Jim Carrey Donates 1913 Picasso to LACMA
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| Pablo Picasso, Bar-Table with Musical Instruments and Fruit Bowl, 1913. LACMA, gift of Jim Carrey |
LACMA continues a hot streak of acquisitions. Actor Jim Carrey has donated a Cubist Picasso still life, filling a major gap in the modern art collection. Now on view on the third floor of BCAM, Bar-Table with Musical Instruments and Fruit Bowl is an example of Synthetic Cubism from the pivotal year of 1913. Though LACMA has the largest collection of Picasso paintings in the West, it has never had an early, fully Cubist picture. The vertical-format painting measures 39-1/2 by 32 in.
For all its influence, Cubism was a brief movement. The crucial developments spanned the seven years from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) to the start of World War I (1914). Picasso and Braque began using collage in 1912, and their paintings also became more colorful (so-called Synthetic Cubism). Bar-Table with Musical Instruments has a green violin and multicolor clarinet whose music is suggested by a sweeping yellow beam emanating from the bell, shown frontally as a red bull's eye. It's all painted, with the sheet music at bottom only faking collage. The fruit bowl is the askew whitish form at top, perhaps holding a pear, apple, and grapes.
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| Bar-Table with Musical Instruments in "Odes to Common Things" |
Bar-Table with Musical Instruments is being shown without fanfare in "Odes to Common Things," a small installation on still life as a motif in early Cubism and Surrealism. (The darkened room adjoins a brightly daylighted gallery, making the glazed painting tricky to photograph. The phone image at top contains more glare and reflections than may be apparent, given the multi-perspective schtick.)
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| Picasso, Head of a Woman, 1906. LACMA, partial, fractional, and promised gift of Janice and Henri Lazarof |
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| Georges Braque, Still Life with Violin, 1913. LACMA |
LACMA has two early Cubist paintings by Georges Braque, both oval in format. The Still Life with Violin was made the same year as the new Picasso. Braque used paint to simulate wood grain and printed paper. MoMA deaccessioned the Braque, and LACMA purchased it in turn with deaccession funds from its George Gard de Sylva collection.
Yikes! A few months ago LACMA didn't have a Manet, van Gogh, or Cubist Picasso painting. Now it's got all three (the first two via the Pearlman Foundation).
P.S. It's a journalistic cliché that Hollywood folks don't support L.A.'s museums. There is some truth to that, but you couldn't prove it by recent developments. Last year LACMA received a collection of modern art bequeathed by actor and gallerist Conrad Janis. In 2014 TV executive Jerry Perenchio promised his Impressionist and modern trove, contingent on completion of the Zumthor building. Then there's George Lucas and his eponymous museum.
Jim Carrey is not widely known as a major collector or museum donor. Last year he auctioned 35 works of modern art and design at Bonhams. This included a David Hockney lithograph and a Kenny Scharf painting that sold in the mid five figures.
It's hard to find another example of a Hollywood star donating one major artwork to a museum that doesn't have his name on it. The only one that comes to mind is Cary Grant's 1980 gift of Diego Rivera's The Flower Vendor to the Norton Simon Museum.
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| Cary Grant with Diego Rivera's The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies), 1941. Photographer unknown |
Comments
From the Surrealist room on, the galleries feel cramped—sometimes with barely a foot between works. First time I see the Kusama, the Hockney pool painting, and the Gerhard Richter portrait, they shine in the ’60s room, but the space feels overstuffed, and key works from the old Ahmanson are missing. I can’t imagine squeezing in the Perenchio pieces here.
It’s great to see the Lazarof works folded into the larger modernist story, but moving the Richard Serra beneath the Geffen could open vital space for modern and contemporary art In BCAM. Richard Serra is important but he is given equal space as all the german expressionism, early french modernism, Picasso and Giacometti combined. Truth is Jim Carey’s painting beats that Serra any day.
> third floor of BCAM,
If modern art and its exhibition format (and location) in the Broad (ie, walls, floors, platforms, display cases) continue after the Geffen opens, that will put a Picasso, etc, in an odd juxtaposition next to older styles-periods placed in a more rough-hewn setting (gray concrete walls, gray concrete floors, Zumthor-type installations).
When I see modern housed in the Broad, the format looks right. Meaning it's the way most museums display such works, not just early 1900s but from all styles and eras too. By contrast, older works of art may look ill-fitting in the Geffen. If so, they'll give the impression they should swap places with what's in the Broad building.
Hopefully that won't happen, however, since the Geffen Galleries 5 years following the demolition of the 1965-1986 campus does give LACMA a sense of greater relevance. Among museums in the LA art scene, pre-2020 LACMA was feeling increasingly lost in the crowd.
> but he is given equal space
I've always felt that's an extravagant use of the first level of the Broad.
As for "overstuffed," most galleries in a museum to me often look like the curator has more space than he or she knows what to do with. That's more of a problem in a museum that already has limited square footage to begin with, such as MOCA on Grand Ave.
I recall certain areas in the old Ahmanson Gallery where walls seemingly could have been taken advantage of to display more artworks.