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| Lari Pittman, Maladies and Treatments, 1983. LACMA, anonymous gift |
LACMA continues to receive gifts of modern and contemporary art in advance of April's opening of the David Geffen Galleries. While the Perenchio and Pearlman donations are getting the most attention, a big tent of museum supporters have donated or funded works by Cézanne, Matisse, Calder, Ed Ruscha, Sherrie Levine, George Condo, and Simone Leigh. At top is a classic '80s Lari Pittman, Maladies and Treatments (in oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on paper, mounted on mahogany; 53-1/2 by 108 in.) The donor has defied a town of big egos by electing to remain anonymous.
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| Paul Cézanne, Néréide et Tritons, about 1867. LACMA, gift of Robert and Mary M. Looker Family Trust |
The Robert and Mary Looker Family Trust has given LACMA two small paintings by big names: Cézanne and Matisse. The Cézanne, Néréide et Tritons, is one of the group of dark-toned sketchy homages/satires of Romanticism that the artist produced in the mid 1860s. It becomes the earliest of a well-balanced group of five Cézanne paintings at LACMA, more than any other museum on the West Coast.
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| Henri Matisse, Nude on a Sofa (Harmony in Red), about 1921-1922. LACMA, gift of Robert and Mary M. Looker Family Trust |
The Matisse Nude on a Sofa (Harmony in Red), 9-1/2 by 13 in., is only the second Matisse painting in the collection, the other being the large Tea (1919).
Also from the Lookers is a 1957 Alexander Calder sculpture, Fish, and an Ed Ruscha painting, City. Calder produced fish-themed mobiles and stabiles from 1929 onward. A Flying Fish mobile, also from 1957, sold for a record $26 million in 2014. The Looker sculpture is painted sheet metal and wire, 60-in across. It joins two Calder mobiles at LACMA, the similarly scaled Little Face (1962) and Three Quintains (Hello Girls), the mega-mobile/fountain commissioned for the museum's 1965 opening. The latter is to be reinstalled on the Zumthor-transformed campus.
The Ruscha City must be related to the liquid word painting of the same name and year in Chicago. It's smaller at 20 by 24 in.
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| Bruce Connor, Rat Purse, 1959. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by the Modern and Contemporary Art Council and the Modern and Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions Endowment and gift of the Tomeo Family and Michael Kohn Gallery |
LACMA recently added works of California assemblage by Bruce Connor and Noah Purifoy. Connor's
Rat Purse is made of nylon, wax, gold leaf, a tin can, fur, sequins, string, and a cardboard box. Purifoy's
Watts Uprising Remains is one of a group of burnt urban relics-as-art.
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| Noah Purifoy, Watts Uprising Remains, 1965-1966. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by the Ducommun and Gross Endowment |
Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg have donated a John McLaughlin painting (
#6, 1970) in honor of Stephanie Barron; a Jenny Holzer bench (1989); a set of four Sherrie Levine
Number Checks paintings (1990). Sorry, no images.
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| Ed Ruscha, Baby Jet, 1998. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by Andy Song |
Andy Song, who's bankrolled multiple strategic buys lately, supplied funds for a 1998 Ruscha on shaped canvas, Baby Jet.
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| George Condo, Entrance to the Void, 2015. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by an anonymous donor, Alexandria and Kevin Marchetti, Sprüth Magers, Karen and Barry Wolf, Solomon Family Charitable Trust, Nicholas Embericos, Mr. Han Kyun Kim, Andrea Neustein and Laurence Milstein |
Entrance to the Void is the museum's first painting by Condo, acquired through the collective heavy lifting of a dozen donors.
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| Julian Schnabel, Bouquet of Mistakes, Buñuel Awake (for Jean-Claude Carrière), 2022. LACMA, purchased with funds provided by the Maria and Conrad Janis Living Trust |
Julian Schnabel's Bouquet of Mistakes is a large (27-1/2 ft. wide) ten-panel painting on velvet. The subtitle refers to Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel and his frequent collaborator, French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. The Maria and Conrad Janis Living Trust supplied purchase funds. (A group of Jean Arp sculptures from the Janis collection are now on view in an installation in BCAM's modern galleries.)
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| Simone Leigh, untitled (after June Jordan), 2024 (center, as installed at LACMA in 2024 show). LACMA, purchased with funds provided by Andy Song |
Song supported the purchase of Simone Leigh's
Untitled (after June Jordan), a 16-ft-tall tower of porcelain cowrie shells featured in LACMA's 2024 Leigh show. The reference is to the Jamaican-American poet June Jordan, who collaborated with architect Buckminster Fuller on the design of "Skyrise to Harlem," an uptown utopia of 15 residential towers in which "every room has a view." Leigh's sculpture aptly evokes
the concave-conical form of Jordan and Fuller's towers, which were never built.
Comments
> and contemporary art in
> advance of....the David
> Geffen Galleries.
> have donated or funded
> works by Cézanne, Matisse,
> Calder, Ed Ruscha, Sherrie
> Levine, George Condo, and
> Simone Leigh.
Other than the Cezanne, I don't if any of the other works should (or will) be installed in the Geffen. It will be interesting if the display format of the Broad building ends up as more flattering to a Ruscha than the Geffen is to a Cezanne.
I realize that most art nowadays, even garden-variety contemporary, is priced way higher than ever before or what makes sense. But LACMA also has a number of works of pre-modern/contemporary style and from the pre-1900s that sits in storage. How much of it should be on display more frequently?
The museum's Aubusson tapestries are rarely shown, partly for conservation reasons. But I also wonder how much of that is because they think older art isn't hip and cool enough?
Someone from the botox-Hollywood crowd implied that Lynda Resnick's preference for old European is dull and dowdy. So to the Geffen-LA elite, artworks reminiscent of what's in the LA Art Show are more appealing or interesting to them?
Yea, okay, LACMA will always be a piker compared with the big-time art museums of the nation and world. But why do they have to go out of their way to make that way too noticeable?
As LACMA prepares for the...opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building...Dancing Bride is a character from Lisa Reihana’s video epic, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–17)...
^ So I guess the Geffen will contain more than its fair share of contemporary art, just as the Resnick often has shows of newer art.
So will the Broad and Price-Goff buildings also have displays - or even more of them - of works made in the 20th-21st century? If so, whew! As it is, there aren't enough galleries in LA already exhibiting art created in the past 50-plus years. Again, whew!
> modern art that isn’t currently
> on display
I get it when a museum's budget is under pressure. Or what causes various types of temporary shows to be impossible or galleries to be closed due to staffing/security shortages. Or certainly when a collection is so limited in both quality and quantity, just about all of it is already on public display.
I single out artist Josiah McElheny's hanging objects on display in the Resnick Pavilion for months and months. That's not to slight the quality of his work. It's also not to fault him for an entire room being wasted for way too long with his "chandeliers." However, that's also assuming he didn't arrange an art-museum version of the music industry's payola.
When there's space in the Resnick, LACMA can't claim the BCAM is too small. When there's space in BCAM, the museum can't claim there's not enough space in the Geffen. When there's space in the Price-Goff building, the museum can't claim there's not enough space in the Geffen.
If they like making that excuse, they'll next claim there's not enough space in the nearby Page museum. So the Geffen may end up showing Ice-Age skeletons and plant fossils embedded in tar. For LACMA, that will be like taking a trip back to the future, back to pre-1965 Exposition Park.