Lost in the Geffen
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| Handout map for David Geffen Galleries |
The Los Angeles Times and New York Times are each running their second reviews of Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries, by Leah Ollman and Holland Cotter respectively. Both are about as positive as the first round of reviews (by Sam Lubell and Michael Kimmelman), and both focus on finding your way through the building. Cotter wants an orientation gallery with suggested routes. Ollman doubles down on Michael Govan's premise that getting lost is the point. She brings up an issue scarcely mentioned elsewhere: the minimalist labels for art. Govan says that more information is available online, but Ollman finds spotty WiFi behind Zumthor's concrete and prefers a respite from digital screens.
Comments
Yes, provide visitors with LACMA on-site free wifi that is 55K-strong..no dead spots. For $30 bucks a ticket, that's the least you can do.
Even have an interactive app so visitors can cross off rooms and hallways that they've seen.
> holdings uneven in scope
> and depth.... It’s spotty in
> Western European painting,
> and thin in African
> and Oceanic material.
> It doesn’t come anywhere
> close to the breadth or
> depth of the Met...
In effect, LACMA is comparable to art museums in city A, city B or city C. Which is why the *look* and *quality* of the European galleries in, for example, the MFA Houston or the overall *look* of the MIA in Minneapolis, etc, easily will give a traveler to LA the sense that LACMA is more municipal than must-see.
I once naively perceived it as a bit better than that. But, whoa, I've been riding the turnip truck and have been one of the rubes referred to by J. Garcin. lol.
If the staffers (and director) of the museum perceive LACMA the way I now do - referring to its internet page, Youtube channel, special exhibitions and overall history - they better not assume that drinking latte from Erehwon somehow offsets a lack of enough sophistication.
The new building doesn't change the claim that "LACMA has transitioned to a de facto contemporary art museum [b]ut not a very good one."
However, Geffen LACMA is better than 1965-1986 LACMA, but I now feel like it's a 40-year-old finally learning how to drive a car---perhaps the Studebaker Avanti in one of the galleries.
Cotter did NOT conclude that LACMA's collection is "comparable to art museums in city A, city B, or city C."
He observed that there were strengths in the collection: Spanish Colonial Art.
Cotter also observed that there were some masterpiece around which LACMA could make sense of the whole.
This is how Cotter concludes his review:
I hope it will go with the “flow” idea, but articulate it more clearly, maybe in a single starter gallery that will set up, like a hiker’s AllTrails app, several suggested exhibition routes. And I hope that it will continue to tell intricate, knotty, scholarly stories and alternate such telling with some “masterpiece”-touting. The collection has some sensational things; new ones will arrive. Bring them out for their close-ups. In short, be the institution you clearly want to be: a “glocal” beacon of glam-with-brains.
... I suggested something similar the other day: organize the themes around the masterpieces and work on acquiring more.
--- J. Garcin.
> conclude
I didn't say or even imply he had said that. That's my take, period.
Your reading comprehension seems kind of rube-ish.
Incidentally, I recall your in the past implying LACMA was anything but a typical municipal-type museum. So reactions like yours through the years have lulled me into not fully understanding the true nature of the place. Or it being more rube than high faluting [insert Southern twang here].
I knew LACMA wasn't up to the standards of [insert name of big-time museum here], but I didn't fully realize how it also wasn't up to the standards of [insert name of second-tier museum here].
> work on
> acquiring more.
If even a Getty in the 2020s struggles to gain more traction, a museum like LACMA has that much more of a rube-ish budget (and rube-ish mentality too?). lol.
> for their close-ups.
I don't know if that's Cotter implying some gems are still in storage. I like to think there are, but when I zipped through some of LACMA's online collection, I didn't see as much "why isn't that on display!?" as I wanted to.
The museum has a lot of study pieces or, even worse, objects that give me "Goodwill" vibes. But I'm not a connoisseur, so someone's treasures may be junk to me, and my treasures may be junk to someone else.
... LACMA's collection is better than that of the second-tier museums you have named in the past. For Cotter, obviously, the basis of comparison is the Met. LACMA is never going to be the Met, but neither is the Art Institute of Chicago.
... Acquisition can take many forms, for example loan agreements
There should also be a capital campaign to establish an endowment for acquisitions.
Finally, Govan needs to switch gears from building to collecting. Find the collectors and make a case for giving the works to LACMA.
--- J. Garcin
> a rube
When I was an even bigger rube, I winced at Wendy Beckett's comment about LACMA---per the reactions of people she had been in contact with.
"Traveling around America, I was surprised to find how relatively unappreciated LACMA is."
https://youtu.be/nm6evrelKkY?si=gaGlNaL5hJdM5hTS&t=159
Today, her observation to me is way less surprising. Although I've long heard guffaws aimed at LACMA, going back to when I visited it as a kid with my family, my being a rube convinced me the museum wasn't as shaky as it really was.
Your own rube side has made you in the past several months imply that LACMA deserves a better response than Wendy Beckett's "unappreciated."
Generally, when things, people or places aren't too much in the rube category, they're appreciated, maybe even greatly respected or admired.
About that Hockney picture (Muholland Drive), I haven't seen one person comment that Zumthor might have been inspired by the shape of the road in that picture. The other work of art in LACMA's collection that might have inspired the shape of the building is Burden's Metropolis II.
From the winding shape (Hockney and Burden), to the letters hanging from the building (Ruscha), to the angled shadows (film noir and Ruscha), there is a lot of Los Angeles in this building.
It's a remarkable building. Now, the collection has to catch up.
--- J. Garcin
Promised gifts is Govan's raison d’être now.
I was inside the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for all of 20 minutes before I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was.... But I found myself not caring—that disorientation is entirely the point.
During a preview last week, the first thing I noticed was the light. Floor-to-ceiling glass lines the perimeter galleries... light streams in and shifts across the space over the course of the day, so a gallery that feels one way at 10 a.m. can feel entirely different by 3 p.m.
For someone who has spent a lot of time in traditional museums with windowless galleries, the experience was disorienting in the best way.
In practice, wandering through the David Geffen Galleries feels almost like taking a nature hike... At times, the structure feels thrillingly random. More than once, it struck me as an apt way of seeing art now: a museum for the TikTok generation, for better or worse.
The experience reminded me of moving through L.A. itself—driving from Echo Park to West Hollywood to Venice Beach in a single afternoon, each neighborhood a world of its own. [End quote]
Given LACMA's history and collections, I don't know if the traditional approach would have worked. Given my sense of same-'ol, same-'ol, creating the look and layout of a traditional museum for LA in the 2020s wouldn't have been necessarily ideal. So few options existed.
I've been using the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as a counterpoint. Part of that is because it's a generally younger instead of older museum. And it's associated with the Sun Belt, not the Frost Belt.
Most of all, I think it now also has more square footage than LACMA. Moreover, MFAH has the stereotypical look or feel of a Beaux-Arts-enfilade-type museum down pat.
Artist James Turrell has an installation in 1 of the 3 main tunnels that connect the MFAH's buildings on different blocks.
I can see people based in a city like Houston (etc, etc), were they to visit LACMA, still having mixed emotions about what they're familiar with versus what's on Wilshire Blvd. But when trying to envision myself meandering through a MFAH compared with a LACMA, a museum like the one in Texas would be more of a slog, more analogous to doing homework. The Geffen, concrete warts (and collection gaps and blank walls) and all, might be more like going to a party or taking a camping trip.
> offices/storage
For technical, creative and - obviously - financial reasons, I can't see space being created on the Geffen's roof top. But I wonder if some of the hollow spaces under the main floor and around the pylons that hold up the building (where the store, theater, restaurant are located) might eventually be filled in.
I don't have the greatest confidence in Govan's planning and judgment. I wish I could, but he reminds me of the person who does something first then asks questions later.
I'm still wondering how the theater on the south side of Wilshire Blvd will or won't be affected by its greater distance to parking north of Wilshire.
It is NOT a single building. One of the buildings was designed by van der Rohe and has an open plan (NOT Beaux-Arts and NOT an enfilade).
The most recent building, the Kinder building also does NOT have a suite of rooms aligned on a single axis (enfilade).
... If the people in Houston visited the LACMA/Anderson building before it was knocked down, they would have recognized their own Kinder building. Like the Anderson building, the Kinder building is more or less a large block with a white, fluted exterior.
--- J. Garcin
> Museum of Fine Arts,
> Houston.
Can no do. MFAH to me represents a good counterpoint to LACMA, both 1965-1986 and now 2026. It shows how a good presentation helps offset a collection that's non-Met or non-NGA in caliber.
The Pereira/1980's buildings did just the opposite. Although a more enfilade-type format was introduced to part of the Ahmanson in the 1980s, it was not as thorough (or convincing) as what the MFAH has done. LACMA came off more like a last-minute overlay, reminiscent of what a smaller municipal gallery would do.
Then again, J Garcin, LA is full of rubes, correct?
Thanks to...hoisting the entire gallery space 30 feet...above the ground, the artwork is additionally engaged in dialogue with unobstructed views of the museum campus and the city beyond. While the original museum buildings turned their backs on the treasures of its immediate surroundings, such as the Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by Bruce Goff in 1988, Zumthor frames them as an artwork in themselves.
Even Wilshire Boulevard gets the star treatment, inviting visitors to turn their backs on the artworks to contemplate traffic patterns. If you weren't already overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of art, the awareness of the city only adds to the feeling.
With the bridge over the boulevard and the views, is the building's suspension in service to the public, or is it just a symptom of its monumentality?
At a time when cultural institutions struggle to compete with the allure of our smartphones, LACMA has created a museum space that feels as though one is swimming through the bottomless scroll of Instagram... As a well-seasoned museum goer, I found myself lost in the maze.
But for a gallery space so attuned to the contemporary attention span, it is filled with technical shortcomings that even those glued to their phone might notice. Many of the artworks facing the exterior are blasted with natural light that blows out details in paintings and casts glare onto protective glass.
The Nuno textile curtains lining the windows, while sometimes elegant, are altogether too lightweight to mitigate overbearing natural light, and fail to hang straight up and down without immediate ironing.
Early critics of the design can feel vindicated for their concern that a museum composed of the same materials as a parking garage would be echoey.
...the David Geffen Galleries feel insulated from the rest of the museum campus, with hardly any elevated outdoor spaces of their own. How many visitors will muster the energy to visit LACMA's two other museum buildings afterwards, or even remember they exist? [End quote]
^ The Bruce Goff building used to look like it was plopped down too close to the northeastern side of the Pereira's buildings. It seemed like an afterthought. So although the BCAM and Resnick buildings are now more lost in the crowd, the Geffen helps make the Japanese Pavilion better framed.
> designed by van der Rohe
> and has an open plan
> (NOT Beaux-Arts and NOT
> an enfilade)
i at first thought the MFAH's European collection was exhibited in the museum's building from the 1920s, but it's actually in the structure designed by Rafael Moneo and added in 2020. Those galleries all come with natural illumination from skylights. They show how LACMA really came up short, both in 1965 and then the 1980s.
In a way, yep, LA really has been the land of rubes.
Even within the same building, there are various configurations. At the Beck building, the antiquities are shown in a transitional space next to a prominent escalator and a wall, etched with the names of donors (if I remember correctly). The escalator trivializes the display.
Only the top floor has a fully-realized enfilade. As a whole, however, the galleries look dated and pretentious --- top-lit Beaux-Arts salons. Those work at the Met, not at the MFA (Houston) with its inferior collection.
... The rubes have been drowned out by all the positive reviews of the Zumthor building. Of course, you are still here. ...I was kind of hoping we would hear from the Citizens's Brigade to/Save LACMA, if only for the laughs. But those rubes have disappeared entirely.
--- J. Garcin
"With the bridge over the boulevard and the views, is the building's suspension in service to the public, or is it just a symptom of its monumentality?"
"With the bridge over the boulevard and the views, is the building's suspension in service to the public, or is it just a symptom of its monumentality?":
Can you say more?
> at the MFA (Houston) with
> its inferior collection.
Which means LACMA has been in an even worse position. Its older-European collection isn't much better than MFAH's, but it also has been displayed in the rube--ish confines of 1965-1986 LACMA.
> The rubes have been
> drowned out by all the
> positive reviews of the
> Zumthor building
LOL. If a totally positive opinion of the Geffen is required in order to not be a rube, then most reviewers must be rubes.
A blemish-free assessment of LACMA would require its collections be (a) consistently A-grade and that (b) the Geffen/Zumthor building be without any technical/aesthetic flaws.
Bryan Barcena, Artforum:
I was in search of an angle, or more specifically, for some individual or group of people who could tell me what to think about our new county museum... Over the course of the week, I would scour the crowds at the three events to which I was given access, each attended by markedly different constituents of the art ecosystem.
...The thing about art critics is that we are kind of a sour, cutting bunch, and to no one’s surprise, first impressions were not so positive: too dark and yet too bright; too dour; too solid; not LA enough (whatever that means); a hotel-lobby-like experience where art was relegated to interstitial engagements; a mostly didactic-free museum made for looking if not learning; the plaza beneath a barren desert; etc.
But as I walked from its north to south end, across an arrangement of objects that is meant to mirror the geography of the world’s oceans, my opinions, as well as those of some of my colleagues, softened and brightened.
Max Durón had an immediately positive reaction to the anti-hierarchical, anti-chronological hang, and Christopher Knight, whose Pulitzer Prize sits on a pedestal made from his sundry criticisms of this decades-long project, was more reserved in his opinion, but nonetheless less biting than I would have thought.
Polling other critics, overall feelings were mixed, but everyone had something to say; we shared the feeling that the building had a personality.
I was back on Saturday the eighteenth for the Director’s Lunch...it felt like attending a country club luncheon, with guests including the current and former directors of the world’s top institutions: .... These were Michael Govan’s peers, and they were here to support one of their own... [He] had done the nearly impossible, and the admiration was palpable.
There was no use in asking any of the other directors here for their opinion of the building—they wouldn’t dare say anything less than glowing. Game recognizes game, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the other directors were feeling more than a little jealous.
The final and best take of the evening came from Nonaka-Hill director Natasha Garcia Lomas. As I was leaving, she asked, “Doesn’t it feel huge, heavy, bunker-like, and monumental?” which I interpreted as a dis, but she finished: “Like we could all live in it and it would keep us safe, like from a wildfire or an earthquake?”
Any doubts I (a proud card-carrying member of the cantankerous critics’ club) had felt about the building that week were a kind of software issue, so to speak: They were things that can and will be changed over time. [End quote]
BTW, David Geffen did attend the gala opening. Not sure if certain legal-political issues made a lot of the media downplay his presence, but his appearance was sort of the imprimatur of the Zumthor building.
I recall when I first read about Geffen's contribution, at the time I had mixed emotions. Then again, I admit I'm a rube.
On a conceptual level, the sentence creates a duality which is not necessarily rational --- a duality between monumentality and being in service to the public. Those two qualities are not necessarily opposed. Plus, if you can establish one in fact (as the writer does later with "service to the public"), why does it matter that it may be symptomatic of something else? Unless, of course, you just want to be negative. Which is why bad writers often use rhetorical questions and/or the prepositional phrase, "symptom of". Beware of that phrase.
--- J. Garcin
"But art criticism is not a particularly reputable profession, and it’s not something that one feels particularly, I think, good about being—an art critic. Especially if one considers the way one’s colleagues conduct their professional activities."
> often use rhetorical questions
Good or bad, I wish this blog attracted more commentators. It deserves to.
I notice the NY Times articles on the Geffen have generated over 100-plus replies. A lot of them reflect opinions based on what they've read, seen (in photos, videos) or *feel* about something, in this case an addition to a museum.
People like Bryan Barcena (or W. Poundstone) at least have first-hand knowledge, which is what I'm most interested in.
By contrast, comments about rubes, art critics, syntax/grammar, etc, don't help me understand what the Geffen/LACMA is all about.
Again, in the following text, notice the word "mixed." Not descriptions like "superb," "impressive," "excellent" or "unanimously good,"
> Polling other critics,
> overall feelings were
> mixed, but everyone
> had something to say
^ I notice that posting at Christies includes an image of the de La Tour painting, given to LACMA by the Ahmanson Foundation.
One of the regulars here has dismissed that philanthropic organization as sort of rube-like. That's why "rube" may or may not apply to what's being debated here. Most of all, it means that serious debate regrettably doesn't occur much in this forum.
BTW, most people in various ways do happen to be rubes. I admit I'm one of them. So sue me (and personally I prefer the word "hick").
As for the Ahmanson Foundation, I now realize they needed to have long complained about the shape and form of LACMA.
After the MFAH created its building by Rafael Moneo, the folks at the foundation should have really yelled at Govan to make LACMA less of a hinterland museum.
I heard Michael Govan several years ago mention this blog. I wonder if he still does? If so, he probably treats readers' comments as too rube-ish. Sorry, lol.
Agreed. There appear to be about 3 (maybe 4?) regular contributors who take up most of the air. I propose they start a band called Enfilade & the Rubes and go on tour to bicker amongst themselves in the back of a van for awhile.
--- J. Garcin
> are you responding
> to your own posts?
LOL. The post of "April 23, 2026 at 12:14 PM" really wasn't from me. Honestly.
Other than you or Ted G (and me), I believe there's at least one other semi-regular. Or maybe not.
I don't recognize a clearly identifiable 4th voice, whereas you and Ted G tend to post brief quips, some of them having an asshole-type tone.
The other is how LACMA’s once-distantly located Pavilion for Japanese Art now feels folded into the campus by its proximity to the Geffen Galleries. “It was important to Peter to do that,” Govan said. “So many people are saying, ‘What is this building?’ It’s been here since 1986.”
My first visit [to LACMA] was in 1995 for a retrospective of 19th century Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte. The big wall [along Wilshire Blvd] was impressive. Then I stepped past it into the welcome courtyard, only to find the museum was really a number of buildings grafted together awkwardly by an overhead superstructure, all behind a false front.
This was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?
“It was unnavigable,” said Govan, who arrived in 2006. “When I was hired, I went to the Barnes and Noble at The Grove and looked in L.A. guidebooks to see what they had to say about LACMA.” He chuckled. “It was not pretty.”
Future guidebooks, I suspect, will say the opposite. [End quote].
I wish a more no-holds-barred discussion of the 1965-1986 campus had occurred before 2020. That would have helped me realize what an embarrassment it really was. Although it would even worse now since I'm also more aware of what other museums are all about too, particularly places like the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Its Moneo-designed building didn't exist before 2020, so 1965-1986 LACMA wasn't even as outdone pre-demolition as it would be shortly thereafter
However, even before 2020, I recall the posted comments of a visitor from Minnesota describing LACMA unfavorably with her own town's Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But familiarity (ie, with the Pereira/Hardy--Holzman-Pfeiffer buildings) doesn't necessarily breed contempt. It instead breeds complacency. Or provincialism.
I have literally never commented before on this blog, though I've read it for quite some time. The fact that you assume I couldn't possibly be anyone other than one of your usual interlocutors is revealing, though.
Even when deep inside one of the interior galleries...you are just steps away from reconnecting to the cityscape and bathing in its light—beautifully modulated by the Japanese designer Reiko Sudō’s gauzy metallic curtains.
This feels very different to the great encyclopaedic museum buildings of Paris, London, New York and Chicago, where it is easy to forget where you are, let alone the time of day. Then again, Govan understood, from the moment he took the top job in 2006, that Lacma does not have a collection at that level, but one riddled by major cultural gaps.
The Zumthor building performs beautifully when showing sculpture and decorative objects… Objects that are sizable fare well. Those that are big and weird fare the best.
All that raw concrete in the galleries plays favourites. Wood, stone, glass and clay objects tend to come alive in this environment… Textiles look stunning here, offering the sensual pleasures of soft-on-hard textures.
Oil paintings do not always hold up as well… The blue or red tints themselves, streaky and irregular, can be distracting. How can you hang a painting on a painting?
It would rank as a major failure if the David Geffen Galleries were the only building on the museum campus… This [BCAM, Resnick, Goff/Japanese] wealth of exhibition spaces drowns out the loud (but few) voices who waged a campaign against the Zumthor building for providing slightly less square footage…
Unfortunately, the museum skimped on something else... Lacma has also stripped works of much specific historical and biographical context...…it is easy to have no idea what you are looking at, or why.
Consider the section “Textile Conversations: Africa and Black America”… You will not learn from the space…that two of the US artists…are mother and daughter. Nor will you discover anywhere that all five quilts come from a late California collector…whose romantic theory that “improvisational” African American quilt-making has African roots has been discredited by recent scholars.
What the gallery delivers are wonderful textiles and obvious visual rhymes. Clearly the museum wants to let people wander and have intense experiences with art. But is there no way to provide more information and interpretation, drawing on the curators’ deep expertise? [End quote]
^ It's interesting that the reviewer didn't question all the plain gray concrete walls but instead the nature of the surfaces with tint on them. Every person's brain is like a human fingerprint, no two are alike.
Also, no one has criticized all the spaces (on both the walls and floors) that to me are overly large blank spots. Or areas in the Geffen that (based on my admittedly, so far, judging images and videos, not a first-hand experience) trigger the sense that one is in a parking garage or warehouse. Or, even worse, that LACMA has more space than it knows what to do with.
When I first visited at 11 am, the sun was directly overhead, and Peter Zumthor’s highly anticipated...new building struck me as a dismal, dated, inelegant brute. But when I came back at 4 pm, I came to a wildly different conclusion: in that more flattering light, I saw a brilliant innovation and true gift to the city. I think both visions can be true.
At 900 ft long, the finished building has no particularly beautiful angles from the outside. Where Zumthor’s renderings featured delicately curving glass and sandy-coloured stone, reality delivered windows framed…with more corners than curves…oppressively dark, remarkably flat concrete slabs. On the interior, the same sombre concrete forms…look like bunkers.
The view over Wilshire Boulevard is nice… Then the bridge ends with an anticlimactic, panoramic view of a nearby apartment complex’s stucco.
But just like LA public life, the building really starts to come alive in the later afternoon. During these magic hours, golden rays enter the museum horizontally, warming and brightening the concrete. The curtains become luminous, casting stripes of light and shadow on the floor. Suddenly, everyone’s complexion looks amazing.
Different pathways approach the same gallery from such remarkably different angles that you are drawn back into spaces you’ve already seen… The joy is very much in getting lost... Alongside the sweeping vistas of sunset over Hancock Park, the aforementioned stucco apartments actually feel perfectly appropriate.
It’s a tour through the truth of LA, both its banalities and grandeur. [End quote]
Govan and LACMA curators and board members before 2020 should have held a meeting where the 1965-1986 buildings were debated in a public forum. They could have compared them with Rafael Moneo's addition to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which dates back not to 2020 but to 2000.
That means LACMA had at least 20 years to focus on how it came up short, not just compared with museums built in the first 30 years of the 20th century (in both larger and smaller American cities), but all the improvements some of those same museums have had in the past 25 years.
The millions of bucks spent on the Pereira buildings in 1965, its extension in the early 1980s and then the Anderson/Arts of America building in 1986 were very much a case of throwing good money after bad. But they still reflected hundreds of major donations/benefactors.
That's why what Govan wanted to do gave me a "what a waste, don't throw it out" reaction. But it was also because I didn't totally understand just how mediocre LACMA's campus was compared with what existed in other cities.
If Govan and others had been more transparent about the pros and cons of 1965-1986 LACMA, supporters like the Ahmanson Foundation would have slapped their head and said, "what took you so long?!"
> only 2/3s the way through
> their hang.
Judging the Geffen building is like a Rorschach test. Or a version of the Rashomon effect
Everyone has different takes on things like gray concrete walls. I think more of them should be tinted, Finkel thinks the paint (or tint) is distracting.
I'm sure most people aren't aware that apparently over 35% more artworks are supposed to be installed in the galleries. Yet I haven't read or heard one visitor complain about what to me looks like a museum whose collection isn't big enough to fill its main building.
The museum’s original buildings...sputtered soon after opening. Critics were not impressed with the trio of modernist pavilions that resembled department stores… Within a decade, the pool was drained to make way for a sculpture garden. By the ‘80s, the garden was gone, replaced by a pavilion by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer… Think Miami Vice.
The old LACMA, Govan told me during the press preview, was “a wannabe East coast museum.” The new one, he believes, better reflects the realities of contemporary LA…”
So does it fulfill LACMA’s long-running aspirations to create something lasting?... The short answer: Yes and no. The Geffen Galleries offer cinematic architectural moments, but it comes at the expense of the art.
What can appear sinuous at a distance, however, grows more severe as you draw nearer. The plaza areas underneath the building are a work in progress…. But as it stands, these spaces comprise broad expanses of concrete…which is heavy on palms and light on shade trees — relegated to the fringes.
And there’s the overbearing nature of the building itself. Approach from the west and you’ll be greeted by a massive concrete eave that looms overhead like a giant industrial pancake. And the concrete that perhaps looked sculptural from a distance is splotchy and stained up close.
From there, a set of straight, unremarkable stairs lead up to the galleries — which comes off as an afterthought… All-in-all, the sensation is that of crossing an airport tarmac to get to the terminal.
And then there is the display of the art. Here, the results are wildly mixed…. sandstone sculptures…and Assyrian bas reliefs come to life as the light shifts… A 17th century marble bust…by Gian Lorenzo Bernini….appears ready to talk.
But other works don’t fare so well. All that daylight makes anything covered in glass difficult to make out. During two different visits, I found a trio of paintings…and a large-scale architectural photograph…practically impossible to see because of glare. …I watched several museum-goers put their nose right up to a vitrine…because it was the only way to view the objects inside without a reflection.
Translucent curtains…soften the light in places, but not nearly enough to obscure the blazing Southern California sun.
…many of the interior galleries leave much to be desired as an aesthetic experience. These cacophonous spaces are all concrete — including the floors and ceilings. To relieve the monotony, walls have been stained with pigments in shades of maroon, charcoal black and ultramarine blue. It’s an atmosphere that might work for a Tibetan temple textile or a Baroque religious artifact, objects that wear gloom well. But it strangles other forms of art.
Plastic sculptures associated with California’s Light and Space movement…look like they’re sulking in storage. And a series of photographs….are overwhelmed by a sea of maroon, making it difficult to pick out any details.
When architect Yoshio Taniguchi designed an expansion for [MOMA] in the early aughts, he famously told the trustees that if they raised enough money, “I’ll make the architecture disappear.” Zumthor’s galleries will follow you home and haunt you.
On the whole, the building is a study in contradiction… this instant icon also feels like it could be a logical bookend to the era of starchitecture… In some ways…[this] building could not be more LA: messy, sprawling, too big to take in from a single vantage point. In others — its embrace of the road and its relentless horizontal-ness — it seems stuck in a vision of the past.
When the Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer pavilion opened in the ‘80s, Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson was not a fan of the design… But he did praise its daring. “….The existence of this thing is going to change the life of this city for the better.” To that I’d add: at least for now.