Showing posts with label LACMA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LACMA. Show all posts

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Tim Burton Exhibition Opens at LACMA Tonight and Jane's Addiction: End to the Lies



Opening Event tonight at LACMA for the Tim Burton exhibition. Jane's Addiction is slated to perform. Much more to follow...

Tim Burton
Untitled (Edward Scissorhands)
1990, private collection
Edward Scissorhands © Twentieth Century Fox, © 2011 Tim Burton

More at:
Tim Burton at LACMA

Sunday, May 23, 2010

American Stories at LACMA

by Gregg Chadwick


John Singer Sargent
(American, 1856–1925)
A Street in Venice
29 5/8 x 20 5/8 in. (75.1 x 52.4 cm) oil on canvas ca. 1880–82
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts


“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” is currently on view at LACMA and unfortunately closes today. The exhibition includes more than eighty paintings which range in date from the Revolutionary War era to just before World War I. The stories are myriad and the paintings are narrative heavy and engaging.The museum is open till 7 pm and if you haven't seen the exhibition already, rush on down today.

Barbara Weinberg curated the exhibition “American Stories" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The website that the Metropolitan Museum put together for the exhibit is rich in detail and I enjoyed the audio elements with Barbara Weinberg and guests. The podcast with painter Eric Fischl discusses John Singer Sargent's "An Interior in Venice" and "A Street in Venice". Eric Fischl admits right out that he has not studied the history of the works in depth and so allows himself the imaginative freedom to wander into the paintings and describe what he finds in the artworks themselves.

Sargent is a painter's painter so I am not surprised that Eric Fischl would provide fresh insights into Sargent's work.

Eric Fischl describes Sargent's technique:
"Sargent is someone who has such extraordinary bravura, the kind of slapdash quality of the paint combined with his acute observations. It’s incredibly reductive in that he can see so accurately the essentials for what describes an ornate, gold Venetian table or what it takes to capture the quality of the material of the dress or something like that. I mean, it’s so luscious, so direct, and so perfectly observed. At the same time, it’s so fast and facile. It’s pretty amazing."

John Singer Sargent's "A Street Scene in Venice" seems to depict a chance meeting between the viewer wandering through the maze of Venetian alleys and a man and woman engaged in conversation outside a wine shop. The woman seems to stop mid sentence to gaze at us as we arrive on the scene. Eric Fischl sees the man as caught up in a flirtation or rendezvous:

"The other thing that strikes me in this painting is the way he’s painted her dress, which looks like a bonfire. If this painting’s about sex, about desire, about lust, whatever, then, you know, she’s absolutely the object of that desire and she’s on fire. And fire is something that is also being consumed by the huge, vast emptiness of that blackness that it reaches up into .... I think it’s more like the feeling of you’re moving through your life and you come on this scene. You interrupt something. You have the chance to pass by it, but for that brief moment it stops you and you take it in and then you go past, you know, you go into the light."

Much more at:
American Stories Exhibition Website at the Metropolitan Museum, New York
American Stories at LACMA

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Eleanor Antin's Classical Frieze at LACMA

"Pompeii, especially, with its grand murals and flourishing gardens haunted by the dark shadow of Vesuvius, has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with our contemporary world, especially here in Southern California, where the sunlit life also turns out to have dark shadows in which failure and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Now, in these times, we have even closer parallels with those ancient, beautiful, affluent people living the good life on the verge of annihilation."
—Eleanor Antin on Classical Frieze



Eleanor Antin
The Artist's Studio from "The Last
Days of Pompeii," 2001 (detail)
chromogenic print
46 5/6 x 58 5/8 inches


Eleanor Antin
The Tree from "The Last
Days of Pompei," 2001
chromogenic print
60 x 48 inches

Eleanor Antin's film and photo work, Classical Frieze, re-imagines Pompeii and the classical Roman world as if seen through the eyes of a contemporary filmmaker paying homage to the sword and sandal film epics of the 1950's which are then viewed through a scrim of French neoclassical painting from the 1800's. Eleanor Antin's work was chosen to illuminate a contemporary viewpoint or perhaps fantasy of the Roman world and is featured alongside LACMA'S current exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.

Art21 on PBS describes Eleanor as "a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves." Eleanor has a long and influential record as a visual and performance artist, as well as a filmmaker and photographer. Eleanor Antin "delves into history—whether of ancient Rome, the Crimean War, the salons of nineteenth-century Europe, or her own Jewish heritage and Yiddish culture—as a way to explore the present. "

I find Eleanor's Classical Frieze to be lightly provocative and very humorous. At the same time, the work which is ravishing in its color reminds me of the rich chroma in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. In that film and Antin's work, as Eleanor suggests," the sunlit life also turns out to have dark shadows in which failure and death lurk at the edge of consciousness" Antin sees that "Pompeii, especially, with its grand murals and flourishing gardens haunted by the dark shadow of Vesuvius, has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with our contemporary world, especially here in Southern California, ... Now, in these times, we have even closer parallels with those ancient, beautiful, affluent people living the good life on the verge of annihilation."

"Pompeii and the Roman Villa illustrates how the Trojan War and the death and wandering of the great Greek heroes were the moral and aesthetic tropes of Roman culture. Whereas for us, the romance of the Roman Empire, with its deliciously decadent affluence and military power, lies deep in modern Western consciousness. The great 19th-century colonial powers that preceded us saw themselves as the new Rome, bringing civilization to primitive peoples, not unlike the way we see ourselves today. At the same time, we are uneasy and haunted by the great empire that owned but then lost the world."


Art:21 | Eleanor Antin | Inventing Histories

May 14, 2009–October 4, 2009 | LACMA - Art of the Americas Building