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| Grafton Tyler Brown, View of Tahoma (Mount Ranier), 1886. LACMA |
Christopher Knight recently called out LACMA on the awkward lighting of Grafton Tyler Brown's small painting
View of Tahoma in the Geffen Galleries.
He wrote on Instagram,
"A wide strip of dark shadow runs edge-to-edge across the top of the canvas, like a black cloud obliterating an ample swath of sky. The bar covers one-sixth of the picture.… That wide and intrusive shadow ruins the visual effect.… The ragged dark rectangle looks like a nasty storm is brewing over Tahoma.
"Thin shadows are often cast across the top edge of paintings in museums’ public spaces, even with great effort expended in designing lighting systems to minimize the interference. But not here. This disfiguring shadow is cast from inflexible, ceiling-mounted light fixtures, inadequate to the job."
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| Ceiling lights in Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries |
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| Eugène-Louis Boudin, Scene on the Beach at Trouville, Sunset, 1867 |
The Brown is hung in one of the Geffen's enclosed "core" galleries that (supposedly) offer the best control of light. Knight's post led me to search for other examples of intrusive shadows cast by frames. Just as bad are a Eugène Boudin seascape in the Perenchio collection and a William Michael Harnett still life. PhotoShop tells me that nearly 23 percent of the Harnett is in shadow.
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| William Michael Harnett, Alas, Poor Yorick, 1877 |
This is definitely a problem of small paintings with big, projecting frames. But it depends on the frame's design. A small Courbet seascape has a frame that casts a shadow on itself rather than on Courbet's brushwork.
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| Courbet, The Wave, about 1869 |
With some frames, shadows are all but inevitable. I don't know enough about lighting to say whether the Geffen's fixtures contribute to the problem. It does seem that the Geffen's core rooms present a unique challenge. With their single exits, dark floors, dark ceilings, and walls tinted dark red, dark blue, or even black, these spaces have relatively little ambient light to soften shadows.
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| Degas, At the Café-Concert: The Song of the Dog, about 1876–1877 |
This Degas loses "only" about 4 percent to shadow. But because the shadow strip is near black, it reads as a redaction.
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| van Gogh, Tarascon Stagecoach, 1888 |
In comparison the strip of shadow on van Gogh's
Tarascon Stagecoach is less disturbing because there is diffuse light to fill it in. The van Gogh is in a more open space with sideways natural light.
As Knight notes, the shadow problem could be solved by dispensing with problematic period frames. But period frames, when they survive, are a vital part of the historical inheritance. Other museums do a better job of lighting for them. However, that's typically in rooms with brighter walls and often, skylights.
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| Mexico, Folding Screen with Indian Wedding, Mitote, and Flying Pole, about 1660–1690 |
LACMA curators and installers have been tweaking the Geffen's lighting since the opening. The award for most improved lighting ought to go to the Spanish Colonial Folding Screen with Indian Wedding. Previously it had the unwanted distinction of being the only painting installed against a window. That is, the back was to the window. The painted surface was a murky silhouette against blasting L.A. sunlight. Now it's been moved to a concrete wall, revealing beautifully legible details and colors.
Comments
One solution is to slant the bottom of the picture away from the wall, toward the viewer.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It never is.
--- J. Garcin
> Zumthor's David Geffen
> Galleries
Artiste types (or dilettantes) like Zumthor or Govan sometimes do such funky or flaky things, that a fine line exists between hipster-appropriate or just basic incompetence. Or mediocrity.
Quirky lighting in the Geffen, however, seem less "rube" to me than wall brackets that are the wrong color. Or a lack of visual-aesthetic sophistication overall.
The Geffen's area with blank gray concrete walls & open concrete floor space set aside for performance art (skateboards! bicycles!) really professional for an art museum, at least a serious one?
A visitor from Minnesota several years ago posted a comment to a blog about her own city's art museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, being better than LACMA.
As for the city of Houston, it created its own art museum in the 1920s, while LA wouldn't have one until the 1960s. And for over 25 years, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston has managed expansions and installations more like that of a MIA than a LACMA (1981, 1986 or 2026), much less museums in Chicago, NYC, Washington DC, London, Paris, etc.
Michael Govan and Peter Zumthor, let me introduce you to Richard Brown and William Pereira.
Richard and William, please meet Michael and Peter.
Oh, well. lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH2ZiFrAEJo&t=305s
@darrinb1972, Youtube:
You inspired me. I flew to LA last night. Touring the Geffen Galleries today. :)
@TobyNomad, Youtube:
No way! 😊. I’m flattered, let me know what you think!🎉
@darrinb1972, Youtube:
Mission accomplished! I spent the whole day in there — opening to close. And am headed back shortly to do BCAM and the Resnick Pavilion. You definitely nudged me over the edge into booking the trip.
My overall impression is really positive. I thought the thematic organization worked much better than a lot of the early criticism suggested, and I liked that the architecture supports the art instead of trying to steal the show. (Though, I headed directly for the Impressionist Gallery upon entry. I studied the layout in advance and had a bit of a plan of attack.)
The stained concrete inside the galleries gives the spaces a surprising warmth, and the collection itself is just breathtaking. I also loved how the installation kept leading me into unexpected encounters with artists and works I wasn’t expecting.
But… man, were you right about the seating! 😂 After spending hours there, that became my one major complaint. There just aren’t enough places to sit and really spend time with the art. I also noticed a few spots where the daylight made viewing certain works a little tricky, but those feel like things that can be fine-tuned.
Thanks again for the inspiration. It was absolutely worth flying out for. [End quote]
I haven't even mentioned the lack of enough seating in the Geffen. The old Ahmanson building had plenty of couches designed by I believe the Charles Eames workshop. Not sure about that, however, but I do vaguely recall seeing the exact same style of seating in some LA County government building. I assumed that since LACMA was under the guidance of LA County government, one agency shared with another.
Just as Richard Brown over 60 years deserved a lot of blame for LACMA's original campus, Michael Govan has to take a lot of blame for the museum's current campus---or certainly its exhibit layout.
William Pereira's design should have been modified by Browh, whereas Zumthor's architecture isn't the reason so much of the installation overseen by Govan has away too many miscues, including those of lighting..
However, I'd still want to visit LACMA (warts and all) than Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, but I can easily see a lot of people feeling just the opposite.
https://youtu.be/Ogyc0Fcq-GE?si=OA0KR9ISzWoJ6XKr
Of course, the top-tier museums of the world aren't even in the conversation because their professionalism is a given compared with that of LACMA's.
Lighting doesn't appear to be an issue at the MFAH, particularly in its galleries of older European art. The skylights designed by Rafeal Moneo (circa 2000) make a mockery of the single skylight built into the atrium of the old Ahmanson Gallery.
Value engineering forced out at least the clerestory lighting (and higher ceilings) in certain galleries that was originally planned for the Geffen. But that doesn't explain installations that give a vague sense the museum is running out of objects for public display.
... Remember when someone uses the term "rhizome" most of the time it's just a buzzword because most people don't understand the concept or its im-pli-cations
--- J. Garcin
Can you say more?
It's thinking in terms of change, motion, continuity, relations of force. According to Deleuze, Baroque art takes the figure of the fold in art (e.g,., drapery in Ancient Greek sculpture) and draws a continuous line with it.
For example, Deleuze shows how in El Greco paintings there are all sorts of folds (e.g., fabric, boulders, clouds). El Greco dissolves all these folds into continuous waves --- not separate parts (identities), but infinitely smaller and smaller folds.
If this is starting to sound like we are doing math, we are. In the book where Deleuze discusses Baroque art, Leibniz's mathematical thinking frames his argument. Strictly speaking, Leibniz's thinking is NOT rhizomatic, but like rhizhomatic thinking it evinces "difference in itself." Difference-in-itself is the fundamental operation that Deleuze extracts from Leibniz's calculus (math about continuity) and Baroque art.
In so much as El Greco's work flirts directly with "difference-in-itself," Deleuze classifies El Greco as a Baroque and not Mannerist painter. In most art history surveys, El Greco typically appears in the section on Mannerism.
--- J. Garcin
I'll have to study Deleuze.