The “Vault”—Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s storage space for Eli Broad’s Grand Avenue museum—is now rising quickly. See also The Broad’s construction cam.
William Poundstone on Art and Chaos
William Poundstone’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire
Huntington Buys a Renaissance “St. George”
May 15, 2012, 4:39 pm
The Huntington’s Art Collector Council has acquired a polychrome St. George and the Dragon, attributed to Giovan Angelo del Maino, one of the pre-eminent Italian sculptors in wood. The St. George, 27-3/4 inches high, is dated 1522-27. It was once in the collection of J.P. Morgan (who also owned most of the Huntington’s Renaissance bronzes). The attribution to del Maino is new, proposed by Giancarlo Gentilini of Perugia University and the Huntington’s Catherine Hess. There’s only one other del Maino in the U.S., a Massacre of the Innocents relief at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (below).
Also acquired by this year’s Council is a Barbizon painting, Sunshine and Shadow, by Constant Troyon (bottom). Dated from the 1830s, it was auctioned last May for $40,625, doubling the estimate. It shows the influence of Constable, down to a white horse.
Both purchases reaffirm a commitment to neglected parts of the collection. Like many Gilded Agers, Henry Huntington began collecting Barbizon art, but almost nothing has been added in that field, or in Arabella’s beloved Italian Renaissance, since the Huntingtons’ time. The St. George is to be a focus of a new room of Renaissance art opening this summer.
Lancaster MOAH Debuts New Building
May 14, 2012, 5:27 pm
The Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) is hardly known south of the Grapevine. Established as the Lancaster Museum/Art Gallery in 1986, it reopened this month in a new building, an extensively reconfigured bank with 20,000 square feet. The marquee opening exhibition, ”Smooth Operations: Substance and Surface in Southern California Art,” is cheekily billed as “the first post-Pacific Standard Time exhibition in southern California.” It pairs vintage Finish Fetish pieces with works by younger artists working in the plastic idiom. Though small—occupying MOAH’s “great room” of a central gallery—the percentage of exceptional works rivals the PST shows.
Start with Judy Chicago. One PST takeaway was how interesting and enigmatic the early Chicago was. In the 1960s Chicago used feminism as a trojan horse to be carried within the walls of minimalism.
There’s only one Chicago piece in Lancaster, but it’s a classic. Bronze Domes (1968) is a tabletop still-life of plastic hemispheres/breasts. It looks back to Lee Miller and forward to Charles Ray (how weird is it to use a table as pedestal for a tabletop still life sculpture?)
Another inspired choice is Frederick Eversley’s 1971 Venice Sky. It’s a lens piece the color of sea and smog, supplied with a blue aureole at the center. I’d rate Venice Sky better than any of the lens sculptures recently exhibited in PST (or acquired by Alice Walton).
“Smooth Operations” has good-to-defining works by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, and Craig Kauffman. A 1965 VASA (Union 76 Station) is from his best, most-Anne Truitt-adjacent period.
The show’s younger generation spans Eric Zammitt, son of Norman. At left is Eric’s Untitled (Plank One), 2012, a gift of the Eglash collection. It builds on the horizontal L.A. horizons of Norman’s paintings.
Philip K. Smith III’s Faceted Disc I (2012, right) crimps origami folds into a something like a Robert Irwin disc.
On the museum’s second floor is a small room of local history and “The Painted Desert,” a show of mostly traditional paintings of the Antelope Valley. This is more engaging than you might expect. The region’s dramatic scenery and glowing skies have produced a school of plein air painting. This isn’t sappy “California Impression” but a Highwayman-like art of sensuous extremes. At bottom, an untitled Sally Thatcher from the MOAH collection (bottom) looks like a your basic motel-room painting until you realize the sky is a cloud study of Constable subtlety.
The unlikely nexus of the Antelope Valley school is the otherworldly “Kirk’s Rock,” depicted in half a dozen paintings. That’s Kirk as in Captain James T. Kirk. The triangular crag appeared in multiple episodes of the original Star Trek. Each time it represented a different planet—but never this one.
LACMA Adds a Spanish Saint
May 10, 2012, 11:36 pm
LACMA has recently put on view a new acquisition, a 61-inch high Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1787) by Mariano Salvador Maella. The artist was First Painter to the Spanish King, a position he shared with Goya. The sunny, pastel colors shine the Enlightenment into the dark shadows of the Spanish baroque. Whether you love it or find it kind of creepy, this is a phase of Spanish painting rarely seen in American museums. A distant echo may be found in the pictures printed on the glass of saint candles, or in back issues of The Watchtower.
The LACMA Saint Francis is an autograph copy of a yet-larger painting commissioned by Charles III and now in Madrid’s Municipal Museum. It was purchased from the Terrades Gallery, Paris, using deaccession funds. Saint Francis becomes the second Maella at LACMA, for the museum also owns a small Study for an Altarpiece donated by Robert Procop in 2006. Next to the Alonso Cano Christ in Limbo, with its shocking-for-Spain nudity, the new Saint Francis is the museum’s most important Spanish painting pre-Picasso.
When Warhol Jumped the Shark
May 8, 2012, 5:15 pm
MOCA’s “The Painting Factory” proposes Andy Warhol’s late paintings of shadows, camouflage patterns, and ink blots as inspiration for some of today’s most engaging abstractionists. This isn’t the most adored phase of Warhol’s career—Christopher Knight calls it ”mostly a flop—banal retreads.” The question is, can bad art be influential?
I suppose it can, though the show caused me to reflect on the possible influence of a later, badder Warhol effort. Yes, I’m talking about The Love Boat episode.
On October 12, 1985, Warhol guest-starred on a popular and long-running ABC sitcom set on a cruise ship. Nostalgia-dense The Love Boat was known for its guest stars, typically actors of a certain age whose own TV series had been cancelled. The fellow stars on Warhol’s episode tell the tale: Milton Berle, Andy Griffith, Cloris Leachman, Tom Bosley, and Marion Ross. Unfortunately, the Warhol Love Boat is not to be found on YouTube or anywhere else on the web, as far as I can tell. It’s been posted to YouTube but taken down. The main visual evidence for the episode’s existence is the above still photo with series regular Gavin McLeod, whose name Warhol didn’t catch. In his diaries, the hair-challenged Warhol referred to McLeod as “the ship captain from The Love Boat—the bald guy.”
It is one thing to paint pop culture; it is another to descend into the belly of the beast. That must have been the point. With no more suspension of disbelief than is demanded by “The Painting Factory,” one might trace a semi-facetious lineage from the Warhol Love Boat to Chris Burden on [Regis] Philbin & Company, and to James Franco and Kalup Linzy on General Hospital. The common denominator is a never-conceded smirk at the business of television. These artist-pranksters in turn heralded the more serious side of media-based art, which often finds ways to negate the familiarness of TV so that we can see how truly strange it is. The Warhol Love Boat might be called a point of cultural inflection—more plausibly than the silk-screened abstractions at MOCA.
The Love Boat was produced by Aaron Spelling and Douglas Cramer. One of MOCA’s founders, Cramer was president of the museum’s board of trustees before a falling out and move to Connecticut. At right is Warhol’s portrait of Cramer, from 1985, the year of Love Boat.
In the Warhol episode, Marion Ross (TV mom of Ron Howard in Happy Days) is a former Warhol superstar, married to stodgy Tom Bosley (TV dad of Ron Howard). Bosley doesn’t know about Ross’ past in underground film, and she’s afraid that they’ll run into Warhol, playing himself, aboard ship.
Warhol bonded with Ross. “I really love [Ross] so much,” he told his diary. Ross called Warhol “the sweetest guy in the world.”
The episode’s humor centers around Warhol being a money-obsessed huckster. This echoes two plotlines from the 1960s Batman TV series—which clearly referenced Warhol, albeit without him doing a guest shot. (Click for Warhol as the Joker and, more incredibly, Andy played by Walter Slezak.) “How does an artist know when a painting is really successful?” asks a Love Boat regular. Answer: “When the check clears.” The laugh track goes wild.
That punchline was delivered by actor Raymond St. Jacques, playing a drag queen in Warhol’s entourage. It must have been edgier for 1985 than Kalup Linzy, not in drag, on a 2010 General Hospital. The Warhol Love Boat acknowledged the gay angle more than you’d expect for pre-Will and Grace prime time. In his diary entry for March 26, 1985, Warhol reports: “Got picked up to go to The Love Boat set. Had to do my ‘Hello, Mary’ line, and the gay director is saying, ‘Give it some pizzazz—Hel-lo, Ma-ry!’ And I say, ‘Hel-lo, Ma-ry.’”
Another diary observation: “Andy Griffith seems bitter to be on the Love Boat.” On the final day of shooting, Griffith [TV dad of Ron Howard on The Andy Griffith Show] “suddenly got really happy, very friendly to everybody, and nobody could figure it out… He must’ve had a drink.”
Warhol was himself miffed when the show’s TV Guide ad didn’t run his picture. In New York, a couple of days after air date he “went to Sotheby’s and they had my painting of Ten Lizzes up. Ran into a lot of old ladies who said they saw me on the Love Boat.”
(Below, installation view of Warhol paintings in MOCA’s “The Painting Factory”)
“Second Skins” at the Fowler
May 7, 2012, 2:25 pm
The UCLA Fowler Museum’s “Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth from New Guinea and Central Africa” presents a new paradigm for what was once called ethnographic art: the group show. The New Guinea half of the exhibition displays the work of 15 artists, all women of the Ömie tribe, along with biographies and commentaries. With less than 2000 people, the Ömie must have a higher exhibiting-artist-to-population ratio than Silverlake or Brooklyn. (At top, Ivy-Rose Sirimi’s The forbidden tree of Lawe’s parotia. Ömie mountains, and beaks of Blyth’s hornbill, 2009.)
Painted barkcloths were originally clothing, to be worn and discarded. Many of the designs draw on tattooing (in New Guinea) or skin painting (in the Ituri rainforest of Central Africa). The African side of the show fits a more familiar template. Ituri cloths (one example at left) have been prized and collected by big-name Western artists—including Brice Marden and Terry Winters—yet most of the names of the Ituri artists are lost.
The Ömie addressed the anonymity of barkcloth artists in 2004 with the formation of a cooperative, Ömie Artists, to market their artwork. Everything is sold with biographical documentation. This appears to have been a success, economically and aesthetically. Instead of cashing in on a trademark, the Ömie artists have taken art market success as license to move in new directions. The High Renaissance of Ömie art might be… just about now. At bottom of the post is a 2011 cloth by Vivian Marumi, Climbing Vine with Thorns and Tendrils, that departs from the canon with perfect assurance.
The first museum exhibition of Ömie cloths was in 2009, at the National Gallery of Victoria. That show had eight artists. The Ömie component of the Fowler show is the second museum display, and the first in America.
Munch Math
May 3, 2012, 2:50 pm
The record price paid for an oil-on-canvas painting is the rumored $250 million for Cézanne’s Card Players. Prior to yesterday, the record price for a pastel was Degas’ Dancer at Rest, auctioned for $37 million in 2008. That suggests that a great painting is worth about 6.8 times a comparably great pastel.
Had Munch painted an oil-on-canvas version of the The Scream, an auction house or dealer would arguably be justified in projecting a value of 6.8 times $119.9 million, or about $810 million, in today’s market.
How the Petersen Got Its Grill
May 2, 2012, 1:23 pm
Last year I wrote about the Petersen Automotive Museum board’s concern that its facade may be too subtle—that too few passers-by realize it’s a car museum. In case you’re one of the clueless, the design evokes a retro car wash, grill, or tail fins.
It seems that architectural savvy was never the museum board’s strong suit. During the design process, the Petersen was a branch of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Matt Roth, founding curator of the Petersen, reports that he, architect Marc Whipple of The Russell Group, and exhibit designer Jim Olson
“struggled with the design for the Wilshire facade. The board of the Natural History Museum… were not helpful, offering vague instructions on the order of ‘make it classy’ and ‘give it presence’ and then rejecting anything striking or original because they did not trust their own judgment.
“Whipple… had an associate on his staff, Richard Destin, who was completing a study of space-age carwashes, and he suggested the fins. It seemed an elegant solution to a repetitive facade, it certainly contributed presence, and we liked the playful aspect of it, but I knew the board would not accept a design based on the vernacular roadside, no matter how appropriate it might be for a museum of car culture. So I told them it was an homage to the colonnades of Classical architecture, omitted any mention of carwashes, and they bought it. But the truth is that it was based on a carwash.”
(Below, Andrea Palladio’s classical Villa Rotunda; L.A.’s anti-classical Slauson Car Wash)
Eli Broad: World’s Wealthiest Newbie
May 1, 2012, 2:19 pm
Eli Broad and minions have just launched a Twitter account, a Facebook page, and a blog. It’s part of the marketing campaign for Broad’s upcoming book, The Art of Being Unreasonable. So far the content is pretty generic. But scroll down to the bottom of Broad’s Facebook timeline for a photo of toddler Eli’s Alfred E. Neumann grin.
Kay Sage, Painter of an Odd Future
April 30, 2012, 2:28 am
Consider Kay Sage (1898-1963) the anti-Thomas Kinkade. She was America’s great painter of menace, dread, and the post-apocalyptic future. Her trademark was “the sulphurous light before a thunderstorm,” observed biographer Régine Tessier. Like a thunderstorm, Sage’s art could be depressing and exhilarating. A true contrarian might nominate Sage as the best of all the Western Hemisphere surrealists. Frida, move over? (Above, Danger, Construction Ahead, 1940.)
Born in Albany, Sage had one of her first gallery shows in Los Angeles, at the Tone Price gallery in 1940. Despite that, no Sage paintings have made their way into local museum collections. That’s remedied temporarily by LACMA’s “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” which contains a mini-Sage retrospective. That alone is reason to see “In Wonderland” before it closes May 6.
Kay Sage spent almost her whole career in the shadow of husband Yves Tanguy, also a surrealist painter and considerably better known. It was widely assumed that Tanguy’s wealthy American wife had amused herself by turning out knockoffs. Some of the collections that own Sage’s work catalogue it as “Kay Sage Tanguy” — a hyphenate she didn’t use, more suited to a Junior League cookbook.
The reality is more interesting and even more romantic. The surrealist couple first fell in love with each other’s paintings. That would qualify as “meet cute,” were we not talking about paintings of scorched-earth weirdness. Tanguy was entranced by a show of Sage’s work, not yet knowing the artist’s gender. Sage adored the first Tanguy she saw, Je vous attends (translated “I Await You” or “I’m Waiting for You,” 1934). That early masterpiece is now owned by LACMA, below.
Undeniably, there is a broad similarity between Sage’s and Tanguy’s brand of surrealism. Each produced landscapes populated by unrecognizable objects against smoggy skies. The brushwork was crisp and Leiden fine-painterish. It’s said that Salvador Dali stole the meticulous technique from Tanguy. Dali applied it to figures and objects of Freudian dreams, reaching a larger, sometimes less discerning audience. If Tanguy and Sage’s painting represent dreams, they must be fevered ones.
Disambiguation. Tanguy painted odd rocks, pebbles, microbes, or biomorphs. Whatever they are, they appear to be small, possibly microscopic. The landscapes of Tanguy are underwater, under a cover slip, or on a planet that is not-too-earthlike. There is no human presence. In the postwar period, Tanguy’s pebblescapes were read as melted remnants of atomic blasts. Tanguy himself maintained a Duchamp poker-face on all of this.
Sage’s art, in contrast, has a monumental quality. Her landscapes feel big, windswept, and lonely, with a nod to the American West (she married Tanguy in Reno). There is a human absence. Sage’s paintings, such as Tomorrow for Example (left), have an architectural quality not found in Tanguy. Her peculiar constructions are unfinished, off-kilter, or ruined, the work of unseen humanoids. Occasionally Sage’s works include wind-blown drapery implying a human figure. Art historian Whitney Chadwick found in Sage “a sense of motionlessness and impending doom found nowhere else in Surrealism.”
Tanguy died from an unexpected stroke in 1955. That almost put an end to Sage’s painting career. The following year she produced Le Passage, extraordinary for showing a female figure among the rockscape. The invisible face has been interpreted as a self-portrait. (Bottom of post.)
One of Sage’s last paintings, included in the LACMA show, is Watching the Clock from 1958. The title sounds like the despair of the bereaved. It is a back-of-canvas trompe l’oeil, such as the Dutch Masters did, and such as Roy Lichtenstein would do a generation later. Sage’s painting has two bullet holes in the canvas.
In her last years Sage made small sculptures of wire and bullets. On January 8, 1963, she shot herself in the heart. Her suicide note explained: “The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called ‘I’m Waiting for You.’ I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again — I’m on my way.”
