnick brands, from Wonderful Pistachios to Fiji Water to Cuties.

Gorky, Matta, and Eros in Connecticut

2010-06-08T18:54:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, surrealists walked the Connecticut exurbs. Expatriates like André Breton and Yves Tanguy were joined by a plethora of surrealism-influenced Yankees like Alexander Calder, Peter Blume, and Arshile Gorky. MOCA's "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective" presents its subject as a stylistic hermit crab, serially adopting, then abandoning, the visual ideas of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Breton. The last of Gorky's artistic crushes was Roberto Matta. Chilean-born and thoroughly cosmopolitan, Matta was living in New York. It was Matta who introduced Gorky to the technique of thinning oil paint for watercolor-like effects. Gorky used this to create drips to be embraced, not controlled, by the artist's mind and hand. That paradigm shift anticipated Pollock and just about everything immediately afterward. But there were other parallels between America's and Chile's great surrealists. Matta-Gorky could be a great exhibition and maybe a better movie. Matta had an affair with Gorky's wife the month before Gorky's suicide. The art world blamed him for Gorky's death. Furious, Breton expelled Matta from the surrealists.
Start with Matta. He began producing his spacey "inscapes," such as The Vertigo of Eros (above, 1944) in the late 1930s. The title is a Duchamp-style bilingual pun. It also refers to Freud's idea that the mind is balanced between desires for sex and death. The abstraction of the inscapes soon led backwards (in the Alfred Barr schema) to a wiry, existential illustration, seen in such works as A Grave Situation (1946, below).Matta's art was always strongly linear. He supplied the notorious vagina dentata cover for the last (1944) cover of the short-lived VVV magazine, pictured at top. (VVV was edited by Breton, Duchamp, David Hare, and Max Ernst, with Aimé Césaire and Robert Motherwell on the editorial board. Could there be any magazine like that today? Any website, any cable show, any anything?)
Today the VVV cover seems almost contemporary, while Matta's paintings have a period science-fictional quality. The sci-fi note couldn't have been intended. Rather, 1950s book designers and illustrators gladly ripped off Matta's echt-"modern" take on cosmic themes. Later, movies riffed on Matta's (and Gorky's) toothy, angst-ridden, biomorphic mash-up of sex and death. (Below, an H. R. Giger sketch for Ridley Scott's 1979 movie, Alien.)
Gorky related to the linearity of Matta's art. For much of his career, Gorky was so impoverished that he favored drawings over oil paintings. The MOCA show has a poignant room of many drawings, and just two paintings, from his Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia series of the early 1930s. (The space recently held the Ruscha Chocolate Room.)
After his breakthrough summer in Virginia (1943), Gorky was doing biomorphic abstractions with strong outlines. This led to 1944's The Liver is the Cock's Comb and MOCA's 1947 The Betrothal (above), done after a studio fire and a devastating operation for rectal cancer. The MOCA painting is autobiographical, alluding to Gorky's anxieties about marrying above himself, as the 1940s country club set saw it. The insectoid Venus fly-trap, with spiky teeth, represents Gorky's wife, Agnes ("Mougouch"). Gorky had a reproduction of Uccello's Battle of San Romano in his studio, and he was thinking of the crowns worn by Armenian brides. The picture equally evokes the surrealist themes of vagina dentata and the praying mantis, which devours her mate.
Apparently it was Willem de Kooning who clued Gorky to the "liner." So called because the Dutch masters used it to paint the rigging of ships, the liner is a fine paintbrush designed to supply long continuous strokes of oil pigment. (Left, a small detail of Willem van de Velde II's A Ship in Need in a Raging Storm, c.1680.) De Kooning used a liner in such paintings as Attic (1949, below). Matta must have been using it or something like it.On June 5, 1948 — 62 years to the day before the MOCA show's members opening — Matta visited the Gorkys in Connecticut. According to biographer Hayden Herrera in Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work (2003),

"After everyone had retired for the evening, Matta noticed that, because of its angle, the open window to Gorky and Mougouch's attic bedroom reflected their bed. As Matta told the story, he saw Mougouch's reflection reflected on the window of the floor below. While it is unlikely that any window opened in such a way that Matta could have seen via reflections up into Gorky and Mougouch's bedroom, it made a good story. Matta must have gone outside, stood in the grass, and looked up. He was smitten…"

Within days Agnes/Mougouch and Matta were having an affair. Matta, from an affluent background himself, told Agnes that they were "tweedy." Gorky, the poor Armenian immigrant, was "oily."
Gorky soon found out about the affair. The following month, on July 16, Gorky contrived to meet Matta in Manhattan. Gorky blew up and chased Matta through Central Park, brandishing his cane and comparing Matta to Joseph Stalin. Matta talked Gorky down, assuring him that Agnes was not about to leave him.
From this Matta concluded that Gorky was out of his mind. He told Agnes as much. She took the children and left Gorky.
On June 26 dealer Julian Levy drove Gorky to a psychoanalyst, believing it would do him some good. It didn't, insofar as Levy hit a road post and spun the car over on the way home. Gorky fractured a collarbone. His painting arm was useless — permanently or not, it was hard to say. There's a photo of Gorky from this time (left) that is notable because of who took it: the visiting Cuban surrealist Wilfredo Lam.
Gorky must have used his good arm to tie a noose in a length of clothesline and hang himself in a shed on July 21. His body was discovered by two celebrated neighbors, critic Malcolm Cowley and magic realist painter Peter Blume.

"Malcolm and I went up to the waterfall and the road sort of petered out and we had to stumble around in there. And we looked all over, thinking that he might possibly try to hang himself from one of the overhanging trees, because I thought that he had sort of a profound interest in the waterfall. And because it was so far removed from everything else, I thought this might be the place where he might choose to commit suicide. But he wasn't anywhere around. So we started wandering… Gorky had two dogs, a dachshund and a huge dog as big as a horse. And when we saw this little dog barking as we came up, we knew this was where Gorky was…"

This was about the time that Blume put the finishing touches on his masterpiece, The Rock (below). The American press presented Blume as a bad boy of the avant garde, incomprehensible to those not schooled in the latest European developments. That's further evidence of just how exceptional Gorky was.

No “Liver” for MOCA

2010-06-07T02:59:00.000-07:00

MOCA plunged back in the loan exhibition business this past weekend with the opening of the Philadelphia-organized "Arshile Gorsky: A Retrospective." One major work in the Philadelphia show didn't make it to L.A.: The Liver is the Cock's Comb (above). Its owner, Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery, didn't extend the loan. Andre Breton called Liver "the most important picture done in America" (i.e., by anybody). It's particularly missed because MOCA owns (and is showing) the preparatory drawing, a bequest of Marcia Weisman (below).

Celtics’ Hometown Museum Too Scared to Bet Painting

2010-06-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

On Tyler Green's urging, LACMA has made an apparently unilateral bet with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts: If the Celtics beat the Lakers, LACMA will lend Millard Sheets' Angels Flight to Boston for six weeks. This raises two questions: Why isn't Boston MFA putting up a painting? Does anyone in Boston know who Millard Sheets is?

Auction Notes

2010-06-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

From the collection of Mel Gibson, and formerly in the collection of Sylvester Stallone, comes this William Adolphe Bouguereau Pietà, offered at Christies June 9, for an estimated $1.5 to $2.5 million.

Weird Day in Restitutionville

2010-06-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

An Armenian church wants the Getty to return seven T'oros Roslin bible pages, claiming they were stolen. (TMZ had it before the L.A. Times, along with the Harry Potter-esque note that the Roslin book has magical powers.)
The Getty just announced that its new BFF Sicily has lent a famous vase by the Niobid Painter. The Gela Krater will be on view at the Villa through the end of October.
Italy is threatening to prosecute Princeton Art Museum curator Michael Padgett, says The New York Times. Padgett could be the second American curator charged, after the Getty's Marilyn True. Apparently, no one's more surprised than former Met director Philippe de Montebello, quoted: "“My understanding was Marion True was it."

New Getty Galleries for Medieval, Renaissance Art

2010-05-31T04:03:00.000-07:00

Museum visitors like paintings more than sculpture, or anything else. That apparently immutable fact has always challenged curators of sculpture and decorative arts. There have been many strategies for dealing with it, and in its short history, the Getty Center has already recapitulated several of them.
When the Brentwood museum opened in 1997, the paintings were on the upper floor, and everything else was on the ground floor. In the first pavilion, of art prior to 1600, the ground floor rooms were subdivided by media: illuminated manuscripts, renaissance bronzes, maiolica, and glassware. Each room featured a collecting area that had been inaugurated with the purchase of an entire collection in the free-spending 1980s. Despite the arguable logic of that arrangement, the crowds voted with their feet. They preferred the paintings on the top floor. The most important sculptures were kicked upstairs, where they could be seen (or ignored) among the paintings.
In 2002 London dealer Sam Fogg mounted a show of about 50 gothic and renaissance stained glass panels and roundels. The Getty grandly bought the whole show, making stained glass its first new area of collecting since photography. The acquisition prompted a rethinking of the museum's installation. Meanwhile, in 2004 the Getty hired a new curator of sculpture, Antonia Boström, with new ideas. In 2007 she bought the museum's first star piece of medieval sculpture. It was a gilt copper and enamel Christ in Majesty, made in Limoges for the cathedral of Orense, Spain (above left). Created about 1188, that made it nearly three centuries older than the museum's earliest renaissance sculptures.
After two years of slipping deadlines, four reinstalled galleries of pre-1600 sculpture and decorative arts have opened. Orchestrated by Boström, the new rooms both adopt and reject current fashions in museum installation. Yes, there are touchscreens, and yes, the display mixes up media. In other ways, it's back to the future. The new rooms are actually a bit more respectful of chronology and national schools than the former ones (everyone else thinks chronology is so 20th-century). Boström has reclaimed important sculptures that used to be on the upper floor. For that reason, the display is richer and no longer feels like a reserve collection. The Giambologna Female Nude (pictured at top), back from a sojourn among the Titians and Dossis, is one of the first objects you see. She sits at the bottom of two-story well of California sunlight and has never looked better.
The Giambologna introduces the one "new" room, of classicizing art of the Italian and French renaissance. Richard Meier designed this curvy, light-filled space as an "art information room." Is there anywhere else in the U.S. where you can see renaissance sculptures in close-to-broad daylight?
The Getty Center timeline now begins with the room of "Sacred Art, 1150-1600," housing the Limoges Christ in Majesty and most of the stained glass (above). This room is said to evoke "a late-medieval cathedral treasury," a somewhat alarming statement that may suggest Thierry Despont Does the Cloisters. Well not really. The stained glass is displayed in tastefully futuristic frosted glass monoliths. The old glass is free of museum glazing and is backlighted perfectly. In all, it's respectful to the medieval objects and to Meier's building.
Another room is built around the Augsberg curiosity cabinet (above), now displayed on an equally curious octagonal table. It's among a constellation of the beautiful and bizarre, roughly representing the ethos of Emperor Rudolf II.
The smallest room, of glass vessels from 1400 to 1700, is the least changed from its former incarnation. It's now more open, and the vitrines are more densely packed, arranged by themes.
Instead of putting the sculptures in the painting galleries, the new regime brings paintings to the sculpture rooms. Inevitably, the Getty wants to tell the best story of European painting it can on its upper floor. That means the ground floor paintings are at best fascinating misfits. The most compellng is Hans Hoffmann's Hare in the Forest (c. 1585). An elaboration of Dürer's Hare, it was owned by Emperor Rudolf. There's nothing much like in any other American museum. Previously it was shown in the Dutch baroque rooms, next to tabletop still lifes of the 1620s it loosely prefigured. It was an outlier there. Here it's a perfect fit.

Eli Broad, You Complete Me

2010-05-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Deitch tells the Los Angeles Downtown News, “The Broad Foundation’s collection fits in very, very well, and does not really compete with MOCA’s collection. It’s complementary.” It's no secret that Deitch is dying to have the Broad Collection land catecorner from MOCA Grand Avenue. It's nevertheless hard to see how MOCA's wide-ranging collection of international avant-garde art, from c. 1939 to the present, doesn't "compete" with Broad's collection of international avant-garde art from c. 1954 onward.
Deitch's talking point in the Downtown News is that MOCA's is a historic contemporary collection, "more heavily weighted in earlier works" while Broad's is a real contemporary collection "anchored by newer contemporary works, from the 1960s onward." Say what?
The Rothkos aside, MOCA has a history of acquiring emerging artists before the market recognizes them. Broad's business plan is almost the opposite, favoring marketable blue-chips with upside potential. Case in point: John Currin's Old Couple (pictured). Currin painted it in 1993, seven years out of Yale art school and a few years before he became an art market phenom. In November 2009 Sothebys auctioned Old Couple for an impressive $842,500. The winning bidder was dealer Larry Gagosian. Old Couple has recently been acquired by the Broad Foundation, to be displayed on Grand Avenue — or wherever the museum ends up.

Charles Rohlfs at the Huntington

2010-05-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

In group exhibitions of the arts and crafts movement, Charles Rohlfs' furniture stands out. It is strange, not tasteful, as we expect arts and crafts furniture to be. Something about Rohlfs channels the Shaker aesthetic. He is outsider-weird with an homespun delight in nutty invention. Rohlfs' furniture is as fussy as the Shakers' is not. It's hard to say whether that makes it less modern or more. Rohlfs recalls surrealist objects (top, a 1903 Plant Stand) and seemingly deconstructs ornament, enough to appear postmodern now. There is a touch of Philippe Starck, a hint of S&M fetish.
"The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs," now at the Huntington's Boone Gallery, is a carefully edited show of forty-some of Rohlfs' best pieces. If nothing else, Rohlfs is proof that American lives have second acts. The son of a Brooklyn cabinetmaker, he trained in design and juggled careers as a cast-iron stove designer and an actor. He became the cub to Anna Katherine Green's cougar. Green, a pioneering writer of mystery fiction, became rich and famous. Her royalties supported Rohlfs' foray into furniture design, a critical success that never paid the bills. It appears furthermore that Green contributed to some of her husband's designs. After ten years of making furniture for their Buffalo home — and not selling much to anyone else — Rohlfs hung up his saw. His so-called career had lasted about ten years. In quitting at the peak of his powers (as we see things now), he bears comparison to Victorian photographer Roger Fenton.
What Rohlfs did with the rest of his life is sketchy. His CV reads like that of an investment banker's wife. He was said to have been a community leader and social activist in Buffalo, who secured a patent for a gavel used by the Rotarians. Rohlfs died in 1936, the year after his celebrated wife. He was then considered to be the widower of a literary lion whose star was fading. Few could have guessed that it would be Rohlfs who would be getting love in the 21st century (the tour ends in New York, at the Met), while Green would be obscure even to aficionados of mystery fiction.
One might easily suppose that Rohlfs represents the late, mannerist death agonies of the arts and crafts movement. Not all all. He was early in the game for an American. Gustav Stickley credited Rohlfs as an influence, and of course Stickley achieved the commercial success that eluded Rohlfs. Consequently, much of Rohlfs' furniture descended in the family. It has only lately entered museum collections. The late Max Palevsky recognized Rohlfs' genius and donated several key pieces to LACMA. Two are in the show, one an ambulatory coal bucket (above). Other objects on view were funneled through the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, which is distributing them to museums nationwide. The Foundation has promised a Rocking Chair to the Huntington, below right.
As a couple, Charles-Anna was a pop culture powerhouse. The Huntington supplies a vitrine of Anna Katherine Green's early editions from its library collection. One of Green's characters was the prototype for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and another for Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Green's novels focus on scientific forensics (anticipating both Sherlock Holmes and CSI). Rohlfs too was fascinated by microscopy, and it inspired one of his most prescient chairs (below, a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum). The backrest is believed to be based on the cell structure of oak, the material it's made from.

Thinking Globally

2010-05-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

"This is our globe."
—Michael Govan, on Andrea Gursky's Ocean (2010), a set of photos from satellite images recently bought for LACMA. In Carol Vogel's NYT column, Govan says he plans to create a space for the four 8 by 11-foot photos within LACMA's historic collection. He adds the interesting fact(?) that 19th-century museums often had globes as the "linchpin" of their galleries.

Cute Overload in the Japanese Pavilion

2010-05-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

LACMA has lately acquired several Japanese paintings that fall into that elusive category of great art that speaks to people who know nothing about art. Foremost among them is Mori Sosen's Six Animals, a gift of Camila Chandler Frost (above, large detail). A toothy boar anchors an S-shaped composition of a bat, a fox, an ox, and two rabbits. It's as cute as anything by the Murakami, or Hello Kitty, corporate combines. Formatted to a street banner, it's got to be the museum's next signature image. According to the LACMA gallery text,

"If one stands to the right of painting, the two rabbits appear tucked into a spatial niche in the side of the ox that is not apparent when viewed frontally; if one stands to the left of the painting, the boar appears to stand out and exist in a separate space from the ox."

Would you believe this isn't the only great Mori Sosen painting of a porcine donated by Ms. Frost? In 2009 she gave the museum Boar, also on view.
Last month the Collectors Committee added a wryly humorous Tiger Drinking from a Raging River (about 1640) by Kano Sansetsu. It's the only signed work outside of Japan by this legendary and Giorgione-mysterious painter. (That said, one of America's best-known screen paintings, the unsigned Old Plum in the Metropolitan Museum, is attributed to the artist.) Sansetsu wouldn't have seen a living tiger. He reverse-engineered the flat evidence of Chinese paintings and preserved tiger skins.
David and Margaret Barry have promised to the museum a spectacular pair of screens, Birds and Flowers, by the little-known Imanaku Soyu (1886-1959). Dating from about 1920, Birds and Flowers looks like nothing else in the Japanese Pavilion. It loosely recalls the decorative, mural-scale paintings created by Vuillard and Bonnard. There is a similar delight in juicy-jungle greens, lilac, and scarlet. Less abstract than the Frenchmen's work, Birds and Flowers is more aggressively allover.
You can't see it in the photo below, but in the right slant of light, the pale dots in the trees light up like fireflies. Your folks from out of town will love that.
Another Frost gift is Ueno Setsugaku's Myriad Birds, Insects, and Flowers (c. 1850). It was discovered over the fireplace in a British treasure house, framed like any old old master painting. In its new life at LACMA, it inhabits an "adventuresome" scroll in two tones of green.

Getty Goes 3D

2010-05-17T12:51:00.001-07:00

The Getty website has an "augmented reality" feature on the museum's c. 1620 German collector's cabinet. It's an interactive take on 3D that's arguably more compelling than the non-interactive, glasses-required version that has Hollywood agog. You have to print out a .pdf and hold it in front of a computer with a webcam. The print-out is a simple black-and-white silhouette. When you tilt it, the on-screen image rotates as if you were holding the real thing. (The above is a demo and will work without a webcam or print-out.)
The Getty site also has a more conventional interactive feature on the cabinet, which goes on view tomorrow as part of the refurbished galleries of medieval and Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts. Pictures of the new installation look impressive. One surprise is that the British royal collection has lent the long-separated mate to the Getty's Cellini Satyr for the inaugural display.

Emil Nolde’s Freaky Swiss Postcards

2010-05-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

As part of the citywide Ring Festival, LACMA is presenting "Myths, Legends, and Cultural Renewal: Wagner's Sources." It's basically the latest rotation of the Robert Gore Rifkind collection of German Expressionism, augmented by some contemporary costumes and an installation by Achim Freyer, designer of the Los Angeles Opera production. Freyer's interpretation of Wagner has been damned for being unserious, disrespectful, populist, and dumbed-down. But in the LACMA show, Freyer is outweirded by a set of 16 shamelessly lowbrow postcards created by Emil Nolde. They raise interesting issues about high v. low art and the commercial value of being grotesque.
Nolde, of course, is one of the great German expressionists. More than that, he's a paradox, the card-carrying Nazi who was damned by his party for creating "Degenerate Art." The postcards date from a much earlier, pre-expressionist phase of Nolde's career (though he was around 30 when he created them). After hiking in the Swiss Alps, Nolde did a painting, Mountain Giants, presenting the mountains in human form. Nolde wrote,

"The picture went to the annual exhibition in Munich in 1896. [Ferdinand] Hodler's picture "Night" [pictured below] which established his fame, was also there. But my "Mountain Giants: was soon returned, rejected… In those days there was a general and stormy derision and ridicule about each of Hodler's pictures. 'And his colors are as ugly as can be possible!' What help was my contradiction and my firm conviction that his sinuous, pushing, wry bodies are part of the character of the mountain folk, just as the firs on the mountain slopes are gnarled and grown oddly."

Nolde went on to monetize "gnarled and grown oddly." Using local folklore of mountains resembling weird faces — and drawing on local traditions of grotesquerie, such as the gnomes featured in garden statuary and beer steins — Nolde created funny pictures of mountains for the magazine Jugend. When they got a good reception, Nolde produced lithograph postcards in editions of 100,000.
In Emile Nolde (1980), Peter Howard Selz wrote of the postcards, "Their crude and simple anti-art quality, which made no demands on intellect or esthetic sensibility, so captured popular taste that the edition was exhausted in ten days, earning Nolde 20,000 Swiss francs. As soon as he could, he gave up his teaching job and left for Munich to become a full-time student of painting."
The tradition of mountains looking like something else is universal. In southern California we have Eagle Rock. Magritte's Domain of Arnheim (existing in several versions, one below) is another take on the "Eagle Rock" theme. It's tempting to say that Nolde's mountains prefigured surrealism. But painters had been playing such games for centuries.
Artists at all levels of seriousness bank on the popularity of the weird (just look at YouTube). What's unusual is Nolde's success in making weird art pay, followed by success as a so-called serious artist. There aren't too many other examples of that. Among the expressionists, Lyonel Feininger did newspaper comics early in his career. In the more specifically grotesque vein, Robert Williams' early rat finks for "Big Daddy" Roth are an example. Then there's R. Crumb, who never set out to be a artist but is now shown in smart museums like the Hammer. Williams and Crumb never strayed too far from unserious grotesquerie. But come to think of it, the iconic mask paintings of Nolde's maturity — a high point of Expressionism — are basically grimacing mountains translated into the idiom of serious art.

The Girls Next Door

2010-05-04T06:47:00.001-07:00

Christies is touting its May 4-5 auction of the Frances Brody collection as the return of good times to the auction business. It's worth noting that the same auction house helped disperse much of the collection of the Brodys' next-door neighbor, Hugh Hefner. While the Brodys were amassing Picassos and Matisses for their mid-century modern home, Hefner was acquiring art for his faux-Tudor mansion. This included pieces by Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Tom Wesselmann, Keith Haring, and, uh, a lot of Leroy Neiman and Alberto Vargas. It's hard not to wonder whether the Brodys and Hefner ever saw each other's collection, and what they thought of it. Most of Hefner's important art was owned by his corporation and has been sold, victim of hard times for magazine publishing and a randy octagenarian's estate planning. A 2003 Christies auction of 300 Hefner artworks and memorabilia netted $3.7 million. That's a trifle next to the $150 million expected for the Brody works.
The 2003 auction didn't include the crown jewel of the Playboy Mansion collection. The counterpart of the Brody Picasso Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust would be Salvador Dali's 1956 Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (pictured). Hefner sold it privately. The painting's Wikipedia page contains the interesting factoid that Dali said it was inspired by Vermeer.
Double Torso (1967) is one of Warhol's ultra-violet paintings, designed to be viewed under "black light." As Andy explained it, ""My next series will be of pornographic pictures. They will look blank. When you turn on the lights, then you see them - big breasts. If a cop came in, you could just flick out the lights or turn on the regular lights - how could you say that was pornography?"
You may see a trend. Hefner collected soft porn by name-brand artists, the more gimmicky the better. A lot of the collection does fits that description, but no, it's not quite that simple. Hefner had an eye for the Chicago Imagists — a pretty unsexy bunch, actually. He had works by Ed Pasche and an impressive 1989 Roger Brown, The Human Fly. Playboy commissioned it to illustrate a T. Coraghessan Boyle story of the same name. That literary tone runs through the collection. Among the most recherché works Hefner owned was a small pastel drawing of a Rabbithead Logo in the Form of a Butterfly by Vladimir Nabokov.
According to the contents page of the April 1976 issue, "The idea for this month's cover came from—of all people—author Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote, in a letter to PLAYBOY, 'Have you ever noticed how the head and ears of your Rabbit resemble a butterfly in shape?'"

That $335,000 Woman

2010-04-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

Steve Roach, attorney and former Christies specialist in nineteenth-century painting, looks at comps for LACMA's new Jean-Jacques Henner Portrait of Madame Paul Duchesne-Fournet. The museum's Collectors Committee paid $335,000 in a private sale, blowing away an auction record of $57,000 for a Henner Mary Magdelene in 2007. Get this: The Mary Magdelene was being deaccessioned by the Toledo Museum of Art, which acquired it years after it was deacessioned by the Metropolitan Museum. The Magdalene is one of eight large and twenty-seven small replicas of a salon picture, which ought to depress its market value. Roach's take-away: It's tough to put a price tag on a painter so few collectors (or museums) want.

J.W.N. Munthe, International Man of Mystery

2010-04-25T15:05:00.000-07:00

Last week's acquisition of a prized set of Tibetan furniture now gives LACMA "the most comprehensive public collection in the world" of Tibetan and Nepalese art, according to a press release. This comes seven months after unveiling "the largest permanent space devoted to Korean art outside of South Korea." You won't hear many superlatives about the museum's Chinese art, though. It's now been four years that the department has gone without a curator. The museum's sketchy Chinese collection has been off view for most of that time, with no return in sight. Is Chinese art jinxed at LACMA? You might think so, and the man to blame might be General Johan Wilhelm Normann Munthe (1864-1935).
General Munthe looked like he was invented by Terry Gilliam. Indeed he was self-invented, down to his medals. Born in Bergen, Norway, Munthe drifted to Qing dynasty China, taking a job as a customs inspector. Munthe was no man to be satisfied with a desk job. "He loved danger, was the first in a fight, a devil to fight and a devil to love," author Nils Collett Vogt put it (1934). Munthe entered the Chinese military in the age of the Boxer Rebellion, working his way up to General, an unprecedented distinction for a Westerner. Munthe became right-hand man to Yuan Shikai, the Nationalist Chinese President who declared himself Emperor for a few giddy months in 1916. (Four years earlier, Yuan had forced the abdication of the proper "Last Emperor" of the Qing, Puyi.) As China burned, Munthe fiddled with medals. The Chinese had not awarded medals, and Munthe thought that was a bloody shame. He designed the profusion of Euro-style gewgaws littering the chests of Yuan and himself in photos.
Munthe was in the right place and time to collect Chinese art. During the decline and fall of the Qing dynasty, everything that wasn't nailed down was for sale, at a price. From New York, J.P. Morgan negotiated to buy the Chinese Imperial collection — the equivalent of buying the Louvre from Louis XVI. To the great relief of China's aesthetes, Morgan died in 1913 without having struck a deal. This opened the field for smaller operators like Munthe. "In the past year I have been able to significantly enrich my collections," Munthe reported in 1915. "The reason is this: After the revolution, the former major eunuchs had to sell their stuff. One could now buy things…" That, and the guanxi Munthe had acquired in his brilliant career, allowed him to ship crate loads of Chinese treasures to the West, no questions asked.
After a few years of fevered buying, Munthe realized he was as much a creature of the Qing as its eunuchs. Chiang Kai-shek supplanted Yuan Shikai. Munthe elected to call it career and return home to Norway.
That's where Los Angeles comes into the picture. In 1926 Munthe offered to sell his collection of Chinese art to the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art in Exposition Park. The museum was only 13 years old and had made scant progress in collecting any of the fine things in its name. Museum director William Bryan, an ornithologist, sensed that the Munthe collection would be a way to put the museum's art department on the map. He arranged to take it on approval. When it went on display in 1927, it was hailed as the equal or better of any collection of art then on display in the Western U.S. Some went so far as to compare the Munthe collection to the superb Freer Gallery, which had opened only four years previously in Washington.
Bryan lost no time in lobbying to get the money to buy the works. He knew he had an uphill battle. The asking price was nearly $1 million, an astonishing amount for the time. To put that in context, in 1926 Henry Huntington paid $380,000 for Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie, which was — incredibly — the highest price ever paid at auction for any work of art.
Bryan informed the county supervisors that he had discussed the Munthe acquisition with every Asian art curator in country. At any rate, one expert, Berthold Laufer of Chicago's Field Museum, was brought out to Los Angeles to evaluate the collection, and he endorsed the acquisition enthusiastically.
This convinced the county. In 1930, after the market crash, the supervisors advanced $200,000 to buy Munthe’s 118 ceramics. They took an option to buy the rest of the collection for $400,000. This was the first time the county had ever made a significant expenditure for art. The $600,000 total would be the equivalent of $7.8 million today, more than LACMA has paid for any work of art other than Richard Serra's Band (purchased in 2008 for a bit under $10 million, courtesy of Eli Broad).
Above is a mid-1930s installation view of the Munthe collection. In best Hollywood style, two comic child actors, Bill Benedict and Jane Withers, upstage the high-art statue. Behind the scenes, there was then bitter debate over the age and authenticity of Munthe's statues — and it was no laughing matter. Sinophiles flocked to Los Angeles, an unfamiliar city for most. Alfred Salmony was the first to declare that the Munthe collection was junk. The collection was a farrago of copies, forgeries, and tourist bric-a-brac. Salmony's views were echoed by many others. It was not until 1940, however, that Bryan’s successor, Roland McKinney, faced the music and admitted that the Munthe collection “is of such doubtful authenticity as to be unworthy of exhibition in this museum.” It's hard to say what Berthold Laufer would have thought: In 1934 he jumped from the top of his Chicago hotel building to his death.
Evidently, Munthe was either a con artist, or a world-class dupe of Chinese con artists. Probably more the latter. The Munthe collection, it was learned, had been offered to every major museum in America. Munthe must have been pretty far down the list when he approached Los Angeles.
The county supervisors were appalled. They spun into tea party mode, vowing never again to spend a penny for any art acquisitions (least of all for Chinese art, which they understood to be a scam). Munthe still had his supporters, though. One was Millard Sheets (right), the American Scene painter best known for Angel's Flight. Sheets was a pet of museum bulwark Howard Ahmanson, who commissioned him to design artsy facades for his Home Savings and Loan buildings. And Sheets fancied himself a connoisseur of Asian art. In Sheets' humble opinion, the Munthe collection had gotten a bum rap. It was great, it was deep, the eggheads didn't understand it. That view didn't get much traction. But Sheets was a professor at Claremont College. He asked to have the unpurchased Munthe works, including big sculptures, moved to Claremont. Henry Trubner, the Los Angeles Museum's Asian curator, gladly acquiesced. He was glad to get rid of the stuff.
This was in 1947, with Munthe years in his grave. Eventually his estate got around to asking what happened to the collection. The pieces were crated up and returned to Munthe’s hometown of Bergen, Norway, where they are now displayed at the Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum (West Norway Museum of Decorative Art). Scholars are still debating what's real and what's not.
As to the hundred-odd ceramics the Los Angeles Museum bought, at least some are important. One is a voluptuous claire de lune vase in the shape of a pomegranate (right). It was displayed in the permanent collection galleries, back when LACMA displayed Chinese art.
Munthe casts a long shadow. In a few short years, the art division of Los Angeles' flagship museum went from being the West Coast Freer to an encyclopedic museum with a chronic deficiency of Chinese art. That hasn't changed much, even as the art division was spun off into a new museum in Hancock Park. In 2006 LACMA Asian curator J. Keith Wilson left to take a job at the Freer Gallery (the East Coast one). The uneven Chinese collection is one reason it's been so hard to recruit a successor. With no curator of Chinese art, there's no one to lobby for exhibition space and building the collection.
Last year LACMA acquired what could be taken as a memento of the Munthe affair. It's an Asian-influenced screen (below) by Millard Sheets. Believed to date from 1930s, Sheets' screen is evidence of the West Coast's burgeoning fascination with the East, something seen in such different artists as Stanton MacDonald-Wright and John McLaughlin. The Munthe collection was a touchstone for that interest, and Sheets would have been aware of Munthe's Chinese paintings when he created it.

Rose Art Museum of the West

2010-04-24T08:09:00.001-07:00

The Claremont Colleges like to call themselves the Harvard of the West. Claremont has something in common with Brandeis, too: Selling a museum to help with the bills. The difference is that Claremont got away with it, and no one noticed.
In April 2008 — nine months before Brandeis sparked a national uproar with talk of shuttering its Rose Art Museum and selling the collection — Claremont quietly sold the collection of its Kenneth G. Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments, consisting of 1200 instruments from the 17th to 20th centuries. The buyer was the new Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), just opened in Phoenix. The Fiske Museum's collection was actually that of collector Curtis Janssen, who willed that his musical instruments go on display at a college west of the Mississippi. Claremont was interested and opened a display in 1954. Kenneth Fiske was a Claremont music professor who became curator of the collection (and promoted it with appearances on the Tonight Show). There's no question that the Phoenix museum's display is a big upgrade from Claremont's cramped installation in an auditorium building (pictured). But the Fiske collection was a major resource for Claremont, impossible to duplicate today. It forms the historical core of the MIM.
From an April 21, 2008 press release:

"'We are very excited for our collection to be acquired by MIM, the first truly global museum of its kind,' said Robert Walton, Chief Executive Officer, Claremont University Consortium. 'It is very important to Claremont Colleges that these instruments be available for the benefit and enjoyment of audiences from around the United States and beyond.'"

Getty to Show New Cache of German Drawings

2010-04-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

The Getty Museum recently bought a group of nineteenth-century German drawings from the venerable London dealer Colnaghi. That's somewhat unusual for the Getty, which has mostly assembled its drawing collection sheet by sheet. The trove goes on view next year in an exhibition titled "Spirit of an Age: Drawings from the Germanic World, 1770-1900", running March 29 to June 19, 2011. The Getty website says it will include about forty German and Austrian drawings and watercolors (no artists named but presumably including the two spectacular Klimts recently added). Long overlooked by American museums, German drawings are getting expensive. In 2001 the Getty was outbid on a Caspar David Friedrich drawing, View of Arkona with Rising Moon and Nets.

The Fabiola Bump?

2010-04-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

LACMA's Collectors Committee bought $2 million worth of art for the museum this past weekend. See coverage in Unframed and the Los Angeles Times. The big news is a 39-piece collection of Tibetan furniture; a signed screen of a tiger by Kano Sansetsu; and contemporary works by Glenn Ligon and John Baldessari. In comparison, some may scratch their heads at another buy, an 1879 Portrait of Madame Paul Duchesne-Fournet (detail, above right) by the French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. Some older American museums have Henners, but they sure as hell didn't buy them. They were given them long ago, after the death of the aristocratic sitters. As modernism took hold, the Henners were judged deeply irrelevant and consigned to the storeroom. Why is European curator J. Patrice Marandel interested in Henner? One theory is the Fabiola Bump.
Retrospectives always boost interest in an artist. Henner hasn't had a retrospective, but he was an offstage presence in a well-received, Dia Foundation-organized show that came to LACMA in 2008: "Francis Alÿs: Fabiola." Alÿs has collected 300-some amateur copies of Saint Fabiola, a once-famous, now lost, painting by Henner. Marandel organized the exhibition for LACMA. Of course, the show was about clever postmodern Alÿs goofing off poor academic Henner, butt of a joke he'd never understand. But in an age where Tina Fey can boost interest in Sarah Palin, there's no such thing as bad publicity for a forgotten artist.

Italian, Spanish Galleries at LACMA

2010-04-18T16:05:00.001-07:00

LACMA continues to roll out new spaces for older European art. The latest, now half-accessible while being installed, is an airy update of the Renaissance "collector's cabinet" room (above) that was one of the high points of the former installation. It's flanked by the two big Dutch mannerist potboilers, the Hendrick Goltzius Jupiter and Danaë and the Joachim Wtewael Lot and His Daughters.
Nearby is what the museum is billing as the nation's largest gallery space for Italian baroque art. It pairs paintings of the 1600s with archeological Roman statues from a millenium and a half earlier. Curator J. Patrice Marandel compares this to the way art was displayed in period Roman palaces or English country homes.
Though the room is humongous, it's not likely to be anyone's favorite place. Like a New York railroad flat, it's unclassically long, oddly shaped, and kind of dark. It lacks the laylights that make the Dutch rooms glow. The art itself is well-lighted. What's audacious about committing so much space to the Italian Baroque is that the museum's collection omits the biggest names. LACMA has neither Caravaggio nor Bernini, and isn't likely to get them. It does have a carefully assembled set of Caravaggesque paintings and, better yet, great works by Domenchino, Pietro da Cortona, and Guido Reni. You may still be wondering how the museum found enough Italian baroque paintings to fill the nation's largest gallery. The answer is, they include Northerners working in Italy. So the room has Michael Sweerts' Plague in an Ancient City and Gerrit van Honthorst's The Mocking of Christ, among many lesser pieces.
The classical sculptures, from William Randolph Hearst's collection, help finesse the absence of any monumental baroque statuary. They look okay here (though it makes you wonder what future installations of Greco-Roman art will look like without the statues).
An even more remarkable lesson in making do with not so much is to be found in the two new rooms of Spanish art, covering the Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque periods. LACMA isn't known for having much Spanish art at all. Yet the rooms aren't bad, assuming a tolerance for funky wall treatments. Here too, there's a bit of cleverly creative geography. Naples was part of Spain from 1557 to 1714, so this justifies including Neopolitan paintings as well as your mother's favorite LACMA object, the c. 1600 Archangel Raphael from Naples.
Two of the biggest names here are painter Pedro Berrugete and his son, the greatest sculptor of 16th-century spain, Alonso Berrugete. LACMA gambled by buying major works attributed (with some doubt) to each. The two pieces are now displayed together for the first time. The large painting of the Last Supper is now credited to "Pedro Berrugete and Workshop." Some had supposed it to be a mere workshop copy. The figure of Saint Mark, formerly "attributed to Alonso Berrugete," is now given to Alonso outright.
Speaking of attributions, the museum's peripatetic El Greco Saint Andrew is on view. When a big museum's one-and-only El Greco isn't shown for years, it's safe to assume there's something wrong with it. The Saint Andrew is now identified as a product of the "School of El Greco." Translation: "Whoever made this knew of El Greco and wanted to paint like him."
This suggests that Marandel is having a hard time filling some of the wall space. Next to the downgraded El Greco is the creepy, kooky still life by Alonso de Escobar that didn't sell in this January's auction of unloved works. Like a bad penny, it's back. If you like it and can pay cash ($80,000 low estimate), the museum might be ready to deal.

Memes Gone Wild

2010-04-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

From Roberta Smith's New York Times piece on the future of the Whitney Museum:

"Here's a shocking idea: hire Larry Gagosian as a consultant. This could be seen as a more cautious, less desperate version of the move by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in hiring the dealer Jeffrey Deitch as its new director: maybe it’s outside-the-box thinking Manhattan-style."

For more shocking ideation, see the Twitter feed #hiregogo.

Getty Updates

2010-04-12T10:06:00.001-07:00

The Getty Museum has announced an opening date for its renovated galleries of medieval and renaissance sculpture and stained glass: May 11, 2010. That's about two years later than originally planned. Also, the museum has just put on view its new Boilly, Entrance to the Jardin Turc (left, the artist's self-portrait).
UPDATE: The medieval and renaissance galleries' opening has been moved to May 18.

LACMA’s Most Absolutely Fabulous Trustee

2010-04-10T09:36:00.002-07:00

LACMA's trustees were once known for being uptight Hancock Park types. Under Michael Govan, things have lightened up a bit. Case in point: celebutante Dasha Zhukova (above right), named a trustee last June, a few days past her 28th birthday. Zhukova is identified as a fashion designer, editor of POP magazine, and founder of Moscow's Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture. But that's a small part of the fabulousness that is Dasha Zhukova.

• Zhukova once dated Russian tennis star Marat Safin.
• Her $19.5 million Hollywood Hills mansion was a gift from another boyfriend, Russian zillionaire Roman Abramovich (above left).
• She doesn't live there much.
• Zhukova has homes scattered over the globe, plus 100 acres of land on the moon (also an Abramovich gift).
• Abramovich spent $86 million for a Francis Bacon triptych. Coincidentally, a Bacon retrospective is planned for the Garage Centre.
• In 2007, Abramovich's ex-wife had these words for Zhukova: "He'll dump you too."
• Zhukova started her own fashion label, Kova + T., because "I couldn't find a plain white tee exactly the way I wanted it."
• Dasha's father, Russian zillionaire Alexander Zhukova, was convicted of arms trading in 1991 and served six months in Italian jail — before being cleared of the charges.

For more, check out Zhukova's profile in Interview magazine. Journalist Derek Blasberg confessed that he expected Zhukova to be a "James Bond villain" but instead found her "down to earth." Relatively speaking.

"It was so refreshing to finally hear a girl not denying that she likes a good time [Zhukova told Blasberg]. I cannot listen to another girl say, ‘I’m not a party girl. I just happen to always get photographed falling on the floor with lipstick all over my face and a bottle of champagne sticking out of my bag.’” For the record, Zhukova had champagne during this interview, and moved on to vodka later that evening.

One thing's for sure: Half the media world wants to hate Zhukova for being beautiful, rich, and un-wonkish. "Despite an utter lack of magazine experience," snarked Luxist, "she'll be working in partnership with POP editorial director Ashley Heath, leading some to snipe that she only got the job thanks to her mega-rich boyfriend." The Wall Street Journal dissed Zhukova as "just another oligarch princess frittering away millions in her quest for social standing and substance."
And what about art, given that Zhukova is now helping to shape LACMA's future as well as the Garage Centre's? So far, the Garage's signal achievement is an exhibition of Francois Pinault's Koons- and Hirst-heavy collection. That's exactly the sort of fluffery the art press has pilloried New York's New Museum for doing. That said, the Garage's current offering, "Futurologica: Russian Utopias" is a real, curated show, and its web page looks promising — whoever is behind it.

Another Matched Set for the Getty

2010-04-04T16:25:00.000-07:00

The Getty Museum has acquired an 18th-century desk organizer — originally made to sit atop a small, ornate desk long in the museum's collection. The brass, tortoiseshell, and mother of pearl-veneered ensemble was made in Paris around 1710 for Maximilian II Emanuel, exiled Elector of Bavaria. Dealers often separate pieces that were meant to be together, and museums occasionally manage to reunite them. In this case, it's not hard to guess why some dealer separated the two pieces. The new find, a footed set of small compartments for papers or writing implements, obscures the desk's exuberantly pictorial top (below). Desk and top are now displayed together in the Getty's Place Vendome library period room.

Quotes of the Day

2010-03-31T03:00:00.000-07:00

“The most magnificent tax deduction I’ve ever seen.”
—Bob Hope on the opening of the Los Angeles County Art Museum, 1965. The museum is 45 years old today.

“It will not be long before the remainder of those dinosaur bones in the La Brea Tar Pits are covered with a newer, more elegant layer of civilization.”—Museum director Richard Brown, who knew less about geology than Hope did about tax deductions. Brown's prediction was completely backward: Oil began seeping up through the museum's reflecting pool, threatening to cover the elegant civilization in a layer of hydrocarbon sludge. The pool was drained and paved over.

Actual Size

2010-03-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

The Getty Center's "Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture: Inspiration and Invention" tells the story of art too big to succeed. Leonardo frittered much of his time and genius on envelope-testing equestrian monuments that were never realized. His most outlandish notion was a 24-foot-high bronze statue of Duke Francesco Sforza on a rearing horse. Not only would it have been the biggest statue of the Renaissance, but 70 tons of bronze would have been supported on the horse's two hind legs — in the early drawings, anyway. The invading French army destroyed Leonardo's full-size clay model before it could be cast.
The tale the Getty show tells has resonance in today's Los Angeles. Two artists are planning expensive, logistically challenging outdoor works for LACMA. Michael Heizer's Levitated Slot Mass is to be a pyramidal granite boulder suspended on concrete rails above a pit carved into the northwest corner of the museum campus. Daring visitors will be able to walk underneath the 340-ton rock. Heizer's boulder is nearly as high as the Sforza monument and almost five times its would-have-been weight. With Barnum-worthy bluster, Michael Govan promises that the Heizer will be "one of the largest monolithic objects moved since ancient times."
Despite that, the lion's share of publicity is going to Jeff Koons' Train, a laser-scanned simulacrum of a 1943 locomotive to be suspended from a 160-foot crane and supposedly visible from practically everywhere south of Mulholland Drive. The locomotive alone is 70 feet long (high).
Will Heizer and Koons succeed where Leonardo failed?
Pro: Technology has come a long way since Leonardo's time. There's not much to build with the Heizer: just move a really big rock.
Con: The Great Recession. The Koons seems to have lost momentum, with feasibilty study funder Wallis Annenberg suddenly turning hater ("I personally think Los Angeles deserves a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane.")
???: Eli Broad loves Koons to death. Does Broad still care what happens in the Miracle Mile?

Cuzco School “Virgin of Belen” for LACMA

2010-03-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

Eunice and Douglas Goodan have donated a major Cuzco School painting to LACMA's growing Latin American collection. The roughly life size Virgin of Belen, created after 1700, depicts not the holy mother and child but a famous statue of them in Cuzco's Our Lady of Belén church. The Cuzco School has lately become popular with collectors, resulting in escalating prices. It anticipates both modernism (Cezanne's "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone") and post-modernism (with its Thomas Demand-like project of paintings of sculptures that look like paintings of the real thing). The Virgin of Belen is always depicted as a cone, paradoxically rendered flat by surface patterns. Aside from a small oil-on-copper, this is LACMA's first Cuzco School painting. For a 21st-century take on the Virgin of Belen, see Robert Graham's bronze doors for the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels.

L.A.’s First Leonardo Show… in 1949

2010-03-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

The Getty Museum's "Leonardo da Vinci: The Art of Sculpture" is not the first Leonardo show to touch down on the West Coast. The Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park managed a "Leonardo da Vinci Loan Exhibition" for six charmed weeks of midsummer 1949. It had 101 objects, almost four times the size of the Getty show. And that's not counting 66 modern models of Leonardo's scientific inventions (which "may be handled and operated by visitors") nor a selection of books from UCLA's Belt Library. The 1949 blockbuster's star-studded list of patrons included "Prof. Albert Einstein," Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, California Governor Earl C. Warren, and William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst provided much of the impetus for the show. In 1945 Los Angeles Museum director Roland McKinney wrote Hearst, "It is my hope to establish… an art section comparable to the museums of the east." Hearst, resident in his eponymous Castle at San Simeon, began donating art. It was well known that Hearst despised modernism (and was still smarting from that classic of modern film, Citizen Kane). An expert in Old Masters, the German-born William Valentiner, was recruited to curate the collection and solicit further donations. Valentiner came west with misgivings. In his estimation, L.A. was "the furthest point of western civilization," and its museum's small art collection was "deplorable."
Though Valentiner was deeply engaged with German modernism, he had to walk on eggs to avoid offending Hearst and the post-war tea partiers who figured abstraction = communism. In his exhibition program Valentiner mostly stuck to the classics and aimed high. The museum did loan shows of Rubens and Van Dyck (a double retrospective), Goya, Renoir, and Van Gogh. But the biggest and most ambitious project of all was Leonardo.
Only about 15 to 20 Leonardo paintings survive. No comparably famous artist is nearly so rare. There are twice as many Vermeers.
"The current exhibition," Valentiner wrote in the catalog, "the first comprehensive one held in this country, must necessarily be limited in scope as far as original paintings are concerned…" His solution: wall-sized photographic reproductions of unobtainable masterpieces. Make that black-and-white reproductions.

"With the exception of Rembrandt, Leonardo's paintings lend themselves better to black-and-white reproductions than those of other great masters… Care has been taken that these photomurals do not exceed the size of the originals because variations in proportions and dimensions would give a false impression to the spectator who might never have seen the actual works themselves. Even the best reproductions will always lack the surface quality of the original, which transmits to us the pulse and spirit of an age. The art-loving public is right in demanding original works in order to enter into the true atmosphere of the great past. It was the endeavor, therefore, to include in the exhibition as many original paintings a possible…"

The show boasted five Leonardo paintings… if you believe the catalog. One of the five, the Davenport Bromley Madonna (top), was from an unidentified L.A. collection. "…the soft shadow and the utmost refinement in the modeling of the Virgin's head indicate Leonardo's participation in this exquisite work," collector and art historian William E. Suida wrote. Incidentally, the painting had been rediscovered by another storied connoisseur, William Valentiner.
Outpost of civilization or not, L.A. was suddenly awash in ambitious attributions to Leonardo, Boltraffio, and Foppa — in Valentiner's opinion. One, an early copy of Leonardo's St. Anne, the Virgin, and the Christ Child with the Lamb in the Louvre, was lent by UCLA. Donated by Willis Hole, it's still at UCLA and rarely shown. The copy has been romantically attributed to Salai, Leonardo's romantic friend and muse. But that's an unfalsifiable claim, given the lack of certain Salais for comparison.
Duveen Brothers lent Valentiner the Madonna of the Pomegranate, presumably for sale at the right price. Barely 6 inches high, the catalog touted it as Leonardo's earliest surviving painting.
The catalog's list of donors gives shout-outs to the Valley (Carl S. Denzel, Northridge, Calif.) and the red states (Mr. and Mrs. Frank Buttram, Oklahoma City, Okla.) Multiple Leonardoesque works were flushed out of New York collections, and several donors were from the Detroit area. Valentiner had headed the Detroit Institute of Arts and had lived in New York. That was the pattern: Wherever Valentiner lived, he discovered works from Leonardo's circle, or convinced local collectors to buy them.

From our vantage point, Valentiner's Leonardo show is a cautionary tale in the fluidity of attributions. Valentiner was and is one of the most respected art historians of his time. Yet not one of Valentiners's five "Leonardos" pass muster as an original Leonardo today. That's worth pondering even as the odd Michelangelo or Raphael still turns up now and then.
Even in 1949 it was appreciated that no certain Leonardo sculpture existed. The Exposition Park show had to make do with a mere five "sixteenth century bronze casts after Leonardo's models." Only two were from private collections in Los Angeles.

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition

2010-03-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

ARTnews has a piece on colonial Latin American art in American museums, quoting LACMA's acquisitive Ilona Katzew and mentioning collector-lender Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and the Getty Aztec show opening Wednesday. Best line is from Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Joseph Rishel, on the reaction of some colleagues to his 2006 show, "Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820": "The bleeding-martyr business was a problem. I loved doing the Monty Python thing – to leap out and say, 'It's the Spanish Inquisition!'"

Tony Conrad’s “Yellow Movie”

2010-03-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

Museums take great pains to prevent light damage to works on paper. At MOCA Grand Avenue, the skylights have been darkened to permit hanging drawings and photographs next to paintings and sculpture in "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years." Ironically, one MOCA work may not be showing its age enough. It's Tony Conrad's Yellow Movie (pictured).
Tony Conrad is roughly a John Cage of film. He came to attention with Flicker, a 1966 film consisting of black and white frames alternating. It's said to be dangerous for anyone subject to seizures. Many of Conrad's films play with duration. Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), consisting of an eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, provoked Conrad to imagine longer films yet. Could he somehow create a movie that would last years, or a lifetime? As Conrad told Artforum in 2007,

The problem was that a truly very long film won't fit on a reel. So to work at the timescale of a lifetime necessitated revisiting the whole mechanical system. Lying on my bed in my Forty-second Street loft, contemplating this problem and vacantly staring at the ceiling, I said to myself, Crap! I just painted the ceiling last year, and look at it, already yellow! At this point I realized cheap house paint had exactly the emulsion properties I was interested in: environmental responsiveness over a very, very long scale of time.

The idea was that a painting made with cheap white housepaint would yellow with age. This would constitute a changing image, call it a "movie," lasting years or decades. "I thought about furniture pulled away from the wall showing its photograph on the wall in an indistinct but precise manner," Conrad explained. "I realized that if I used cheap house paint as an emulsion, people who wanted to be in my 'Yellow Movies' could stand against them for, say, a year or two and leave their trace embedded in them in a monumental way."
Conrad made 20 Yellow Movies and showed them for a one-day "screening" in New York in 1973. Since the movies were supposed to be yellow, Conrad tinted some with yellow pigment. MOCA's movie is light citron framed in black. When the Yellow Movies were reshown in Cologne and New York in 2007, Conrad felt they looked "pretty white for movies that are supposed to turn yellow." Apparently, the yellowing of white paint is more about dirt than light. It requires smog, urban grit, and cooking fumes. Artworks are normally protected from that sort of thing.
Conrad seems more relevant than ever to an art world obsessed with finding connections between art and film. At least one good example is in MOCA's "Collection" show, Hiroshi Sugimoto's Cinerama Dome, Hollywood (1993, displayed at the Geffen). In a way, it's the conceptual opposite of the Yellow Movies. Sugimoto used long exposure to compress hours of a "moving picture" onto a still image.

Never Bet Against Deitch?

2010-03-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

Grand Avenue is Eli Broad's "first choice" for his new museum, according to Martha Welborne, managing director of the Grand Avenue Committee, in the Architect's Newspaper. A Broad spokesperson says they're still considering three locations, however.
Should Grand Avenue pan out, it would qualify as Jeffrey Deitch's first big win. Until Deitch started lobbying for the site, it sounded like the contest was between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. A Grand Avenue site would be good(ish) news for those who think we need critical mass more than far-flung buildings. MOCA California Plaza is just across the street, creating what could be a one-stop contemporary art complex. The Geffen is a confusing 2-mile round trip hike from California Plaza, discouraging same-day visits. A Broad-MOCA proximity ought to facilitate future collaborations and loans. (Pictured, nano-detail of William Powhida and Jade Townsend's Hooverville, with Charles Saatchi at left and Broad at right, saying: "I've got all of L.A.'s art riding on this! Shit, I bet Jefferey!")
Broad hasn't publicly repudiated an earlier bet. Not so long ago, he promised that LACMA could take its pick of his collection — and that any museum wanting a Broad Foundation loan would have to clear it with Michael Govan first.

Innocents Abroad

2010-03-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

Logically enough, the largest collection of European drawings in the West is housed in the region's oldest museum. The part that might not be so logical is the location. It's neither L.A. nor San Francisco but Sacramento. Through March 29, you can sample a few of the Crocker Art Museum's riches in a one-room show at the Huntington, "The Golden Age in the Golden State: Dutch and Flemish Prints and Drawings from the Huntington and Crocker Collections." It's the quirkiest of the flurry of nano-exhibitions built around the Getty's recent Rembrandt drawing extravaganza.
Much of Judge Edwin B. Crocker's wealth came from the same source as the Huntington family's: the Central Pacific railroad. Crocker had the good fortune to be the brother of Charles Crocker, one of the "big four" of Western railroad barons. It was Charles who hired the coolies to build the Central Pacific at slave-labor wages. Touch of irony there — brother Edwin was an abolitionist, chair to the new Republican Party. After Lincoln's election, Edwin was appointed California's Supreme Court Justice. He served for seven months before retiring to a more lucrative post as chief legal counsel to his brother's railroad.
Crocker's legal career came to a halt in 1869, when he suffered a stroke that would leave him paralyzed (though wealthy) for life. Crocker promptly took his family on a two-year European grand tour, buying art for a new house-museum being constructed in far-away Sacramento. Most Americans of the age would have made a beeline to Paris. With the Franco-Prussian war looming, the ailing Crocker prudently made Dresden his base of operations. He bought paintings, and he must intended them to be his legacy to future Sacramento art lovers, if any. (The town's population was barely 16,000.) The paintings Crocker bought are a bizarre melange of forgotten painters and schools — Bohemia? Sweden??
Most important and mysterious is the stunning group of old master drawings that Crocker acquired. The track record of Gilded Age autodidacts buying art in Europe is not encouraging. Despite that, and without a known adviser, Crocker amassed nearly 1400 sheets. That's about twice what the Getty has acquired in nearly 30 years. The Crocker drawings are overweighted in minor 19th-century Germans, yet include amazing works by Carpaccio, Correggio, Fra Bartolomeo, Pordenone, Giulio Romano, Durer, Rembrandt, Boucher, Fragonard, David, and Ingres. (None is in the Huntington show, though. Right, Durer's Nude Woman With a Staff.)
Crocker's widow didn’t consider the drawings important enough to mention in her founding bequest to the city of Sacramento. The drawings were just there, along with the wainscotting and plumbing fixtures.
The most remarkable work now at the Huntington is Hendrick Goltzius' hand-drawn personal emblem, Honor Above Gold (top left). There are a couple of notable Dutch landscape drawings, weirdly enough by Simon de Vlieger and Jan van Huysum (otherwise know as painters of seascapes and flowers). Absent is perhaps the most reproduced work in the Crocker collection, a Roelandt Savery, the only drawing of the now-extinct dodo bird from life (above). Dodos lived on the island of Mauritius, Savery worked for Emperor Rudolf in Prague, which city the Crockers might have visited — but the drawing is in Sacramento. The Huntington is showing a drawing of an elephant by Savery's nephew, Jan, who worked the same natural-history vein.
In October, the Crocker debuts a new Charles Gwathmey-designed expansion. It will include a new Anne and Malcolm McHenry Works on Paper Study Center and an exhibition of highlights of the Crocker drawings and prints.

The Matisse on the Patio

2010-03-10T11:50:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times has a great photo of the Matisse mural Sheaf, in the patio of the A. Quincy Jones-designed Brody home in Holmby Hills. According to the Times, the 12-foot ceramic piece has been lifted out by crane and arrived safely at LACMA, where it is expected to go on view in about six months. For more on the mural's history, see here. The Brody estate is auctioning its modern art collection and has pledged some of the proceeds to the Huntington.

Greenberg on the Beach

2010-03-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

Clement Greenberg is not known as a champion of L.A. art. How many remember that the quintessential critic of the New York School curated two exhibitions of So. Cal-only contemporary art: "Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity" at the Los Angeles County Museum (1960) and "Sixth Annual Southern California Exhibition" at the Long Beach Museum of Art (1968)? Yes, Mr. Cultureberg found time for Long Beach. This history is glancingly recalled at the Long Beach Museum, now celebrating its 60th anniversary (and financial near-death experience) with a museum-wide, MOCA-style installation of a rarely seen permanent collection. One of Greenberg's picks was purchased out of the 1968 show: Nick Boisvert's It Hurts So Bad I Could Care (above).
Greenberg's best-known L.A. effort was LACMA's 1964 "Post-Painterly Abstraction." Greenberg is said to have selected all the artists except those from California, who were chosen by LACMA curator James Elliot. (As if California were Uranus.) "Post Painterly Abstraction" included Emerson Woelffer and Sam Francis, who were nevertheless behind its curve. It omitted the "Four Abstract Classicists" of the more prescient 1959 show at the Los Angeles County Museum. (Greenberg said of John McLaughlin: "There is something oddly Oriental at work here.")
According to the Long Beach Museum, Greenberg selected "only 17 percent" of the entries for its 1968 show. That statistic speaks volumes of a world before MFA-mills and the Internet. Picky as he was, Greenberg chose scores of artists who have subsequently managed to elude the attention of the New York critical establishment and, in some cases, Google spiders. As to Boisvert, he's still an artist, producing views of Western landscapes that Greenberg surely would have damned as kitsch (below, The Desert Tramps, 1979). Intentional or not, Boisert's Roadrunner pinnacles and canyons flip a middle finger at Greenberg's flat picture planes.

Cleopatra Finds Mate

2010-03-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

The Getty Museum has bought the long-lost pendant to a painting that's been in its collection since 1969. The new painting, The Death of Cleopatra, is by the Dutch classicist Gerard Hoet (1648-1733). It is the same size as a related Hoet that J. Paul Getty bought, The Banquet of Cleopatra (left). Though Banquet is one of several autograph versions, Death of Cleopatra was recognized as its mate when it was auctioned in 2008. The Getty bought it last year. Hoet once owned another Getty painting, Saint John the Evangelist by Frans Hals. The Hals was acquired by a modern Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, before entering the Getty collection in 1997.

Mexican Mash-Up

2010-03-08T10:24:00.001-08:00

LACMA's Latin American department has made another impressive acquisition with deaccession funds from the Lewin collection. It's a lacquer tray (batea), attributed to the workshop of José Manuel de la Cerda, greatest lacquer artist of 18th-century Mexico. The tray is circular, nearly a yard across, minutely decorated with a flat-world mash-up of fete galantes, bull fights, Greek mythology, and chinoiserie. (Above, the central medallion shows the myth of Arachne, complete with a gigantic spiderweb.) The "inauthenticity" of the decoration apparently didn't bother Cerda's aristocratic patrons in Mexico and Europe, most of whom had little access to Asian lacquer. European chinoiserie populates its invented landscapes with supposed Asians; Cerda's Orient favors Mexicans decked out in British redcoats. The only comparable piece in the U.S. is at New York's Hispanic Society.

Ripping Yarns

2010-03-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

LACMA's "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915" is two shows in one. The higher-profile show is a greatest hits collection of American painting that refuses to be limited by its nominal theme. By today's conventional thinking, paintings with a clear narrative are "illustrations," valued less than art open to multiple interpretations. That's one reason why Winslow Homer is prized more than Eastman Johnson; Thomas Eakins more than William Paxton. The good news: Through May 23, Los Angeles audiences can peruse textbook masterpieces of Copley, Homer, Eakins, and Cassatt, whether they tell much of a story or not. "American Stories" embraces everything from Colonial portraits to California landscapes. Only still lifes and Madonnas are off-limits.
That's not to say that there aren't plenty of proper narrative paintings. They comprise the show's more unruly side. Most of the flat-out story pictures are by forgotten artists, and many are ridiculous to the point of sublimity.
Consider Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait's The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix (above). If you like that sort of thing, get thee to Bentonville. The Tait, along with several other works, is on loan from Alice Walton's unopened Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. It looks like Crystal Bridges is poised to become America's Baddest American Wing.
Tait's rip-snorter is a world removed from Homer's The Gulf Stream (below, one of the many iconic works in the show). "American Stories" wants to claim that all these paintings draw from a common well. It comes as a shock to realize that they've got a point.
Both the Tait and the Homer present man imperiled by the forces of nature. Less obviously, both presume a viewer who delights in discovering a succession of narrative clues. "The bear's sitting on his gun!"… "The boat has no mast!" Both paintings step back a bit from the gloomy abyss, offering the possibility of salvation. The hunter's buddy is aiming at the bear, and a ship is on the horizon. Rescue looks more probable in the Tait, but it's not the first thing you notice.
Homer originally exhibited The Gulf Stream without the rescue ship. After hearing criticism that it was too dark, he added the ship, reverting to the money-making formula of earlier paintings such as Tait's. These parallels do not make the Tait a better painting or diminish the Homer. They do hint at the web of connections between art high and low.
The best of the show's "bad" paintings must be Charles Deas' fantastic The Death Struggle (above). On loan from Vermont's Shelburne Museum, it's an exuberantly baroque piece evoking Rubens' Fall of Phaeton. Nothing else in the show is like it. The "story" must be that that the white guy was hunting beavers — the Indians hunted him/and or his precious beavers — the chase ending in all plunging over the precipice. White hunter clutches beaver that bites Indian that grabs hunter — a vicious cycle worthy of Sartre, or at least M.C. Escher. As Sartre said, hell is other people. And animals.
Deas is known to L.A. museum goers for his magnificent A Solitary Indian, Seated on the Edge of a Bold Precipice, probably the only worthwhile painting at the Autry Museum (not in the show). Gene didn't buy it — it was a purchase of the museum trustees. Evidently, Deas liked the theme of native Americans dangling over cliffs. The Autry painting depicts its subject heroically. In contrast, the native Americans in The Death Struggle are demonic, barely human. But they're not the garden-variety racist caricatures, either. There's a trace of Ben Kingsley in the figure at upper right. It's an amazing, troubling picture.
Charles Deas (1818-1867) was born in Philadelphia and knew the work of Thomas Sully and George Catlin. In 1840, he visited the settlements of the Sioux and Pawnee. A 1849 fire in Saint Louis is said to have destroyed most of his life's work. He went insane in 1859 (now there's an "American story" that the public has always eaten up) and died in a New York hospital in 1867. Deas' first retrospective opens at the Denver Art Museum this August.

Pomegranate-gate in the Resnick Pavilion

2010-02-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

Conspiracy theorists should check out a post on LACMA's Unframed blog, ostensibly reporting on routine tests of concrete sealants for the floor of the unopened Resnick Pavilion. The concrete is being subjected to a variety of stain-producing fluids, including pomegranate juice. The pavilion's donors, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, just happen to have made a fortune marketing POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. Coincidence?
The Unframed blog's photo clearly shows the double-bulb bottle of POM Wonderful. Curiously, the photo is mirror-reflected: note the reversed print on the labels. Was this to dial down a too-blatant product placement? Or to avoid the implication that the Resnicks' antioxidant-rich fruit drink stains like Rit dye?

Youth vs. Kouros

2010-02-22T10:38:00.000-08:00

The Getty's recently announced deal with the Sicilian Ministry of Culture and Sicilian Identity provides for transporting the famed Marble Youth of Agrigento (above left) to Malibu for construction of an earthquake-resistant base and public display. The Agrigento Youth, dated about 480 BC, should make a provocative comparison with the Getty Museum's so-called Kouros (above right). The latter, bought for a reported $7 million in 1985, is now labeled "Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery." Practically every classical scholar outside the Getty would say that a more reasonable dating would be "Modern forgery, barring a miracle." Perhaps the most damning indictment of the unprovenanced kouros is that no European state has ever asked for its return.
The Agrigento Youth is not quite a kouros. The word is Greek for "dude," but art historians apply it to a small group of frontal statues of nude young men from the archaic period. The Youth is later and probably represents an athlete holding a libation. The Getty kouros has been faulted as a pastiche. The treatment of the face, the six-pack abdomen, and the feet appear classical, a style that would have been unknown to an archaic sculptor working in 530 B.C. A counterargument is that the date is unknown, and one art-historic style must somehow segue into another. The Agrigento Youth is relevant, as it represents the "severe style" bridging the archaic and classical periods. Unless 99 percent of scholars are wrong, the comparison probably won't favor the Getty statue.

LACMA = Laughingstock?

2010-02-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

One Boston blogger is really steamed over LACMA's January sale of a German renaissance portrait by the relatively obscure Christoph Amberger. A recent post on "AndrewAndJoshua" reads like a manifesto for the world's smallest tea party movement:

Any American museum that would sell an Amberger painting—let alone an important Amberger painting—is, by definition, a laughingstock.

And who at LACMA made the boneheaded decision to sell such a rare work of art…? The blame may be placed on Patrice Marandel, LACMA’s Chief Curator Of Painting… Marandel’s statement [explaining the sale] may constitute the single most stupid public utterance ever made by an American museum official.

All persons involved in approving the sale of this rarest of paintings, including the Museum Director, Michael Govan, should be removed, immediately, from their positions.

Van Gogh Does Tulsa

2010-02-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, has been lent six paintings formerly in the collection of L.A.'s Hammer Museum. In 2007 the museum ceded 92 works, said to be worth $55 million, to the Armand Hammer Foundation, resolving a dispute over terms of Armand Hammer's gift. There was no public disclosure of what works were returned or their subsequent whereabouts. The Foundation lent a Morisot and a Caillebotte to the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach. Six others have gone on loan to the Philbrook, according to a November 2009 piece in the Tulsa World. The two highest profile paintings are a van Gogh oil sketch, Lilacs (1887), and a more substantial Renoir from the following year, Antibes (below). The latter is no worse than the landscapes on view in LACMA's current Renoir blockbuster. The other loans are Corot's major, though much-darkened Pleasures of the Evening, William Michael Harnett's Still Life, and works by Bonnard and Fantin-La Tour.
There are no great surprises here. Ex-Getty director John Walsh advised on the split of the Hammer collection, ensuring that the Westwood museum retained the most museum-worthy material. Lilacs is the least interesting of the four van Goghs Hammer owned. Van Gogh's scintillating Hospital at Saint-Rémy, from 1889, is still in L.A.
Obvious question: Why Tulsa? The Philbrook fluffed the Hammer collection way back in 1984. According to the Tulsa World's James D. Watts, Jr., Hammer's grandson, Michael, was married in Tulsa to a Tulsa native, and he sits on the board of trustees of Oral Roberts University. The latter is best known for a brand of Christian conceptualism. In 1977 Oral Roberts had a vision of a 900-foot-tall Jesus telling him his "City of Faith" would be successful. Of comparably monumental scale is the 60-foot Praying Hands, a 1980 bronze by Leonard McMurray, now at the campus entrance.

“Renoir in the 20th Century”

2010-02-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

LACMA's "Renoir in the 20th Century" is founded on a paradox: The modernists we love loved the Renoir we love to hate. That's the late, post-impressionist Renoir, from about 1890 to his death in 1919. The art trade's shorthand for this period is "icky Renoir." Yet Matisse credited the aging Renoir with "the loveliest nudes ever painted." Picasso appropriated Renoir's beefy physiques for his classical period. And it wasn't just artists, who might admire a fellow painter for technical reasons obscure to the rest of us. The smartest avant-garde poets and critics praised Renoir to the skies. To Guillaume Apollinaire, Renoir was simply "the greatest painter of our time." This from a man who ran with Picasso and Duchamp.
The show's most astonishing statistic: French steel tycoon Maurice Gangnat owned 180 Renoirs. All dated from after 1905. (Many were sold to Philadelphia collector Alfred Barnes and aren't in the show.)
But by late 20th century, everybody who counted had discounted late Renoir. Monet's late style was said to prefigure Pollock and was avidly collected by museums. Meanwhile, late Renoir set curators' deaccession trigger fingers itching. It was "bad" art overvalued by a vulgarian market. The Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum each sold late Renoirs (the Met's reject, liquidated to buy a van Gogh, is on view).
In recent years, Renoir's nudes have acquired a cult following, almost as if he were a newly discovered "outsider" artist. Another point of reference is the post-feminist, post-modern painters of the human body. The proportions and distortions of Renoir's late nudes have parallels in the art of Lisa Yuskavage (right) and John Currin. Unfortunately, Yuskavage and Currin aren't in this show, despite the fact that it's on the second floor of the so-called Broad Contemporary Art Museum. ("BCAM" is becoming more and more like Voltaire's definition of the Holy Roman Empire: "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.")
"Renoir in the 20th Century" hews to the economic constraints of ticketed-blockbuster programming. The street banners say simply "Renoir," with no indication that this is the artist's bad self. Many visitors will not know the difference. The show delivers massive quantities of Renoir's late style, not only the nudes but the portraits, the landscapes, the costume pieces, and the collaborative sculptures. The few comparative works by early modernists don't add much. There's just one painting apiece by Picasso and Matisse; two by Bonnard, and several sculptures and drawings by Malliol. If the Picasso boosts Renoir's reputation, it's by demonstrating that the Spaniard could be just as boring as Renoir. One of the Bonnards, a Mediterranean landscape, has the opposite effect: It puts to shame a whole wall of Renoir's mild-mannered landscapes. "Renoir in the 20th Century" ends up demonstrating the "icky" theory as much as challenging it. But the nudes are something else again. In a perfect, non-blockbuster world, the nudes might have been the show.
The most thought-provoking work in the exhibition is the last, The Large Bathers from the Musée d'Orsay (pictured). It's easy to read it as comic: Plus-size nudes, ruddy and lumpy as hard-drinking Marseilles dockworkers, inhabit a sketchy landscape, a parody of impressionism. Incredibly, Matisse rated it Renoir's masterpiece. Yet when the family gave to the French national museums, it seems they accepted only for lack of a graceful way of saying no.
The path to The Large Bathers began nearly 30 years earlier, with paintings like Bather Sitting on a Rock (at top, 1892). It's got an erotic charge not associated with Impressionism. The pouty, pixyish facial expression remained a trademark, even as the bodies grew more Rubenesque, and it applied to Renoir's rare male nymphettes too. It was clearly a successful formula, comparable to Margaret Keane's goggle-eyed waifs, another variety of para-modern activity.
The nudes employ multiple perspectives. You see 51 percent of the bather's body, that with a flattened perspective. It's like a map peeled off the globe, or Tim Hawkinson's flayed self-portraits. Cezanne was doing that with apples and ginger jars, but Renoir took the idea into new emotional territory. The zoned-out, pretty faces on borderline grotesque bodies anticipate Leger and even surrealism.
That brings us to the show's greatest omission, Rene Magritte. During the wartime 1940s, Magritte channeled his depression over Nazi advances into a Renoir period, producing some 50 paintings of sunlit cheeriness. His appropriation was both more literal than any other big-name modern's, and also more original.
In Favorable Omens (above, 1944), a late-Renoir bird excretes a bouquet of beautiful posies. Magritte used Renoir's idiom as a vehicle for the irony that some post-moderns are now trying so hard to read into Renoir himself.

Ken Price Settles for #4 Choice

2010-02-13T12:07:00.000-08:00

"And it has finally been determined that the long overdue survey of the abstract ceramicist Ken Price that has been undertaken by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will come to the Metropolitan Museum. I’m glad it will be seen here, but the fact that the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Modern could not fit it into their schedules shows an appalling narrowness of vision. I don’t care how many scheduling conflicts can be cited."
—Roberta Smith, in The New York Times

The Curve of Beauty

2010-02-08T17:36:00.000-08:00

J.M.W. Turner > Frederick Evans > Aubrey Beardsley

That's the unlikely lineage exposed in the Getty Museum's "A Record of Emotion: The Photographs of Frederick H. Evans." Evans, revered as a pictoralist photographer of cathedrals (above, Stairs to the Chapter House, Wells, 1900), said he came to that subject after seeing Turner's watercolors of church interiors, a relatively minor phase of the great Romantic painter's production. Evans appreciated the way that Turner crammed the mysteries of light and dogma into a few square inches (left, Salisbury Cathedral, c. 1802). It's easy to see echoes of that in Evans' trademark photos of cathedral vaulting and staircases.
A more surprising link in the social network of art history is Evans to Aubrey Beardsley. It turns out that Evans "discovered" Beardsley. The future decadent was then a humble salaryman frequenting Evans' London bookstore on his lunch hour. Evans gave him his first big break, a recommendation to the de luxe publisher of Le Morte d'Arthur. Evans made a profile portrait of Beardsley and promoted him by selling platinum-print reproductions of Beardsley's drawings in his shop (both can be seen in the Getty show).
This may leave you puzzling over how Evans could be the nexus between two polar opposites of 19th-century British art. The show provides a few clues. One is an Evans photo of the spiral shell of a sectioned chambered nautilus. Another is a small album of brown-paper leaves, owned by the Getty, and opened to a postage-stamp-size pen drawing that looks like it was made with a Spirograph. Not quite. It was created by Evans with that toy's Victorian predecessor, the Harmonograph.
Invented by Joseph Goold, the Harmonograph used two pendulums to generate pleasing ink curves on paper. (Above, one of Goold's own productions.) In the Getty show, Evans comes off a shade less the seeker of spiritual light and a bit more the gadget-crazed uncle in the garage. Cameras were a gadget, after all. So were the magic lantern and the microscope, both wielded by Evans and represented here.
The perpetual sin of art history is to reduce every novelty to a banality. Notwithstanding, this exhibition makes a fairly compelling case that Evans, and perhaps some contemporaries, had a jones for a serpentine "curve of beauty" (in Hogarth's words) intersected by a series of similarly curved lines. Think of a sectioned nautilus, or the stairs of a spiral/eroded staircase, or the butterflied-shrimp form of some Beardsley drawings, such as The Black Cape from the 1894 edition of Oscar Wilde's Salome (above).

The Eli Problem: One Too Many or Not Enough?

2010-02-08T05:25:00.000-08:00

(The New York Times cites unnamed LACMA board members as saying that Eli Broad failed to pay $6 million of a pledged gift, a charge that Broad denied.)

“He owes us a fortune. There was a period he wouldn’t speak to me for a year and a half.” — Lynda Resnick, LACMA trustee

“The problem is that we don’t have enough Elis in Los Angeles to balance out his generosity and the power of his influence.” — Ann Philbin, Hammer Museum director

“Prince” Shows Hand of Rembrandt

2010-02-07T08:48:00.001-08:00

With Rembrandt scholars in town for the big drawing show and a symposium, the Getty Museum has quietly changed the attribution of one of its paintings. Prince Rupert of the Palatinate With His Tutor in Historical Dress, formerly credited to Gerrit Dou, is now called A Young Scholar and His Tutor and labeled "Workshop of Rembrandt van Rijn." Dou was part of Rembrandt's workshop in 1629-30, when the painting was created. But the change isn't just semantics. The Getty's new label copy is less sure the prince is a prince, or this Dou is a Dou. It cites x-ray evidence to argue that Rembrandt sketched in the subject and a student painted over it. The tutor's pointing hand, the focus of the composition, is believed to be by Rembrandt himself. (Hands are notoriously difficult for painters.) As to the student's identity, they're now saying only that "it may be the work of" Dou.
The whole painting was long attributed to Rembrandt. It had been downgraded to Dou by 1984, when the Getty bought it along with an apparent companion piece, Prince Charles Louis and His Tutor, by Jan Lievens. Getty curators have now decided that the faces in the Dou/Rembrandt painting are too generalized to be portraits. A historical subject, such as Eli Instructing Samuel, may have been intended.
This makes yet another case of flip-flopping (de)attributions. Either those 20th-century deattributors went way too far, or today's curators, dealers, and scholars are too hungry for fresh old master meat. Young Scholar hangs in the room where the Getty has temporarily assembled seven Rembrandts. Make that 7.1.

Irresistible Decay

2010-02-03T08:45:00.000-08:00

Hubert Robert painted an imaginary Louvre in ruins. For a taste of transience on Wilshire Boulevard, check out the increasingly ruinous banners on Renzo Piano's Broad Contemporary Art Museum. After two years, the John Baldessari-designed signage is beginning to sag from its supports and has taken on the sickly blue cast of an ad in a luncheonette window. In days past, there was talk of ongoing artists' commissions for new banners. The recession intervened, or maybe they want to keep the banners in place for the upcoming John Baldessari show. Either way, the images won't look any fresher with another summer's worth of UV.

N.Y. on L.A.

2010-02-02T17:14:00.000-08:00

"Looking at this oil left me feeling like I had recently disembarked from a long ship voyage over roiling waters. The hard edges of the piece weren’t rigid after all. Quite a trick." — N.F. Karlins on John McLaughlin's L-1958, at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York

"Take a look at the late drawing called 'Head of a Young Man' from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The sitter looks like someone the artist might have met on a beach, a surfer at Santa Monica." — Holland Cotter's review of the Met's Bronzino drawings show

Fiscal Crisis Slams Cultural Affairs Dep’t

2010-02-01T17:01:00.000-08:00

There's a proposal to cut the staff of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department by almost half and to deprive the department of its primary source of revenue, the 1 percent hotel tax. Arts for LA makes it easy to write your councilperson, even if you're not sure who s/he is. The Cultural Affairs department runs the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery and offers arts programs to families that can't easily afford the fees our big museums charge. [Via]
UPDATE: A mass calling of council member offices is planned for Tuesday at 2 to 4 PM. More here.

Dutch, Flemish, and French Galleries at LACMA

2010-02-01T08:06:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is debuting its reinstalled European galleries with five rooms of Dutch, Flemish, and French 17th-century painting. For the first time the Edward and Hannah Carter collection of Dutch paintings has a worthy presentation. That alone makes LACMA a better, more important museum than it's ever been. All 36 Carter Dutch paintings have now been accessioned, including the Hendrik Avercamp and Jan van der Heyden that were partial gifts. (This pair reportedly motivated this past week's auction of unwanted works from LACMA's collection.) The museum now has three large rooms of Dutch golden age painting. Two of the three are devoted exclusively to Carter works.
The kneejerk reaction is, doesn't that set a bad precedent? LACMA has a history of donors bolting after not getting their own museum-within-a-museum — or getting it, for that matter. There's been no indication that the Carters, by all accounts the museum's most unselfish supporters, demanded a room (or two) of their own — or else.
Remarkably, the Carter-segregated arrangement is as fine as you could ask for. The Carters bought only landscapes, seascapes, city views, church interiors, and still lifes. Everything they bought was a first-rate museum painting. Within these categories, LACMA has almost nothing worthy of hanging next to the Carters' works. The only painting in the "non-Carter" room that feels like it might belong is the Jan Davidsz de Heem Still Life with Oysters and Grapes, an Ahmanson gift. LACMA just sold several mediocre Dutch landscapes at Sotheby's. They wouldn't have scanned alongside the Carters'. This suggests a model for future collectors: If you really want your paintings to hang together in perpetuity, focus on one tightly-defined area and make sure that every object you buy blows everything else out of the water.
Speaking of landscapes, one wall alternates (uncle) Saloman van Ruysdael and (nephew) Jacob van Ruisdael. Not too many of the world's great museums can match these four paintings.
European painting and sculpture curator J. Patrice Marandel recently told The New York Times he's looking for Flemish paintings. It's not hard to see why. The Flemish baroque room is low-wattage compared to the Dutch collection. Not so long ago, the museum's most notable Flemish painting was a van Dyck Andromeda, said to be one of just two nudes by the artist. The museum has since decided it's not a van Dyck at all, and it's somewhere in storage. The second-most interesting Flemish painting, the Sweerts Plague in an Ancient City, is now shunted to the Italian baroque room. Sweerts painted it in Rome.
A French gallery is built around the great de La Tour Magdalene. In the past, Marandel has spoken of giving greater prominence the Andrew S. Ciechanowiecki collection of 46 oil sketches, acquired in 2000. The Ciechanowiecki pieces tend to be religious or history paintings by minor classicists rather then the later, plein-air landscapes that have set collectors and museums abuzz. The new installation works well enough mainstreaming Ciechanowiecki "sketches" alongside actual "paintings." In many cases, the distinction isn't apparent.
The new rooms are painted off-white and have the ebony-hued wood floors of the modern galleries (the planks at a diagonal to the walls). Whoever picked the paint color probably pitched it as Saenredam white. It's a cool, silvery white that zings with the Saenredam. (Left, Interior of the Mariakerk, Utrecht, a Carter gift.) Stand back and the overall effect is a little severe. It's a white cube with chair rails. Some will find that a relief from the Pottery Barn cranberries and teals many museums are using.
The rooms may not be memorable, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Saenredam white cube is a perfect machine for viewing Dutch art. The walls diffuse the overhead light (artificial), offering equal opportunity for every hue of the Dutch palette. The Carter paintings, the Rembrandts, the Magdalene — all look better than you've ever seen them.
The one flourish in this empire of white is a stained-glass overdoor separating the Flemish and non-Carter Dutch rooms. It's a heraldic Dutch window, dating from the 1620s, a gift of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst gave the museum its modest collection of stained glass, and most of that holding is late in the stained-glass chronology: the 1500s. The even later Dutch window has not been shown in the permanent galleries before. It fits here, reminding visitors that the early Dutch still life paintings coexisted with stained glass. No less important, it provides a landmark in the expanse of white-cubism.
There's more to come. The museum will be showing Italian paintings alongside Roman antiquities in a long gallery, said to be the largest for Italian baroque art in the U.S. More alarming: There's been talk of using the appalling fake-stucco wall treatment of the Luis Melendez show for the permanent galleries. In an unopened room, they're now hanging LACMA paintings on walls reminiscent of Old Madrid. Yikes!

LACMA Nets $3 Million at Auction

2010-01-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

Bankers may not be too popular these days, but someone just paid $1.2 million for this painting of one. Christoph Amberger's portrait of Hans Jakob Fugger was the high point of another surprisingly successful sale of LACMA's deaccessioned European paintings at Sotheby's, New York. Despite a soft economy, an obscure artist, and the obvious fact that a museum didn't want it, the Amberger sold for over four times its high estimate. So did a murky Ferdinand Bol Self-Portrait ($579,000). The museum's 17 works raised $3.8 million total, or over $3 million net of buyer's premiums. The money will be used to fund new acquisitions, including the Hendrick Avercamp Winter Scene. That painting and other Dutch works are now back on view in LACMA's refurbished European galleries.
Only one LACMA painting failed to sell: this grim still life by Alonso de Escobar (est. $80,000 to $120,000), a Spanish baroque master
who could have used a few pointers from John Baldessari.

Getty Buys a Boilly

2010-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Getty Museum has just purchased Louis Léopold Boilly's 1812 The Entrance to the Turkish Garden Café for $4,562,500 at Christies, New York. “It is arguably the artist’s greatest picture,” Getty curator Scott Schaefer was quoted by Artinfo, “and we paid the same price the seller did 20 years ago.” The $4.6 million far exceeds Boilly's previous auction record of $937,500 in 1994. The seller was Australian media tycoon James Fairfax, who bought the painting in 1992.
The 29-by-36 inch canvas depicts the Napoleonic Pinkberry — Café Turc, a Parisian ice cream place so popular that crowds spilled out onto the street. The painting orchestrates 60 figures, including the artist's self-portrait (far right, in top hat) and assorted street entertainers. The stately woman's profile at left is studied in an oil sketch at LACMA.
Schaefer has been trying to build the Getty's French painting collection for some time. In 2000, in a rare show of pre-auction candor, Schaefer vowed to bid for Jean-Francois de Troy's Return from the Ball. Return was the long-lost companion to the Getty's Before the Ball. Nevertheless, and despite the Getty's billions, the museum was humiliatingly outbid. This time, according to Artinfo, "Schaefer sat in the front row… giving zero indication of any Getty interest."

Getty, the Playboy Philosopher (Cont’d)

2010-01-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

In his Playboy magazine columns of the early 1960s, J. Paul Getty faults American businessmen as rapacious "barbarians." Yet Getty himself often gives the impression that the secret of art appreciation is to buy low and sell high. He presents art collecting as a populist enterprise—uh, because it doesn't take much money?

Obviously the average person is not financially able to go on a shopping spree for Rembrandts, Fragonards, Gauguins… But even the individual who has only a few hundred dollars to spend can buy good works of art—objects that are of high quality and that will retain or increase their value.

Certainly, it is often possible to buy good, reasonably priced works by lesser artists, particularly in out-of-the-way art stores, antique shops, and even second-hand bookstores…

Nor is it even necessary to spend thousands—or even many hundreds—of dollars to start and build an art collection that will almost certainly increase in value in the years to come.

There are—and always have been—many opportunities to obtain real bargains in art.

This attitude was all too familiar to the Getty Museum curators of the time. Getty believed that not only art collecting, but the running of a public museum, could be done on the cheap. At first, Getty did not even want to pay for museum guards; he settled on UCLA grad students. Confronted with a $17 bill for an electric pencil sharpener, the richest man in the world wired his agents to cease and desist from such profligate folly. "He liked to associate with large objects rather than small ones," said painting curator Burton Fredericksen. "He was getting more for his money if he had a big picture." (Most of Getty's "big pictures" were wrecks, studio copies, or both.) Getty was famous for having a pay phone in his England manor house, and similar economies prevailed in Malibu. "To make a long-distance telephone call, you had to get permission from the board of trustees," recalled decorative arts curator Gillian Wilson. "They only met once a year."

“Effulgence” at the Velaslavasay Panorama

2010-01-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

The Velaslavasay Panorama tends to be mentioned in the same breath as the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It is a deadpan recreation of another age's public spectacle, done on the slimmest of budgets by a clever artist working outside the MFA box (in this case, Sara Velas). The Velaslavasay presents panoramas, which is to say cylindrical landscape paintings where the viewer stands in the middle.
The idea is credited to otherwise forgotten Irish artist Robert Barker (1739-1806). During a walk with his daughter on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, Barker was struck with the notion of capturing the full, 360-degree view and presenting it to the viewer in a special room. Barker talked up the idea to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who told him to forget it. Barker nonetheless took out a patent in 1787, sparking a century-long vogue for illusionistic cylindrical landscape paintings. From the beginning, the goal was virtual reality. These were paintings without frames; the viewer was to feel that he or she was there. Panoramas were the Avatar of their time, proof that the masses desire nothing more than dimensionally "realistic" illusion. Panoramas predated photographs and gave stereographs a run for the money. It was motion pictures that killed them. To the British, particularly, panoramas offered a substitute for foreign (ugh!) travel. The Times of London found a 1861 panorama of Naples “even more pleasant to look upon in Leicester Square, than is the reality with all its abominations of tyranny, licentiousness, poverty and dirt.”
Barker originally named his invention “la nature à coup d’oeil” [“nature at a glance”]. On the advice of friends, he switched to “panorama,” a word that remains in the language, though (oddly) it is most often used to describe a real unrestricted view rather than the illusion. The L.A. suburb of Panorama City is proof of the term's popularity and bastardization. Velaslavasky's auteur, Sara Vela, was born there.
There are no proper panoramas in Panorama City, and only three others in the U.S. (in New York, Gettysburg, and Atlanta). The Velaslavasky inhabits the former Union Theater in the West Adams district. As in the panoramas of old, the viewer ascends a spiral staircase to enter a circular viewing platform looking out on an expansive landscape. The landscape is a painting, carefully lighted and supplemented by some three-dimensional elements between the platform and the backdrop. The Velaslavasay space is much smaller than its nineteenth-century forebears. The painting is maybe five feet beyond the edge of the platform. This diminishes the sense of "being there," but that's okay. It is the artifice that resonates most loudly.
The current offering, "Effulgence of the North: An Arctic Panorama" is a near-monochrome view of ice floes. The sepulcral lighting and ambient noise of "Effulgence" change ever so slowly, on a long-cycling timer. It's an interesting gloss on the the hallucinatory literature and art of the polar regions, initiated by Samuel Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1789); the icebound landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Frederic Church, and William Bradford; Gustave Doré's 1876 illustrations of "Rime"; the "slow time" of L.A. light and space art; and the Ganzfeld effect, a point of reference to the latter movement, in which jet pilots and snowblind explorers see phantasmagoric imagery in a featureless field of vision.
The panorama's brushwork is not so fundamentally different from what you might find at the Laguna Pageant of the Masters, executed on a tight production schedule. But the Velaslavasay presentation encourages the viewer to find abstraction in figuration, and strange patterns in abstraction. That way madness — at any rate, sensory deprivation hallucinations — lie.
The blurring of illusion and reality has always been part of the panoramic package. In “The City of York with the Cathedral on Fire,” exhibited at the British Diorama in London, viewers gazed on a painting of York Minister. A light appeared in a window, representing the mad arsonist Jonathan Martin. Smoke appeared, then open flame, which gradually engulfed the building.
On May 27, 1829, a worker was lighting some chemicals behind the panorama painting to give a realistic ruddy glow to the painted flames the audience saw. The trickery set the painting ablaze. The audience became engulfed in real flames as it rushed headlong for the exits.

Here Comes Trouble

2010-01-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

The Michael Vick school of museum programming holds that the way to draw crowds is to put two alleged adversaries in the same small space. LACMA is trying something of the kind tonight, with its Michael Govan v. Martin Scorsese smackdown—er, conversation. The participants don't have much left to disagree about, but predictably, the event is sold out. LACMA's Allison Agsten will be tweeting.
A more substantial confrontation seems to be brewing for Feb. 2. There will be a daylong Rembrandt Symposium at the Getty Center's Harold Williams Auditorium. At the last big Rembrandt conclave, at Herstmonceux castle in June 2009, scholar Gary Schwartz had this frosty exchange with Peter Schatborn (a curator of the Getty's big Rembrandt drawing show):

Schwartz: Peter, do you still think that the core list of Rembrandt drawings is no larger than 70?
Schatborn: Yes. It may be a bit larger, say 75.
Schwartz: Have you ever published the list?
Schatborn: No.
Schwartz: Why not? Shouldn’t you and Martin [Royalton-Kisch] back up your claims with argued information? In preparation for my book of 2006 I began assembling a list of the drawings that answer to your criteria, and there were 125 items on it.
Schatborn: If you show me your list I will cut it down to 75.

Says Schwartz, "If anyone else in the hall shared my impression that this was a trifle arrogant, they kept it to themselves." The core group of "certain" Rembrandt drawings is the linchpin of the Getty show. Schwartz has posted his list on his website and promises some pointed Q. and A. at the Getty symposium's opening talk: Peter Schatborn on "The core group of Rembrandt drawings." "There I hope to spark a more satisfying discussion of this matter than that at Herstmonceux," writes Schwartz. "Unless, of course, Peter Schatborn succeeds to the contentment of the field to slash my list back down to 75."
Tickets are still available for this, at $15 (lunch included).

The First Sam Francis Sculpture, Maybe

2010-01-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

The Huntington has installed a Sam Francis corten steel sculpture, on long-term loan from the Sam Francis Foundation. That will take Francis' fans aback: He's not known for 3D works. Sited just outside the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, the piece reminds visitors of the increasingly modern character of the institution's collection (exemplied by Francis' large painting, Free Floating Clouds, a gift from the Francis Foundation). Evoking calligraphy, the new sculpture nods to the Huntington's famed Japanese and Chinese gardens. The question is, is the Foundation's "Untitled Sculpture" an authentic Sam Francis?
It was created in 2003, nine years after the artist's death — and not by Francis, obviously. There are curmudgeons who turn their noses up at any posthumous sculpture. The more pragmatic simply acknowledge that a posthumous work is a shade less covetable—and marketable—than one created in the artist's lifetime.
The reality is that there are many varieties of sculpture-by-artists-who-were-already-dead. Consider Rodin's posthumous casts of The Thinker and The Burgers of Callais at the Norton Simon Museum. Rodin made bronzes of these works in his lifetime and decreed that further casts could be made after his demise. The posthumous casts were made by the same foundry, using the same molds. The artisans had a good idea of what Rodin would have wanted.
Approximately as authentic, and vastly rarer, is Tony Smith's Smoke, also on loan from an artist's estate and presently inhabiting the atrium of LACMA's Ahmanson Building. Smith conceived the work, his largest, in 1962 and constructed a full-sized wood model for the Corcoran Gallery. He never had the funds to fabricate it in painted aluminum. After Smith's death, the market value of his work rose, and his estate commissioned the work. (Michael Govan talked Renzo Piano out of an escalator in order to save room for Smoke. “My intention and hope is that we will be able to acquire it,” Govan told the New York Times in 2008. “I don’t think I could live without it.” Somebody write that man a check, already.)
More problematic are cases like the Degas bronzes. Degas showed just one sculpture, the wax original of his famous Ballerina. After his death, many less finished wax sculptures were discovered in his studio. All were cast in bronze. Many of the original waxes are at the U.S. National Gallery. The first-generation bronzes ended up at the Norton Simon Museum; the second-generation pieces are at the Metropolitan Museum, the Musee d'Orsay, and elsewhere. Because the bronzes pack in crowds at prestigious museums, few care to say they're fake. But there's no clear indication that Degas ever intended his waxes to be cast in bronze. Not in dispute: Degas wasn't on hand to make the countless small aesthetic choices of casting and patinating.
In 1964 Sam Francis visited Japan. His exposure to Japanese art inspired him to make some ceramics. Though known for paintings and prints, Francis began a peripatetic engagement with the third dimension. He sketched sculpture and, in the 1970s, made some small scale models in plaster. This phase of his work is not well known. At the time of his 1994 death, Francis had made no large sculptures. In 2003 his Foundation executed six large sculptures based on his models. The work at the Huntington is said to be the first shown in the U.S. It will command the interest of any serious follower of Francis' art. But is it authentic, or just authorized? The oft-damned Degas bronzes are the same size as the original waxes. The corten Francis sculpture is much larger than the plaster models, and thus Francis never saw his conception at this scale. It's hard to say whether Francis would have approved, made tweaks, or gone back to the drawing board.
Retired United Airlines pilot Charles C. Dent conceived the idea of realizing Leonardo da Vinci's unexecuted design for the Sforza equestrian monument. Dent used Leonardo's drawings (representing the horse only) and consulted with the greatest Renaissance scholars for the highest sort of authenticity. His house-sized bronze horse was unveiled with great fanfare and presented to the Italian people in 1999.
Q. Is it a Leonardo?
A. You're kidding, right?

The Art of Noise

2010-01-15T16:00:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, MOCA's got an exhibition schedule again. It looks as ambitious as ever. Planned through 2012 are Geffen-sized surveys of land art and Latin American light and space; retrospectives of William Leavitt, Jack Goldstein, and Mike Kelley (not to mention Arshile Gorky, previously announced). Among the quirkier choices is "Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary," to be shown at the Pacific Design Center. Xenakis started as an assistant to Le Courbusier and became a math-obsessed composer, John Cage with a twist of Alfred Jensen. Among his creations was UPIC, a computer that converted visual images to sound (the idea is the opposite of the sort of synesthesia that intrigued Kandinsky, and which was the subject of MOCA's 2005 "Visual Music.") Much of Xenakis' music is available online. Below is his Metastasis.

Jeffrey Deitch & Walter Hopps: Stranger Than Fiction

2010-01-12T18:28:00.000-08:00

“It is somewhat unusual, but remember Walter Hopps went from Ferus Gallery to the de Menil collection.” —Eli Broad

Hopps: Born 1932, raised in Los Angeles.
Deitch: Born 1952, raised in Hartford, Connecticut.

Hopps: Studied at Harvard (no degree).
Deitch: Studied at Harvard (MBA).

Hopps: Partnered with artist Ed Kienholz in founding the Ferus Gallery, which went bust.
Deitch: Partnered with Jeff Koons on the "Celebration" series, ending up millions in debt.

Hopps: Did 1962 show of pop art, "New Paintings of Common Objects," in Pasadena and Warhol show in Houston (both blasted as banal and commercial).
Deitch: Appropriated Warhol's banal commercial logo.

Hopps: At age 31, was first art dealer to head a major museum (Pasadena Art Museum, then L.A.'s principal venue for contemporary art).
Deitch: At age 58, was second dealer turned major museum director (MOCA).

Hopps: Commissioned Renzo Piano's best museum building (the Menil Collection).
Deitch: Hired by Eli Broad, who commissioned Piano's worst museum building (BCAM).

Hopps: Arranged for Marcel Duchamp to play chess with a nude woman (Pasadena, 1963).
Deitch: Got Kanye West to drop in on a Vanessa Beecroft performance with 22 nude models (Long Island City, 2009).

Hopps: Did 2003 James Rosenquist show for the Guggenheim.
Deitch: "Jim's a friend."

Hopps: "a gonzo museum director — elusive, unpredictable, outlandish" (Washington Post, 2005).
Deitch: "a controversial appointment"… "the enfant terrible of the New York gallery scene"… "a quirky figure," etc., etc. (Brand X, Gothamist, and Cityfile New York).

Hopps: Mounted first museum retrospectives of Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Joseph Cornell.
Deitch: Big on James Franco and Kehinde Wiley.

Hopps: Died in Los Angeles.
Deitch: Probably not.

J. Paul Getty, the Playboy Philosopher

2010-01-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

From 1961 through 1965, J. Paul Getty wrote a column for Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. Getty (and/or his ghostwriter) had almost nothing to say about sex, and a lot to say about money. As the world's richest man, Getty's name was synonymous with wealth and was often featured on the magazine's cover. Getty was only secondarily associated with art, notwithstanding a small museum in Malibu bearing his name. (This was the original "house museum," predating the more notorious 1974 reconstruction of a Herculaneum villa.) Several of the Playboy columns discuss art, museums, and collecting. Getty's prime talking point, repeated with numerous variations, was that the average American male hates art.

The curator of a famous French art museum tells me that he can instantly single out most American men in even the largest and most heterogeneous crowds that come to his galleries. "It's all in their walk," he claims. "The moment the average American male steps through the doors, he assumes a truculently self-conscious half-strut, half-shamble that tries to say: 'I don't really want to be here. I'd much rather be in a bar or watching a baseball game.'"

[After Getty, entertaining an American industrialist in London, proposed a visit to the Wallace Collection]: "Good Lord, Paul!" he spluttered indignantly. "I've only two days to spend in London—and I'm not going waste an entire afternoon wandering around a musty art gallery. You can go look at antiques and oil paintings. I'm going to look at the girls at the Windmill!"

[Similar situation]: "Hell, I've already seen a statue!" one of the men snorted. "Let's go to a night club instead!"

Getty termed America's ruling patriarchy "educated barbarians" and diagnosed the problem as a deep-seated conviction that art is just for women and homosexuals. That thought, too, is expressed in Playboy's pages fulsomely.

I've found that the majority of American men really believe there is something effeminate—if not downright subversively un-American—about showing any interest in literature, drama, art, classical music, opera, ballet or any type of cultural endeavor. It is virtually their hubris that they are too "manly" and "virile" for such effete things, that they prefer basketball to Bach or Brueghel and poker to Plato and Pirandello.

In the best Hefner metrosexual mode, Getty plays up the studly side of art and culture.

Far from emasculating or effeminizing a man, a cultural interest serves to make him more completely male… Be it in a board room or a bedroom, he is much better equipped to play his masculine role…

Culture is like a fine wine that one drinks in the company of a beautiful woman. It should be sipped and savored—never gulped.

Did any of this James Bond-era gender politics factor into the design of the Getty Villa? Hard to say, but there is a Spike TV high concept in plunking a Roman orgy palace onto babe-rich Malibu. Anyway, one of Getty's most incontestable claims of Yankee barbarism is:

It's doubtful if one in ten Americans is able to differentiate between a Doric and an Ionic column.

That distinction is nicely addressed at the Villa, with its docent-friendly assortment of mix-and-match columns.