MoMA's Thematic Installation Works. Can LACMA Match It?
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| MoMA's David Geffen Wing |
LACMA and the Museum of Modern Art share David Geffen naming ops and a controversy. Should a multifarious permanent collection be organized around chronology and culture, or should it be a more art-history-fluid succession of changing thematic installations?
Michael Govan has talking up the latter approach since he took the helm at LACMA in 2006. It is grounded in a scholarly sensibility skeptical of encyclopedic museums. Since 2006 an influential segment of the museum world has caught up with Govan and his transformation of LACMA's campus. In 2019 MoMA inaugurated a changing layout for its permanent collection. "MoMA is change," ran the branding catch phrase. This has received generally positive reviews.
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| 2019 MoMA installation of Picasso and Ringgold. Photo: Noah Kalina |
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| MoMA's "Divided States of America" rotation with works by Faith Ringgold and Sam Gilliam |
Ringgold's Die now anchors a room of 1960s art centered on the civil rights movement. Chronology is still an organizing factor at MoMA, even if certain rooms trade in clever anachronism. Should you be an Alfred Barr revanchist desiring a decade-by-decade walking tour through Modern -isms, you can get still that, more or less.
Closer to home, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures had contemplated a more linear, textbook history of the movies, then scrapped it (and curator Kerry Brougher) in favor of the kaleidoscope. It opened in 2021 with an ever-changing set of installations. Dorothy's ruby slippers went off view… but here's the Godfather's desk. The Academy Museum has been a popular hit and, aside from the dust-up over Jewish moguls, its installation strategy has drawn few complaints.
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| Installation view of "El Greco and European Modernism," permanent collection rotation at Metropolitan Museum of Art |
In 2023 the Metropolitan Museum opened its refurbished European painting galleries with a layout often mixing national schools and occasionally scrambling chronologies. One room presents El Greco alongside his modern admirers Cézanne and Picasso.
Despite this evolving context, Govan's vision for LACMA has been more condemned than praised. There are two frequently voiced concerns. One is that the themes will be unserious and pandering catchalls ("3000 Years of Cats in Art"). Another is that a melange of themes will leave too many of the museum's most important or popular works off display, too much of the time.
None of MoMA's or the Met's themes strike me as frivolous. Many of the rooms are not that much different from what existed before. It's just that the spaces now have prominent labels explaining why these particular objects were brought together. Some rooms are organized around standard art-history terms such as "International Gothic" and "Grand Tour" (Met European galleries) or "Surrealist Objects" and "Vernacular Photography" (MoMA). The Modern currently has rooms dedicated to single artists (Matisse, Rothko), while others pose links between two or more artists or concepts ("Circle and Square, Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Piet Mondrian"). Rather than being dumbed-down, some of the themes may be a bit esoteric for the median tourist.I don’t get the sense that the New York museums have a lot of important paintings and sculptures that fell between the cracks of the current set of themes. Works that did get sidelined at old MoMA—early American modernists, the Mexican Muralists, Christina’s World—are now often shown in novel contexts. Before they were consigned to hallways if shown at all.
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| Still from The Wizard of Oz, 1939 |
In some ways it's the Academy Museum that is more disregarding of accepted histories and hierarchies. It opened with a display on Citizen Kane, including the "Rosebud" sled. That icon of cineaste history is now gone. The ruby slippers, one of the collection's most popular artifacts, have only recently returned to display (in "Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema"). MoMA will always have Picasso and Starry Night on view, but at the Academy Museum, no film, auteur, or object is indispensable.
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| Georges de La Tour, The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, about 1635-37. LACMA |
Govan has vowed to keep LACMA's greatest hits (such Georges de La Tour's The Magdalene with the Smoking Flame) on near-continuous view. But Govan has also been talking about lending LACMA art to the prospective Las Vegas Museum of Art. It sounds like he's thinking of shipping Zumthor-building rotations to Nevada.
A staff memo recently leaked to the Los Angeles Times suggests that LACMA has not entirely abandoned geography. The Geffen galleries will be divided into six "oceans" corresponding to the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (two "ocean" areas each), and the Indian Ocean. Christopher Knight wrote that this "pointedly scraps typical museum categories of continent, nation, empire or time period."
Most art has been created on land, not sea. (Are they planning to emphasize scrimshaw?) My guess is that the "oceans" are a way of talking about connections between continental cultures, a popular topic right now. But cultures also interact overland and through time. It's hard to see how the Silk Road or the Vienna Secession fits into an ocean-centric scheme.
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| "Oceanic" art: Easter Island Dance Paddle from about 1800. It's part of the Masco Collection of Pacific Island art that LACMA acquired in 2008 |
LACMA is no MoMA. Its collection is spottier while its chronological scope is wider. LACMA's holdings of American and Chinese art are modest for a museum of its size, and its representation of Africa's visual traditions is scant. With fewer great objects to draw upon, there are fewer connections to be made. Govan hopes to fill some of the gaps with long-term loans from other institutions.
I can't say how well LACMA's collection and loans can support the new strategy, nor how a Las Vegas outpost might change things. But I don't think the problem is with the concept of changing thematic displays of a permanent collection. That's already working at big museums in New York and Los Angeles.
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| LACMA's David Geffen Galleries, rendering from Atlier Peter Zumthor / The Boundary |
Comments
> while its chronological scope
> is wider.
That adds insult to injury. Or the way that the nearby AMPAS museum is underwhelming to visitors who want both quantity and quality.
LACMA isn't physically large enough and too many of its collections aren't impressive enough to be toyed with in a way that's conceptually too "hip" or politically too self-conscious.
However, what really annoys me, at least about LACMA, is when modern/contemporary artists are lumped together with other art and artists not based on time-style but based on race-culture-nation. In effect, such art and artists are ghettoized.
Modern and contemporary art and artists from throughout the world should be in the Broad building, not scattered through the former Pereira/Hardy-Holzman-Pfeiffer buildings or, possibly, the Geffen Galleries once they're open. Even more so when space for non-modern, non-contemporary art has already been reduced, not even factoring in all of Geffen's windows.
Govan has cited that museums of more than one floor discourage the circulation of visitors. That admittedly was an issue with the 4 stories of the Ahmanson Gallery. But having to walk into and out of different buildings does the same thing. However, at least the weather in LA on most days won't make that more disruptive. Still, not ideal.
Also, the first floor of the Broad building has always been treated way too wastefully. Richard Serra's sculpture implies that LACMA has more space than it knows what to do with. Or more space than artworks. Although using the blank walls around the sculpture might ruin the aesthetic, certain other sections of the Ahmanson seemed the same way.
If too much in storage isn't seen by LACMA as worthy of display, and they have more than enough stuff for their walls and floors, maybe the museum shouldn't keep acquiring artworks.
For example, once the new complex is complete, what other buildings will still display art?
That's what I assumed too. But the poster got me to actually look up that hotel in Vegas. lol. As for "20 questions, 20 buildings." Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
However, the decisionmaking of certain people are so squirrely, that nothing can be taken for granted. I just came across something posted on the internet that noted that since Govan took over LACMA, 80% of its exhibitions have been of modern/contemporary art.
LACMA's website for quite awhile has had a feature photo of a small sculpture done by Simon Leigh. It reminds me of something done for a high-school art class. Or, as noted by the LA Times, the museum has become a contemporary art museum, and "not a very good one at that."
During construction LACMA's Georges de La Tour was lent to the Portland Art Museum (but that showing was curtailed by the pandemic) and then the Getty Museum (for several months starting late 2023). I have run across the story of it being lent to Wynn Macau but my online searching has come up empty. I am tempted to call it an urban legend(?) If anyone reading this can supply a link, photos, or other proof, please do so.
The blue ceramic sculpture by Simon Leigh, "Martinique" (2022), is not small. It's a life-size (though headless) statue.
As for the de la Tour being allowed to be borrowed by a Vegas casino, that sounds so technically or symbolically inappropriate, that maybe Govan and LACMA's board of Trustees, in fact, allowed it? Nowadays it's hard to say when reality ends and sarcasm begins.
> The LA Times is in a MAGA
> death spiral.
LOL. You might just as well say that today's city of San Francisco, as another example, is experiencing the same thing.