Van Leo Easter Egg!

Van Leo (Levon Boyadjian), Portrait of Youssef Nabil, 1995

Easy to miss in LACMA's "Now Showing: Youssef Nabil's I Saved My Belly Dancer" (through Jan. 11, 2026) is this portrait of the artist by Van Leo, the Armenian-Egyptian glamor photographer. Van Leo's photographs—particularly his staged, stagey, cross-gender, and surreal self-portraits—have gained a cult following. They were the subject of a 2023 show at the Hammer

At the time of Nabil's portrait (1995), he was 23 and would have known the 74-year-old Van Leo as a legend/relic of Cairo's Golden Age as "Hollywood on the Nile." It's not a color photograph (which Van Leo disliked) but a hand-colored B&W print.

The LACMA installation presents Nabil's 2015 video I Saved My Belly Dancer alongside stills and vintage movie posters.

Van Leo, self-portrait, 1940s. He wasn't bald; he shaved his head for this photo

Comments

Why "Easter Egg"? I'm dense.
Anonymous said…
LACMA's Resnick Pavilion has another exhibit of contemporary art (!!! and from August 2025 to January 2026!), this time from the studios of a person based in Egypt. Good times! I wonder how the Met Opera House's chandeliers are doing in Resnick's other gallery?

Cairo gets the Grand Egyptian Museum while LA gets Hauser & Wirth at LACMA.

BTW,, a major daytime heist just occurred at Paris's Louvre. I understand one of the prized objects was broken. News reports also show long lines of visitors standing outside France's big-time museum.

Security at LACMA (to prevent theft---although graffiti vandalism is always a threat) doesn't have to be nearly as good, particularly for what's often in the Resnick. Also, far fewer daily visitors at 5905 Wilshire Blvd who will be eyewitnesses of a potential crime too. Oh, well, win some, lose some.
Ted: The photo's label credits Van Leo but without any explanation of who that is (and obviously, 99+ percent of visitors won't know). It's thus an Easter egg in the sense of a hidden-in-plain-sight feature intended as an inside joke or reference.
Ah, understood. My brain fog predates COVID.
I looked up Van Leo. He bequeathed his entire corpus to the American University in Cairo.
I actually find him more interesting, if not more important, than Youssef Nabil. Each to his own taste.
Now that LACMA is growing up, perhaps it should reduce to the regular industry term of 12 weeks for its temporary exhibitions, rather than the 6-month window they've allowed for Youssef Nabil's show.
That would allow visiting tourists especially greater opportunity to study LACMA's own core collection. If locals haven't bothered to see the exhibit by 3 months in, chances are diminished ever further as more time passes.
Time to start building a literature now, now that you've built your house.
Anonymous said…
^ LACMA's show titled "Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics" went from December 2024 to July 2025. However, it was at least in the Broad building, which is where most contemporary exhibits should be housed. The current one featuring the Egyptian artist, however, is in the Resnick, which is for temporary shows.

A second portion of it already contains the apparently indefinite running show of another contemporary artist, Josiah McElheny.

Special temporary exhibits of current-day artists (other than the marquee names) cost less to organize and present. I get that. I also understand why museums of contemporary art host shows of....contemporary art.

As for LACMA's budget being too tight to do a lot of high-caliber shows (eg, what the big-time Met regularly has on its roster), it can throw out entirely a lot of the exhibits of artists better left to MOCA, the Hammer, the Broad, the Marciano or Hauser & Wirth, and show the museum's...permanent collection.

I realize LACMA doesn't have exactly the best of the best, but it's not necessarily any worse than exhibits reminiscent of something in the Hooterville Municipal Art Center and Gymnasium.
Re "I realize LACMA doesn't have exactly the best of the best":
It's clear that kind goes with like kind..when a high proportion of a museum's collection is of exceptional quality, other museums with exceptional collections will more readily trade works for temporary exhibition.
LACMA has exceptional works, but just not at a scale that would entice a Met to lend, for example, "Juan de Pareja." But I could name dozens of important works in LACMA's collection that it should be lending aggressively, so that LA could get tremendously important loans from parts far and wide.
Do the strategic work. It will pay off in the end in the shows LACMA can build.
Anonymous said…
^ I didn't even mention that 2 other shows in the Resnick Pavilion - built to house temporary exhibits---but presumably not so consistently contemporary - are from a variety of current-era Chinese artists.

LACMA comes off in particular right now like an Any-City-USA museum of mainly obscure contemporary artists and their contemporary artworks. The museum is way too much same 'ol, same 'ol.

The LA Times art critic for quite awhile has griped about this aspect of the museum too. But he may not ascribe that as much to its budget the way that I do.

Figuring the museum is juggling a lot of red ink, I, on one hand, give slack to LACMA's director for going the cheap-o-exhibit route.

However, on the other hand, he's also way too big a fan of contemporary art. So he's throwing far too much work at the museum's department of contemporary art and wasting way too much money on exhibits of contemporary art.

He and LACMA could have saved a lot of dollars since 2020 if they made the staff focus far more on the museum's own permanent collection,, which they admittedly did with the current Buddha exhibit. But that pales next to all their Hauser-Writh-type shows.