Geffen Gets Mixed Grades on Lighting 101
Grafton Tyler Brown, View of Tahoma (Mount Ranier) , 1886. LACMA Christopher Knight recently called out LACMA on the awkward lighting of Grafton Tyler Brown's small painting View of Tahoma in the Geffen Galleries. He wrote on Instagram , "A wide strip of dark shadow runs edge-to-edge across the top of the canvas, like a black cloud obliterating an ample swath of sky. The bar covers one-sixth of the picture.… That wide and intrusive shadow ruins the visual effect.… The ragged dark rectangle looks like a nasty storm is brewing over Tahoma. "Thin shadows are often cast across the top edge of paintings in museums’ public spaces, even with great effort expended in designing lighting systems to minimize the interference. But not here. This disfiguring shadow is cast from inflexible, ceiling-mounted light fixtures, inadequate to the job." Ceiling lights in Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries Eugène-Louis Boudin, Scene on the Beach at Trouville, Sunset , 1867 The ...
