Henri Matisse: La Gerbe

Now on view at LACMA is Henri Matisse: La Gerbe, a new exhibition that examines in depth the artist’s final commission, in 1953. The artwork has been permanently on view at LACMA since 2010, but the new exhibition provides context by showing Matisse’s early maquette (on loan from the Hammer Museum) and other works created around the same time, including Madame de Pompadour (1951) and a complete set of his Jazz portfolio (1947). At the time of La Gerbe‘s installation at LACMA in 2010, senior curator and department head of modern art, Stephanie Barron, told the story of how the artwork came to LACMA. In honor of the new exhibition, we re-print that blog post below.

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Today [September 23, 2010] is the long-awaited final installation of Henri Matisse’s large-scale ceramic La Gerbe (The Sheaf) (1953), commissioned by Los Angeles patrons Sidney and Frances Brody from the artist in the early 1950s.  The Brodys’ extraordinary collection of modern art, including works by Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, Calder, and Moore, graced their elegant home designed by A. Quincy Jones in the early 1950s.  Intended to occupy a prime position in their new home, the Matisse ceramic became, as Frances Brody would describe it, “the heart of our home.”

La Gerbe installed in Brody residence. Photo courtesy the archives of Frances L. Brody, now at LACMA.

The journey to today has been a long one.  I remember discussing the possibility of this gift to LACMA in 1986 when she indicated that she would be willing to promise it to the museum in honor of our 25th anniversary.  At the time she shared with me the fascinating story of the commission, showed me correspondence about the acquisition, and regaled me with amazing details about meeting Matisse.

In 1952 the Brodys approached Matisse, who at the time was creating colorful paper cut-outs, with the idea of the commission. Matisse expressed interest and worked on several proposals even before knowing the exact size of the wall.  He showed the Brodys a full-scale paper cut-out when they visited him in Cimiez (Nice, France) in May of 1952. They rejected this first design (that cut-out is today in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; a ceramic version, Apollo, is in the Toledo Museum of Art),  but accepted a subsequent proposal.

Henri Matisse, Apollo, 1953, ceramic tile and plaster, courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

The Brodys also acquired the full-scale maquette of La Gerbe, which they subsequently donated to UCLA.  The final ceramic, created in fifteen sections, was shipped to L.A. shortly after the artist died in November 1954.

Sadly, in November 2009, Frances passed away at age 93.  As promised, she left the Matisse to LACMA in her will.  She was a remarkable figure in Los Angeles’ history, whose grace, style, erudition, and opinions were truly legendary.

Frances L. Brody

In January we began the adventure of deinstalling this 2,000-pound ceramic wall, which had remained in its original position for more than half a century.  It was, to say the least, a delicate and difficult procedure.  Thanks to the ingenuity of our team, we were able to literally detach the mural from the wall in one piece (it was bolted to the wall) and crane it out over the house and trees to an awaiting flatbed truck.  Watching the Matisse hovering in the air high above the trees was one of the most heart-stopping moments I have ever had as a curator.

La Gerbe in process of being deinstalled from Brody residence

La Gerbe in process of being deinstalled from Brody residence

Safely ensconced in a secure a-frame, the ceramic eventually made its way to the museum. After close examination by our conservation department, the decision was made to do a light surface cleaning and prepare the ceramic for permanent installation in the museum.  A prominent wall in the lobby of the Ahmanson Building was selected as the appropriate permanent location for this monumental Matisse.  The ceramic was carefully rigged, gently positioned on the wall, and attached to a steel structure; a wall was then built around the work.

La Gerbe during installation at LACMA

Frances Brody, cognizant of the commission’s significance, wrote a fascinating account of the commission, which I think best describes the transaction.

La Gerbe installed at LACMA

Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator and Department Head, Modern Art

This Weekend at LACMA: Jazz, Matisse Exhibition Opens, The Clock 24-hour Screening, Earth Day, and More

The weekend officially begins with the 2013 season opener of Jazz at LACMA, featuring nine-time Grammy Award-winner Arturo Sandoval. Sandoval is a trumpet master and a protégé of jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie. His dynamic and vivacious style will set the tone for the rest of the weekend–just listen to one of his tracks, Salt Peanuts! (a Gillespie cover), that unpredictably weaves Latin and Swing.

Later in the evening L.A.-based artist Liz Glynn continues her site-specific performance project, [de]-lusions of Grandeur,  in response to monumental sculptures in LACMA’s collection. Tonight she will consider the process of creating, moving, and erecting large-scale sculptures, specifically responding to Alexander Calder’s legacy of kinetic sculptural form through a ballet “mechanik.” The free performance, titled “The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time,” starts at 7:30 pm in the Bing Theater.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s “The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time”

The fun continues Saturday with a special 24-hour screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Beginning at noon and lasting until noon on Sunday, The Clock is a single-channel montage constructed from thousands of moments in cinema and television history depicting the passage of time. The sampled clips come from all genres, time periods, and cultures. The result, a melding of video and reality, unfolds with a seemingly endless cast of cameos. Considered a masterpiece by many, The Clock is enthralling and not to be missed!

This will be the final showing of The Clock by Christian Marclay in the Bing Theater. We are pleased to announce that in the future, The Clock will be shown in the galleries in a space created for the ideal viewing of this artwork.

Christian Marclay, still from The Clock, 2010, gift of the 2011 Collectors Committee, © Christian Marclay, photo courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

As you find yourself mesmerized by The Clock and begin to yen for sustenance, Patina Restaurant Group will be there to offer a bevy of snack and meal options for all you night owls. The main attraction, RED—A Pop-Up Dinner: Midnight Breakfast, will include a timely four-course meal from executive chef Jason Fullilove. The menu includes house cured gravlax, griddle cakes, smoked pork belly, and chocolate banana french toast. Make reservations for the midnight breakfast and view the full menu on the event page. On top of all that, check out even more Clock-related programming from our neighbors at For Your Art.

On Sunday, LACMA celebrates Earth Day with a full day of programs and activities for children and adults alike. Artist-led workshops, tours of the collection, a nature-inspired poetry workshop, sketching, a musical jam session, and guided walkthroughs of our botanical beauties all will make the LACMA campus teem with a sense of exploration, wonder, and admiration for the planet. In addition to all these events (free with admission to the museum), you can also receive free general admission to the galleries by biking (present your bike helmet) or taking public transportation to LACMA (present your bus pass). View the full schedule here.

A weekend at LACMA would not be complete with taking in art from one of the greats–in this case, Henri Matisse. Our newest exhibition, Henri Matisse: La Gerbe, features his famous large ceramic, La Gerbe (The Sheaf), and places it in context with paper cut-outs he made toward the end of his career. This exhibition will also include the original maquette, on loan from the Hammer Museum, as well as his print portfolio Jazz and other works. This is the first time both maquette and ceramic have been exhibited together.

Henri Matisse, La Gerbe, 1953, installed in the Brody residence, gift of Frances L. Brody in honor of the museum’s 25th anniversary, © 2013 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY, photo courtesy of the archives of Frances L. Brody

Lastly, the weekend ends with Sundays Live and a performance from Emerging Artists from the Young Musicians Foundation in the Bing Theater at 6 pm. If you can’t make the show, you can stream Sundays Live straight from your computer.

Roberto Ayala

Rauschenberg and Earth Day

This Sunday, LACMA celebrates Earth Day with a day full of tours, art-making workshops, music, and more. The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. Designed to be a teach-in about conservation and environmental issues, it tapped into the grassroots movements driving many of the anti-war protests and groups. Earth Day 1970 brought issues of pollution, conservation, deforestation, and endangered species into a broader public consciousness. To commemorate this event, Robert Rauschenberg made a lithograph and collage at the Los Angeles printshop Gemini G.E.L. (edition 50) and an offset poster with nearly the same composition to benefit the American Environment Foundation (edition 300 signed, 10,000 unsigned). This was the first time the artist had used a mass-produced poster to express social concerns; however, this was not the first time he had expressed concerns about the state of the environment in his art, and he maintained his interest in this issue until his death in 2008.

Earth Day, Robert Rauschenberg, Gemini G.E.L., United States, 1970
Gift of the Sidney and Diana Avery Trust

Rauschenberg’s earlier, more oblique, expressions of environmental concerns were based upon his personal observations of humankind’s impact on the earth. Rauschenberg grew up in Port Arthur, TX, an oil refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His early memories of the oil derricks belching foul air may have inspired his vision the capital of Hell, Dis, in his illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1959-60). In 1969, Rauschenberg made a series of prints in response to his viewing of the Apollo 11 lunar launch at the Kennedy Space Center. In his journal recalling the event, he wrote, “The incredibly bright lights, the moon coming up, seeing the rocket turn into pure ice, its stripes and USA marking disappearing—and all you could hear were frogs and alligators.” His interest in striking a balance between technology and nature is reflected in the print Sky Garden (1969) currently on view in the Stanley Kubrick exhibition. Although the main image in the monumental lithograph is the Saturn V rocket, the top register features palm trees and a heron.

Sky Garden, Series: Stoned Moon, Robert Rauschenberg, United States, 1969, Gift of Drs. Katherina and Judd Marmor in honor of the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary

His message became more explicit in the poster and print from 1970. Pictures—culled from newspapers and magazines—of crowded highways, deforested land, strip mining, piles of garbage, polluting factories, and an endangered gorilla surround the central image of the bald eagle, the symbol of the United States threatened with extinction because of pesticides. Twenty years after the original event, Earth Day 1990 was dedicated to expanding the message of environmental protection internationally and emphasizing the importance of recycling. In the lithograph, Earth Day 1990 (edition 75), published by Gemini to benefit the Earth Day 1990 organization, Rauschenberg took a less polemical approach than he had in 1970. Using photographs he shot himself, he placed a stand of denuded trees at the top of the composition, while the right and left registers contain close-up images of bark, one marred by graffiti. He then applied ink in tones of green and raw sienna over the pinkish-brown printed images in the background.

Earth Day 1990, Robert Rauschenberg, United States, 1990, Partial and promised gift of the Grinstein Family

 

In Earth Day 1990, Rauschenberg addresses the issue of personal responsibility. The dustpan and broom in the center of the print seem to call on each of us individually to clean up the mess we have made. In 1991, when Rauschenberg revealed his project for Earth Summit ’92 The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (a result of the international activities of Earth Day 1990), he directly stated his point of view that, “once the individual has changed, the world can change.” Deeply concerned about the environment, Rauschenberg used his artistic ability to support organizations financially and impart powerful messages.

Sienna Brown, Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow, Prints and Drawings

Liz Glynn: The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time

[de]-lusions of Grandeur is a cycle of performances by Liz Glynn focused on monumental artworks at LACMA. Last January, we kicked off the series with The Myth of Singularity (after Rodin), a weekend-long event for which Glynn made molds from the original sculptures on display at LACMA to later perform the casting and recombination to create a new group of figurative sculptures with a group of assistants. The second chapter of the cycle, taking place on Friday evening, focuses on the commissioning of a fountain/sculpture from Alexander Calder for the new LACMA campus in 1965.

Alexander Calder, Three Quintains (Hello Girls), 1964, Art Museum Council Fund, © Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For this new performance Liz conducted extensive research on the subject, interviewing curators and conservators and reading through the museum’s archives, catalogue essays, and newspapers articles published around the time the sculpture was installed. The result is an hour-long performance that carefully balances, as if it were a mobile sculpture in itself, all the voices that took and still take part in the process of commissioning, installing, conserving, and maintaining such a work in the campus of LACMA.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s “The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time”

Aptly called The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time, the performance draws upon the form of a ballet mécanique accompanied by a spoken chorus. On the stage, three dancers represent the three sculptural elements of Three Quintains (Hello Girls) while art handlers—doubling roles later as the water jets of the fountain—keep re-positioning the sculpture on the stage and discussing its technical challenges.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s “The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time”

For the spoken chorus, we enlisted six LACMA docents to read excerpts from the correspondence of the Art Museum Council, which commissioned the work back in the day; David, a colleague from Graphic Design, reads a few letters written by William Osmun, the Senior Curator who oversaw the entire process. Rumor has it that even the Director of Security at LACMA has a cameo appearance at the beginning of the play. Bill, the director of LACMA’s Sunday Live, reads many letters and notes from the always charming Alexander Calder, completing this sort of reenacted epistolary novel that tells many stories at once.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s “The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time”

I want to share some photographs Liz and I took with our phones during rehearsals—there were many because we are, after all, busting that myth of getting things right at the first time.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s “The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time”

José-Luis Blondet, associate curator, special initiatives

 

2013 Collectors Committee Acquires Nine Works for LACMA

Since 1986, LACMA’s annual Collectors Committee Gala has resulted in numerous important acquisitions in all areas of the museum’s collection. This weekend the Collectors Committee added nine more. For the event, Collectors Committee members create a pool for acquisitions funds and then use those funds to vote for artworks presented by LACMA curators earlier in the day. In the final tally, LACMA raised more than $3.2 million—a record for the event—toward seven artworks. On top of that, Collectors Committee sponsor JPMorgan made a gift of two more works from the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection: a photograph by Robert Frank, St. Francis and Gas Station, and City Hall—Los Angeles, from his iconic series The Americans; and a portfolio of seventy-five mixed-media works on paper made by Ed Ruscha in 1969, Stains.

Here’s a rundown of the artworks acquired over the weekend:

Mother and Child Figure for the Gwan Association, Republic of Mali, Bamana Peoples, 1432-1644 (carbon 14 testing), gift of the 2013 Collectors Committee with additional funds provided by Kelvin Davis and Bobby Kotick

The first African sculpture to be acquired in Collectors Committee history is a Mother and Child Figure for the Gwan Association is one of the oldest surviving wood sculptures from Africa. The figure embodies continuity of generations and represents the strength and resilience of motherhood. This important acquisition marks the launching of LACMA’s new African art gallery and related educational and outreach programming. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition will be Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa, on view from July 7, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

Mountain Avatar (Zaō Gongen), Japan, late Heian period, c. 1180, gift of the 2013 Collectors Committee

This wood sculpture of a Shinto deity features three crystal eyes and retains its original colors and surface from the late twelfth century; it is the oldest and finest sculpture of its type in existence.

Seated Buddha, Korea, Goryeo dynasty, 10th century, gift of the 2013 Collectors Committee

A rare Korean cast iron Buddha sculpture from the tenth century Goryeo dynasty depicts the historical Buddha Shakyamuni’s Enlightenment at Bodha Gaya in India; this acquisition makes this the largest example of Goryeo Buddhist sculpture outside of Asia.

Julio Le Parc, Mural: Virtual Circles (Mural Cercles Virtuelles), 1964–66, purchased with funds provided by Debbie and Mark Attanasio, Jane and Marc Nathanson, Jane and Terry Semel, the Loreen Arbus Foundation, Alyce Woodward Oppenheimer, Janet Dreisen Rappaport and Herb Rappaport and an anonymous donor through the 2013 Collectors Committee

Mural: Virtual Circles is paradigmatic of Julio Le Parc’s visual experimentations with kinetic and optical effects, as well as his life-long interest in viewer participation. Seen from the front, the sculpture is deceptively static, but with just a slight displacement from the viewer it becomes fully activated, at once dizzying and alluring. This sculpture is already on view now, in our new permanent galleries for Latin American art.

James Turrell, Roden Crater Model (Large Overall Site),1985-87, purchased with funds provided by Suzanne Deal Booth and David G. Booth, Paul Fleming, Suzanne and Ric Kayne, and Pamela and Jarl Mohn through the 2013 Collectors Committee

This large-scale model of James Turrell’s ongoing project, Roden Crater is made from plaster as well as elements from the crater itself and includes details of the geologic contours, textures, and colors of the Arizona site in relation to the exterior of artist’s planned transformations. It will be on view as part of James Turrell: A Retrospective, opening May 26, 2013 and running through April 6, 2014.

Thomas Demand, Control Room, 2011, purchased with funds provided by Willow Bay and Bob Iger and Steve Tisch through the 2013 Collectors Committee

Thomas Demand’s Control Room shows the interior of the Daiichi power plant in Fukushima following the East Japan earthquake and tsunami in 2011, based on a cell-phone snapshot, recreated by the artist as a full-size paper model, and then photographed.

Susan Hefuna, Woman behind Mashrabiya I, 1997, gift of Ann Colgin and Joe Wender, Kelvin Davis, John and Carolyn Diemer, Andy Gordon and Carlo Brandon, Deborah McLeod, and David and Mary Solomon through the 2013 Collectors Committee

Woman behind Mashrabiya I, by Egyptian-German artist Susan Hefuna, depicts the elusive silhouette of a woman in full hejab behind a mashrabiya, a latticed wood window screen characteristic of traditional Islamic architecture. Hefuna’s use of the mashrabiya not only reflects her own personal East-West dichotomy, but also serves as a reminder that our visual perceptions are often culturally encoded.

Scott Tennent