New at the Broad: Anselm Kiefer, Mickalene Thomas
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| Anselm Kiefer, Grenze (Border), 2024. The Broad |
The Broad has put on view new acquisitions by Anselm Kiefer and Mickalene Thomas. Kiefer's Grenze (Border) was featured in the artist's 2025 show at the St. Louis Art Museum. The Rückenfigur is identified as the artist wearing his father's Nazi army uniform. He has crossed a puddle and faces a barbed-wire horizon and a sky of gold leaf.
Grenze is from a group of paintings whose media are described as "emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis"—ingredients Kiefer connects to alchemy. The canvas is 12.5 by 18.7 ft.
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| Detail of Grenze (Border) |
Completely different in mood and media (rhinestones and acrylic) is November 1971, a painting included in the Broad's 2024 exhibition "Mickalene Thomas: All About Love."
Eli Broad collected Kiefer from his 1980s heyday onward, assembling 15 major works. He did not collect Thomas at all, but November 1971 now becomes the third work by the artist at the Broad, all added since 2021.
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| Mickalene Thomas, November 1971, 2024. The Broad. (c) Mickalene Thomas |
Comments
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/g/gogh_van/09/arles58.html
Re Mickalene Thomas's "November 1971", of 2024: I regret, homosexually, I cannot read her.
(Female figure)
Jordan Wolfson
Accession Date: 03/10/15
72 x 29 in. (182.9 x 73.7 cm)
Jordan Wolfson’s (Female figure), 2014, is an immersive environment
that features a robotic sculpture. For twelve minutes, the robot gives
monologues and dances to pop songs. {End quote]
^ That work in particular is ready-made for what a lot of would-be visitors to the Lucas Museum (or AMPAS) would love to see. Or what they'd expect if they dropped by one of the amusement parks of LA or Florida. lol.
As for LACMA, this looks bad. Too much gray concrete and a display table that even Ikea might feel embarrassed about. Or if the platform for the small sculptures is weak, at least don't have objects on it looking like they're at a local discount store:
I hope the photo actually caught a gallery where everything is still makeshift. Even more so since the paintings on the wall look like they're tentatively arranged too---haphazard gaps and large works next to a jumble of small ones?
https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/69a84cf95d4deb737de69b4d/master/w_1600,c_limit/0426_LACMA_embed_04_a.jpg
People with better taste than you chose the display cases and funded the Zumthor building.
In that Vanity Fair Article, David Geffen says the Zumthor building is "magnificent." Who are you to say otherwise?
Geffen gave $150 million toward the building. You don't have $500 in your back account.
Geffen owns Hockney's The Splash. You have some poster from IKEA hanging on your walls.
Shut up already.
https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/69a84cf92f69787b2c4bc3cd/master/w_
1600,c_limit/0426_LACMA_embed_04_b.jpg
It's not opaque, so would you prefer calling it a "stain?"
Your link, above, does not access the photo you note. If it's the oxblood color with the sublime Rubens on the wall, I, myself find the coloring satisying.
> embarrassing
> yourself.
Hey, Michael, how are things going? What the hell is wrong with you?
People working for an institution supposedly (and hopefully) devoted to the visual arts yet who have the aesthetic sensibilities of admiring the looks of a parking garage, are analogous to a player in Major League Baseball who can't throw a ball or a UPS truck driver who's partly blind.
Incidentally, the VF article has no such quote from David Geffen saying what he thinks of the Zumthor building, one way or the other.
However, the other major cultural building named in Geffen's honor - in NYC - apparently turned out underwhelming. I read a review saying parts of it looks like a Marriott Hotel. Or something like that.
NYC's Geffen is a mid-level hotel, LA's Geffen may be a Public Storage----speaking of which, I read their national headquarters are relocating from Southern Calif to Texas.
Oh, well. William Pereira in 1965 designed a tract-house museum, Peter Zumthor in 2026 designed a freeway-overpass museum.
Overall, the old LACMA was physically unimpressive, so the new LACMA may be a variation of that. But gray concrete walls can be tinted and floor-to-ceiling windows can be sealed off.
'Geffen was unfazed. “I have spent most my life working with artists and never cared about criticism of their work. Michael had an idea that I believed in, Zumthor’s design was magnificent, and LA is better because of them both. That simple,” he says.'
So yes, the VF article does in fact have a quote from David Geffen saying what he thinks of the Zumthor building, one way or the other.
But for an actual quote from David Geffen - THE benefactor - the writer sure as hell didn't present it properly. If the namesake approves of Zumthor's building, that's a key sentence. It's a a-ha moment.
The words "Geffen was unfazed" comes out of left field. The paragraphs from the VF article taken together are as jumbled as a version of, "and other than THAT, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
Vanity Fair:
For years he [Govan] was in what he [Govan] says was an impossible situation. He [Govan] had to sell the idea of the building years before residents could see it, feel it, drive by it, walk into it. Zumthor wasn’t brand-name famous among Angelenos. Odds are most Dodgers fans haven’t seen, say, his Kunsthaus Bregenz, in a small town on the northern edge of the Austrian alps. “And if you’ve never seen it before, how are you going to get it?” [Michael] Govan admits. “Certainly in places like Dia Beacon, if I had shown it to everybody, it’d be: ‘That’s weird. Why would you have 17 artists in a giant factory space like that?’ But of course, we didn’t have the scrutiny.”
So the editorials, the outrage, the pulling of promised gifts—all that stuff made sense to him [Michael Govan]?
“If they don’t have an opinion, then you have to worry,” he [Michael Govan] says. “If you’re in a city, you’re in a civic space.”
Geffen was unfazed. “I have spent most my life working with artists and never cared about criticism of their work. Michael had an idea that I believed in, Zumthor’s design was magnificent, and LA is better because of them both. That simple,” he says.
[Michael] Govan mentions that, in discussions with the museum’s public relations team, one school of thought focused on winning over the public writ large, that the idea was to “get everybody on your side,” as he puts it. He [Govan] disagreed.
Case in point.
The tinted walls remind me of the color field paintings of Mark Rothko. Because of the dark corners, the wall color appears to float free of the walls.
Curiously, the key to both the color field paintings and Zumthor's rooms may be the same, monastic architecture. The story goes that Rothko got the idea for his color field paintings (in part) from studying how shadow/light activated the colors in Fra Angelico's frescoes at the San Marco monastery. For the LACMA building, Zumthor sought inspiration from monastic architecture as well. See the New Yorker article on the subject.
By the way, there is an exhibition that just opened in Florence which explores the connection between Rothko's work, Fra Angelico, and wall painting in ancient Roman houses. Read the review in the NYT. Read the New Yorker article I referenced above. Maybe, you will learn something.
--- J. Garcin.