LACMA. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The museum with the Calder exhibition, in which you could NOT take pictures, that I went to last Thursday. The museum with American and specifically Californian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which I took a LOT of pictures of because I'm teaching both California and the US since 1865 next semester. I could show you those, and I probably will before June 2014, but it's Christmas Day, and, since a sort of the LACMA collection for "Nativity" turned up more than a few artworks, some of which are NOT on display at the moment, Christmas it is.
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First, a few words about the museum itself. From my dissertation:
In early 1910, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors authorized the construction of a county museum of natural history, art and science. The cornerstone was laid in December of that year but no art was installed in the museum until 1913, the year of the controversial Armory Show in New York, and what was installed was all on loan from collectors because the museum owned very little art of its own. The county was prepared – even eager – to accept gifts to the museum, but it was unwilling to spend much of its own money on acquisitions.
The museum was fortunate to have as its patrons Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison, who began to summer in Los Angeles in 1916 and eventually moved here during the 1920s. They arrived from Chicago having already decided that the County Museum would be the beneficiary of their enthusiasm for art collecting, an enthusiasm which Preston had developed while working as a foreign correspondent in the South Pacific for the newspaper he and his brother published, the Chicago Times. The collection would hang, of course, in a special gallery named for them. By early 1918, they had amassed several dozen American paintings, twenty-eight of which they gave to the museum later in the year. The Harrisons also gave the Museum many of the finest nineteenth and early twentieth-century French (the franc decreased in value steadily during the 1920s) and American drawings in its collections, including Childe Hassam’s Castle Island, Boston Harbor (1916) and Paul Signac’s Saint-Tropez: Evening Sun (1894); their gifts constituted the heart of the County Museum’s permanent collection for more than twenty years. The museum also, despite the artistic conservatism of the curatorial staff of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, played host to a joint exhibition by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, the creators of synchromism, in 1927.
The art got its own museum amid the La Brea Tar Pits (literally, the the tar tar pits; don't you like language chauvinism?) on Wilshire Boulevard in 1961, and the first three buildings were completed by 1965.
From the LACMA website:
Over several decades, the campus and the collection have grown considerably. The Anderson Building (renamed the Art of the Americas building in 2007) opened in 1986 to house modern and contemporary art. In 1988, Bruce Goff's innovative Pavilion for Japanese Art opened at the east end of campus. In 1994, the museum acquired the May Company department store building at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, now known as LACMA West.
Most recently, the Transformation project revitalized the western half of the campus with a collection of buildings designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. These include the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a three-story 60,000 square foot space for the exhibition of postwar art that opened in 2008. In fall of 2010, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion opened to the public, providing the largest purpose-built, naturally lit, open-plan museum space in the world, with a rotating selection of major exhibitions. Ray's restaurant and Stark Bar opened in 2011, invigorating the central BP Pavilion near Chris Burden's iconic Urban Light.
Yep, old street lights. It's not at all uninteresting. And so, to the art.
First, we have a typical Dutch Renaissance painting depicting the Adoration of the Magi. One of the interesting things that you find when you're looking at art in the collections of the Los Angeles area is that for the most part, despite later curatorial efforts, you're looking at the best art that was available for purchase at the beginning of the 20th Century (LACMA), the middle of the 20th Century (Norton Simon), and from 1940 until, well, now (the Getty). That's actually true for the rest of the country but somehow it's not so obvious at, say, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Art Institute of Chicago. This, for example, was donated to the museum by the publisher William Randolph Hearst.
(
The Adoration of the Magi,
the workshop of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Holland, circa 1530; Oil on panel; William Randolph Hearst Collection, LACMA)
I'm not sure who the person of color is in this depiction, since the Magi are portrayed as older men, but here's a tumblr blog that's been cataloging people of color in European art from before the Enlightenment. My textbook for Western Civ didn't do a good job with this, so I have quite a bit of reading to do before the next time I teach the course.
Here's the other Adoration of the Magi in the LACMA collection, French, mid-eighteenth century, and this time one of the Magi is depicted as a man of color. Mary and the infant, of course, are pretty much whiter than white, so it's no real surprise that Megyn Kelly got confused. Um, do the words "artist's rendering" mean nothing to you, Ms. Kelly?
(
The Adoration of the Magi, Charles-André Vanloo, called Carle Van Loo, France, circa 1760; Oil on canvas, Gift of Anna Bing Arnold, LACMA)
The artist spent some of his career as one of Louis XV's court painters at Versailles. As far as the donor is concerned, it's easy to find out about MEN who acted as philanthropists in mid-century America, but finding out about WOMEN is another story unless they were famous for something else (like, say, Gertrude Stein). Search the museum site, you get the things she gave the museum, and you learn that there's a special edition of the LACMA bulletin devoted to her gifts to the museum available at Amazon.. This is what the University of Southern California has to say about one of its former trustees:
Arnold is a former actress and widow of Leo S. Bing, who built the Empire State Building. She is now married to Professor Aerol Arnold, USC Department of English. Her favorite charities include the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Planned Parenthood, KCET, the public library, and USC.
And children's charities, as there are Anna Bing Arnold centers at Stanford and Cal State Los Angeles. She was Steve Bing's grandmother; the money comes from his great-grandfather's real estate interests.
People wonder why women's history is important? Voila.
LACMA has several other nativity scenes that don't include the Magi. Since this is already a display of how my mind works when I have nothing to do BUT the diary (actually, this is pretty much how I lecture, too), I'll present the three I find the most interesting. First, a piece of stained glass from sixteenth century Germany:
(
Dance of Death Window Containing Nativity Rondel, Southern Germany, 1525-1550; Reamy white glass; two hues of silver stain; two shades of vitreous pint; translucent enamel; back-painting; LACMA)
I have no idea what "dance of death" means in this context. We're already at least fifty years after the Black Death. The Catholic Encyclopedia refers to this as a type of play akin to English morality plays that painters adapted to the walls of buildings to commemorate the Black Death in the fifteenth century, but, unless the opening of the heavens is here a portent of the afterlife and nor just the angels wanting to get a look at the Christ Child, I'm lost here.
Next, an early sixteenth-century print by the German printmaster, Albrecht Durer, print artist to the Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V. Here we're in a village in northwestern Europe. Mary is marveling over the child, and Joseph is drawing water from the well. No Magi, no shepherds, just the holy family:
(
Nativity, Albrecht Dürer, 1504, Engraving, Los Angeles County Fund, LACMA)
If they had a date for the acquisition, I could tell if they bought the print from Jake Zeitlin, the bookseller who frames my dissertation, because I know he had an active trade in prints, most notably the work of Durer, but I don't. I have a feeling, though, that if they bought it in Southern California after 1940, it passed through Jake's hands on the way to the Museum.
Finally, an ACTUAL BLACK nativity! Painted by Palmer Hayden (1890-1973), an African American artist, in 1968:
(
The Ox Lied Down (Black Nativity), Palmer C. Hayden, United States, 1968, Watercolor, Purchased with funds provided by Joan Palevsky, LACMA)
Hayden's dates probably tell you that he was an artist who became known as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance. His career after Harlem is very much the same as many other American artists insofar as he went to Paris in the late 1920s and painted for the WPA during the 1930s, but his biography doesn't show any of the university or art school affiliations you would expect from any other artist after 1945.
NONE of these works are on public view, so this is actually Christmas at LACMA behind the scenes. I hope this finds you all well-rested, well-fed, and content this Christmas evening.
And one more thing. Which Hollywood figure painted this image of the Watts Towers in the 1960s?
The answer will be in the Tip Jar.
And now for the stuff that makes this Top Comments:
TOP COMMENTS, December 25, 2013: Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU when you find that proficient comment.
From Puddytat:
Ontheleftcoast made me laugh with this comment and may have coined a new term in David Nir's diary to drum up followers for Daily Kos Elections.
From your intrepid diarist:
darthstar starts off a terrific thread about Sister Sarah, aided by Pale Jenova, edtheengineer, David54 and BlackSheep1 in Matt Bors's cartoon about Duck Dynasty and the Founding Fathers.
TOP MOJO, December 24, 2013 (excluding Tip Jars and first comments):
1) sorry, but increasingly people disagree with you by teacherken — 213
2) sorry, Government still violating Constitution by teacherken — 187
3) nope by GideonAB — 133
4) Further, "the ends don't justify the means" by bobdevo — 117
5) You said "ends justifies the means" is by bobdevo — 106
6) The NSA was and is committing thousands if by bobdevo — 101
7) That is true ... no legitimate alternative by dharmafarmer — 92
8) This is just about the best Xmas present! by Ian S — 80
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14) Wrong by Dallasdoc — 63
15) The means: by Dumbo — 63
16) Had Snowden acted during the Bush years 99.9% by RFK Lives — 60
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19) Not just Clapper and Alexander... by 4kedtongue — 52
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25) not a saint? by GideonAB — 46
26) Okay I'll start off with a rule: by Bill in Portland Maine — 45
27) And they ALL have the same smile that by catilinus — 45
28) C 'n J holiday household hint by bramish — 44
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