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| Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012. Denver Art Museum, gift of Kent and Vicki Logan |
San Diego's Timken Museum of Art is showing a Kent Monkman painting alongside the Albert Bierstadt landscape that inspired it. The Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, has been in the Timken collection since 1966. Monkman's The Fourth World is on loan from the Denver Art Museum. Larger than its model, it replaces Bierstadt's settler colonialists with blond horsemen pursuing buffalo through a Richard Serra sculpture.
The depicted Serra is Clara-Clara, a 1983 Corten sculpture commissioned for Paris that sparked a populist outcry much like that of Tilted Arc in Manhattan. In both cases citizens complained that the sculpture "herded" pedestrians and interrupted a public commons. Monkman's picture, then, satirizes a certain strain of (White) American art appropriating the monumentality of landscape.
The Timken installation will be on view through June 8, 2025. Meanwhile the Cree Nation artist's first major retrospective, "Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors," runs at the Denver Art Museum Apr. 20 to Aug. 17, 2025.
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| Albert Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864. Timken Museum of Art, San Diego |
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| Richard Serra, Clara-Clara, 1983, installed in Tuilleries Gardens, Paris. Photo (c) MykReeve |
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| Detail of The Fourth World |
Comments
> American art appropriating the
> monumentality of landscape.
That's like all the space set aside on the ground level of the Broad for the Serra work. Or the Josiah McElheny "chandeliers" now in the Resnick Pavilion. Why a lot of contemporary art has to be so gigantic or take up way too much space in a museum, particularly today's LACMA, is something that only a mother (eg, Hauser & Wirth) could love.
Where else would you prefer his works be displayed indoors, if not in massive spaces in the likes of DIA Beacon, MoMA, and Broad?
You really need to check yourself.
The scene is upsetting, notwithstanding the glorious twin arcs by Serra.
I'd like to know Serra's take is on the whole magilla.
> lovely.... The other, monumental
> piece can easily be accommodated
> in the center of the museum's
> cavernous spaces.
Not sure which museum you're referring to, but when it comes to LACMA the word "cavernous" generally doesn't come to mind. Even more so in its current state. Its categories of artworks go from A to C instead of from A to Z. Or at least from A to G.
I recall certain areas in the museum even quite a few years ago as suggesting it had more space than it knew what to do with. Or a few areas with more blank wall space than seemingly necessary. Nowadays, as one example, the first level of the Broad wing at LACMA. Or even certain sections of the Broad museum in downtown LA too. MOCA on Grand Ave seems to be even more a fan of the blank-wall format. Museums like the Louvre (which truly is cavernous) are just the opposite.
Regardless, Michael Govan is too much into contemporary, not enough into other styles, forms and categories of art. If LA didn't have MOCA, the Broad or the Hammer, much less Hauser & Wirth etc, then LACMA's overdoing post-1900s artworks wouldn't be too much a case of "been there, done that."
However, I admit that a lot of the type of exhibits they keep foisting on visitors to LACMA costs way less to formulate, organize and present. Which is even more necessary given the big price tag of the Geffen Galleries.