Christopher Knight, Art Critic
February 25, 2012
Kenneth Price dies at 77; artist transformed traditional ceramics
Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77.
September 18, 2011
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980
Sometimes we seem to know less about the early years of post-World War II art in Los Angeles than we know about the Pleistocene Age mammals dredged up from the La Brea Tar Pits. In the last 30 years, L.A. pushed to the front ranks of international capitals for new art, a dizzying development widely documented — but what happened in the 30 years before that?
September 18, 2011
'Pacific Standard Time': Exhibitions to keep an eye on
A few of the 60-plus shows have already opened, but "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980" officially gets launched Oct. 1 and 2 with a trio of major surveys opening at the Getty, MOCA and LACMA. Here's an annotated list of some of the more intriguing exhibitions. Start your engines.
October 2, 2011
Pacific Standard Time: Open your eyes to John McLaughlin
Rico Lebrun was probably the most famous Modern American artist working in Los Angeles in the decade following World War II. Yet, when the J. Paul Getty Museum opened "Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970" on Saturday, kicking off the mammoth, region-wide survey of Los Angeles art dubbed Pacific Standard Time, Lebrun's paintings were nowhere to be seen.
August 24, 2010
Critic's Notebook: A new life for the Broad Collection
Huntington, Getty, Simon, Hammer, Crocker, Menil, Wadsworth, Phillips, Frick, Morgan, Whitney, Guggenheim, etc. — the list of super-rich Americans who, since the mid-19th century, have established museums or galleries to house their personal art collections is as familiar as the institutions that still carry their names. Their motives have been wide-ranging: altruism, self-aggrandizement, fun, social engineering, commitment, reputation laundering and more, including various combinations thereof.
May 29, 2011
MOCA's 'Art in the Streets' gets the big picture wrong
Is graffiti the most influential art movement since Pop burst on the scene in 1962?
April 25, 2010
Critic’s notebook: The Getty Trust presidency needs to be abolished
In March, a "help wanted" ad appeared on the J. Paul Getty Trust's website. Amid listings seeking an HVAC technician, a security officer and an audiovisual specialist came four succinct paragraphs, highlighted by this description:
December 20, 2009
NOTES ON THE DECADE
L.A.'s growing pains, status
The six solo gallery debuts in Los Angeles that I admired most this year confirm something about the new millennium that we pretty much take for granted. The city's cosmopolitanism and art's internationalism are here to stay. ¶ Two of the six artists were born in the United States. At L.A. Louver, Ben Jackel showed stoneware sculptures on militaristic themes that fuse brutality, fragility and play, while humility wrestled with grandiosity in Justin Hansch's witty paintings at Circus.
January 18, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Inauguration ushers in new hope for National Mall
The cascade of extraordinary scenes will officially begin Tuesday, with the nation's first inauguration of an African American president on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, in a city south of the Mason-Dixon Line, as the oath of office is sworn on Abraham Lincoln's bible.
April 10, 2011
John McCracken dies at 76; contemporary artist made geometric sculptures
John McCracken, an artist whose fusion of painting with geometric sculpture in the mid-1960s came to embody an aesthetic distinctive to postwar Los Angeles, died Friday in New York. He was 76.
March 14, 2010
ART REVIEW
Luc Tuymans: Don't take his images at face value
Last year, when President and Mrs. Obama were selecting art for temporary White House display, I felt a twinge of regret that they were limited to work by American artists. At least two pictures by 51-year-old Belgian painter Luc Tuymans would offer a lot of contemplative substance hanging in the national residence. Both are now in his remarkable and cautionary traveling retrospective of some 70 paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
March 15, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Museum deaccessioning done right
José Clemente Orozco was one of 20th century Mexico's great socially minded muralists. A stark 1929 easel painting made at the dawn of the Great Depression helps to show how. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art bought the modestly sized tempera and oil painting last year -- its first painting by the artist -- and today it hangs on the fourth floor of the Art of the Americas building.
November 24, 2008
ART REVIEW
'Giorgio Morandi: 1890-1964'
" Giorgio Morandi: 1890-1964," the enthralling exhibition of 110 paintings, drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a bit of a surprise, but not for revealing an overlooked master. The show, as the first Morandi retrospective ever mounted in the United States, was in fact guaranteed to be loved. It includes some landscapes and a couple of dry self-portraits, but his spare still-life paintings, with their pale, sensuously brushed forms, reliably send a shiver down the art public's spine.
November 22, 2009
ART REVIEW
Kandinsky retrospective is natural for Guggenheim
"Kandinsky," the big exhibition of 95 oil paintings made between 1902 and 1942 by the visionary pioneer of abstraction, Vasily Kandinsky, is a show that looks like it was made expressly for the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. That's because in a sense it was.
October 31, 2008
ART REVIEW
'Vanity Fair Portraits' at LACMA
Founded in 1856, London's National Portrait Gallery is a place where the people in the pictures, not the pictures themselves, are what count. The museum's website explains: "The National Portrait Gallery was established with the criteria that the Gallery was to be about history, not about art, and about the status of the sitter, rather than the quality or character of a particular image considered as a work of art. This criterion is still used by the Gallery today."
October 11, 2009
ART REVIEW
Charles Burchfield: A master of American Modernist watercolor
Arguably, watercolor was the most important medium sustained by American painters struggling with the new demands and untried possibilities of Modernism in the first half of the 20th century.
November 30, 2008
ART
REDCAT AT 5: ART
Remember the Pacific Rim? The term isn't heard much in art circles anymore, but in the last dozen years of the 20th century, it was everywhere.
October 17, 2008
ART
Carleton Watkins on the frontier of U.S. photography
Conventional wisdom is that the Civil War didn't have a dramatic impact on American art. The preservation of the Union and the end of hideous intramural hostility supposedly generated an illusion of continuity, reflected in dreamy landscape painting and monumental sculpture celebrating American history and myth.
September 24, 2008
ART REVIEW
Kippenberger retrospective at MOCA
A WICKED sculpture at the entrance to the retrospective exhibition of Martin Kippenberger's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art crystallizes the manic tone that made the German-born Conceptual artist such an influential force, beginning in the 1980s. Then, in the show's first gallery, a thoroughly flat-footed installation also demonstrates what made his work so maddeningly uneven. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997, at age 44, so we'll never know whether his early achievements would have been multiplied or divided over the long haul, but MOCA's sprawling, 250-work show gives a welcome overview, warts and all.
September 16, 2008
ART REVIEW
Belgian artist Alÿs reinvents a saint at LACMA
Seen one, seen 'em all?
September 18, 2008
ART REVIEW
'Martin Kersels: Heavyweight Champion'
In the 1980s, Martin Kersels was a performance artist.
July 25, 2008
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Mark Tribe's Port Huron Project via Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Early Saturday evening, Providence, R.I.-based artist Mark Tribe orchestrated a reenactment of a 1971 speech by Chicano labor activist César Chávez protesting the Vietnam War. On the South Lawn of Exposition Park, midway between the Natural History Museum and the Coliseum, a call went out for "organized and disciplined nonviolent action," aimed squarely at those "seeking [their] manhood in affluence and war."
September 5, 2008
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Kori Newkirk at Museum of California Art
Ephemeral, transient, fugitive -- a central theme in Kori Newkirk's Conceptual art resonates through various forms. Thirty-one photographs, beaded curtains, neon lights, murals, collages and video projections made since 1997 constitute his modest traveling survey at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. If the show feels somewhat thin, look again: The subject of dislocated estrangement makes it so.
July 23, 2008
ART REVIEW
'Wifredo Lam' at the Museum of Latin American Art
IN 19th CENTURY EUROPE, when modern science bumped aside the Christian God as the primary artistic foundation for meaning and moral value, artists lost a subject that had preoccupied them for hundreds of years. "Show me an angel and I'll paint one," the famously combative showman Gustave Courbet told his detractors. A search for truth trumped its declaration in the depiction of religious narrative.
August 5, 2008
ART REVIEW
Bernini's genius is revealed in Getty exhibition
NOTHING would seem more dull than an exhibition of portrait busts, those stone-faced dust-catchers representing obscure generals, long-dead clergymen, government functionaries and preening aristocrats that one sometimes encounters tucked away in museum hallways or lobbies but rarely in prominent galleries for painting and sculpture. Typically, the sitter's wearisome vanity outdistances the artist's skill with a chisel and a drill.
August 1, 2008
ART REVIEW
Jorge Pardo's Pre-Columbian art installation at LACMA
Conceptually sophisticated and visually smashing, the installation design that artist Jorge Pardo conceived and executed for the impressive Pre-Columbian collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was unveiled to the public Sunday. Unlike anything you've seen in an art museum before, it's built on a deep understanding of the potential power of smart decoration.
July 4, 2008
ART REVIEW
Peter Saul at the Orange County Museum of Art
Peter Saul is some kind of national treasure. Just what kind of national treasure is hard to say.
July 2, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Why this actor's art shouldn't be at LACMA
I'm no fan of public art museums exhibiting private collections. The negatives so far outweigh the positives that such shows hurt, rather than help, a museum's mission.
June 4, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Under the gun is no way to view art
The e-mail from a reader was unequivocal. "In all my visits to museums and galleries around the world," it said, "I have never seen an armed guard."
June 10, 2008
TELEVISION REVIEW
'The Cool School'
If there had been a flash grease-fire at Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood circa 1960, the entire L.A. art scene would have been wiped out.
May 25, 2008
ART
A renovated Huntington Art Gallery
THE PAVED terrace behind the Huntington Art Gallery is 80 paces wide. By my stride, that's more than 165 feet. Stand at the center and look south, with the imposing Beaux-Arts mansion and its striped green awnings at your back, and infinity rolls out before you.
April 17, 2008
ART REVIEW
Can a museum -- even MOCA -- contain this work?
If an artist makes art intended to function outside the confines of an art museum, does it make sense for an art museum to present a retrospective exhibition of that artist's work?
April 8, 2008
ART REVIEW
'Masterpieces of San Diego Painting'
OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- The exhibition celebrating a building expansion at Oceanside Museum of Art is titled "Masterpieces of San Diego Painting: Fifty Works From Fifty Years, 1900-1950." If that doesn't stop you dead in your tracks, nothing will.
June 25, 2008
ART REVIEW
Marlene Dumas subject of MOCA retrospective
THE LARGE mid-career survey of paintings by South African born, Amsterdam-based artist Marlene Dumas that opened last weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art represents, in effect, her Los Angeles debut.
June 18, 2008
ART REVIEW
'This Side of Paradise' at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens
A1991 photograph by John Humble shows Selma Avenue at Vine Street as a jumbled, architecturally constructed Hollywood landscape of office buildings, stores, asphalt and advertising billboards. Dominating the center is Angelyne, the cosmetically manufactured "human Barbie doll," who adorns one enormous sign.
June 13, 2008
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Jennifer Steinkamp dazzles at ACME
Jennifer Steinkamp is among the most consistently inventive artists working today. Digital animation has been her medium since the early 1990s, which also makes her an important pioneer.
May 16, 2008
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Dike Blair at Mary Goldman Gallery
A dozen gouaches and a matched pair of installation sculptures by Dike Blair continue the New York artist's eccentric dialogue between perception and objects. His second show at Mary Goldman Gallery nicely elaborates long-standing concerns rather than breaking new ground.
May 2, 2007
ART REVIEW
With new space, Seattle Art Museum expands its vision
SEATTLE — When the Seattle Art Museum turns 75 next year, it intends to be not only the most important general art museum in the Pacific Northwest but to be nationally prominent too. It might just get its wish.
May 14, 2008
Artist mixed paint, sculpture, cast-offs
Robert Rauschenberg, the protean artist from small-town Texas whose imaginative commitment to hybrid forms of painting and sculpture changed the course of American and European art between 1950 and the early 1970s, died Monday night, according to New York's PaceWildenstein Gallery, which represents his work. He was 82.
April 8, 2008
ART REVIEW
'Masterpieces of San Diego Painting: Fifty Works From Fifty Years, 1900-1950'
OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- The exhibition celebrating a building expansion at Oceanside Museum of Art is titled "Masterpieces of San Diego Painting: Fifty Works From Fifty Years, 1900-1950." If that doesn't stop you dead in your tracks, nothing will.
April 4, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Portrait of a cultural battle
As a celebrated Modern painting goes on temporary view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art today, the masterpiece becomes the latest work looted by the Nazis during World War II to have been returned to its rightful owner. Ninety-year-old Cheviot Hills resident Maria Altmann successfully sued the Austrian government for return of the treasure, seized from her uncle's home after he fled Vienna in 1938.
July 24, 2005
CRITIC'S CHOICE | BERLIN
A portal to the new Berlin
For Westerners, the center of Berlin suddenly shifted east when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The geographic heart of the metropolis still lies in the bohemian neighborhood of Kreuzberg, with its big, loft-like apartments and sometimes raucous night life. But reunification of East and West has meant that the city's spiritual core has returned to Museumsinsel — Museum Island — a spot of land in the Spree River that is home to an array of seminal art museums stuffed with astounding collections. Nearby, the once drab East Berlin neighborhood around Auguststrasse, just a short walk across the river, has metamorphosed into the liveliest contemporary gallery scene in Europe.
June 21, 2006
CARS / 125 YEARS / COMMEMORATIVE EDITION / GALLERY
Classic paint jobs
Set out the flares: It's important to approach the subject of cars and art in L.A. with considerable caution. The road is dotted with potholes. We learned that the hard way. In 1984, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened a high-profile exhibition titled "Automobile and Culture" that chronicled the interplay between cars and art in Europe and the U.S. throughout the 20th century. To the surprise of many, masterpieces were few and far between. Minor works by minor artists filled the show, together with minor works by major artists, and the exhibition demonstrated just how incidental the car has been as an image for Modern artists.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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