Christopher Knight, Art Critic - latimes.com Critic's Notebook Spring Arts Preview February 11, 2013 Richard Artschwager dies at 89; painter and sculptor Richard Artschwager, an artist who turned his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker into a distinctive approach to making sculptures and paintings that defy easy categorization, died Saturday in Albany, N.Y., following a brief illness. He was 89. 3:21 PM PST, December 20, 2012 Near Newtown, U.S. gun ethos on display at museum Connecticut's familiarity with weapons manufactured for personal use long predates the horrifying recent mass killing in Newtown, one of the worst outbursts of gun violence in American history. About 50 miles northeast of the village, Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art records the historical culture of guns in several acute and significant ways. 8:00 AM PST, December 15, 2012 2012 in review: Art's year of deep (and shallow) pockets Over the course of 10 days in November, art reached a milestone - if that's the right word for it - when more than $1 billion was handed over at the fall auctions in New York in exchange for Modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures. The big story was that art made since 1945 accounted for the lion's share of that, with contemporary art dwarfing Monet, Picasso, Matisse and friends at more than $867 million in sales. Words like "spectacular" and "stunning" peppered the news accounts. 4:26 PM PST, December 26, 2012 Review: Feeling a bit 'Lost (in L.A.) ' At the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, the title of the exhibition "Lost (in L.A.) " pretty much describes how I felt when looking at its many sculptures, installations, videos and a few paintings. 7:00 AM PST, November 30, 2012 Are curators a vanishing breed? Strong support for California's ambitious program to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming was reconfirmed in a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, showing once more the state's celebrated environmental consciousness. 9:00 AM PDT, September 28, 2012 Art review: 'A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau's Salomé' is absorbing Gustave Moreau's painting of Salomé dancing before Herod is one of those rare episodes in narrative art when subject, style and material come together so seamlessly that two things happen: A viewer is transfixed and a moment in time is crystallized. 5:40 PM PDT, October 9, 2012 'Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt' offers insightful essays I've been stealing from Amy Goldin for years. I don't think she'd mind. Critics tend to like it when their insights enter the larger consciousness, and Goldin's certainly entered mine. Her varied writings on the power of decoration, long an artistic taboo, were revelatory in the 1970s. "The Esthetic Ghetto: Some Thoughts About Public Art" was published in an art magazine 38 years ago, but it remains the single best consideration of its thorny subject that I have read. 5:14 PM PDT, October 2, 2012 'Holes, Voids' is filled with ambition Can a hole be moved? Is a hole that's brought from, say, Detroit to Los Angeles the same void or a different one when it gets here? Is the void already just everywhere, merely awaiting an identifying contour? 10:24 AM PDT, September 1, 2012 In art as in music, John Cage reveals the world within John Cage was a leading avant-garde composer for 40 years, but he also made spare watercolors, drawings and prints, plus the occasional painting, especially in the final decades of his life. Infused with the same spirit that characterizes his work as a musician, Cage's pale color washes, Zen circles and delicate abstract markings are often lovely. Critic's Notebook: LeRoy Neiman made art safe for Playboy-reading heterosexuals Without Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine and its philosophy of unfettered heterosexual hedonism through stimulation of all the senses, there would have been no LeRoy Neiman. Usually mischaracterized as simply a sports artist, he was actually much more than that. Neiman was the painter of the "Playboy Philosophy." Review: LACMA's new hunk 'Levitated Mass' has some substance On Sunday morning, artist Michael Heizer's eagerly anticipated environmental sculpture, "Levitated Mass," finally opens to the public at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At an 11 a.m. ceremony, ribbons will be cut, speeches made, the artist and donors to the $10-million project thanked. 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? Critic's Notebook: MOCA's firing of Paul Schimmel is a bad sign Who is the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art? According to the museum it's Jeffrey Deitch, the former New York art dealer who - with virtually no prior museum experience - assumed the top job at one of America's leading institutions two years ago. 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. 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. 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. '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. December 20, 2009 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. 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. 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 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 30, 2008 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. January 18, 2009 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. November 22, 2009 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. '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 1, 2008 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. '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. 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." September 24, 2008 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. August 5, 2008 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. 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. October 17, 2008 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. America's Maul By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer April 8, 2008 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. April 4, 2006 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. 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.