Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado, 1979, Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund

California Design has been on view for eight months, and that means we’ve gotten a lot of great blog posts out of the show. Here’s a look back at some of our favorites:

• Installation: Leading up to the exhibition, we watched “the Clipper” trailer load into the Resnick Pavilion; looked at the installation of the Eames living room; and we did a Q&A with Architects Hodgetts + Fung on their exhibition design for the show
• Artworks up close: individual blog posts on the Swinger camera and the one and only Barbie—plus an inside look at how our curators found some of the objects on view (hint: eBay)
• Connections between California Design and other exhibitions: including Fracture: Daido Moriyama, the recently closed In Wonderland, the Huntington’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition on Sam Maloof, and a fascinating connection to Watts Towers
• LACMA and LA design history: we looked back at some incredible graphic design done at LACMA in the mid-60s, and made some related catalogues available in our Reading Room; we also looked back on the old Pasadena Art Museum’s influential California Design exhibitions of the 1950s and ’60s

Installation view, California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” October 1, 2011–June 3, 2012, photo © 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA

In conjunction with California Design’s closing weekend, we’ve got one last film series to go along with it. Grand Designs: Mid-Century Life in the Movies explores modern living through four terrific classics. Friday night it’s Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey in Desk Set followed by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in The Long Long Trailer. Saturday night starts with the rarely screened English version of Jacques Tati’s wonderful My Uncle, followed by the iconic James Dean in Rebel without a Cause.

LACMA members get an added treat this weekend: exclusive access to the new exhibition Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol. Photographer/filmmaker Lockhart photographs and a five-channel film installation on the work of Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol, who developed a unique notation system for dance practice in the 1950s. The exhibition is open to members only on Saturday from 11am–4pm and all day Sunday. It opens to the general public starting Monday. Lockhart will be in conversation with curator and art historian Sabine Eckmann on Sunday afternoon—free and open to all.

Sharon Lockhart, production still from Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol (detail), 2011, five-channel film installation (35mm film transferred to hd, sound), © Sharon Lockhart, 2012

As with every weekend this summer we’ve also got free concerts every night. Friday it’s Jazz at LACMA with drummer and composer Alphonse Mouzon. Mouzon is a charter member of Weather Report and has also collaborated with titans of jazz like Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Sonny Rollins, and more. On Saturday, San Francisco-based Grupo Falso Baiano brings traditional and modern Brazilian choro music to Latin Sounds. And the weekend concludes with UCLA Camarades performing pieces by Schoenberg and Korngold during LACMA’s Sundays Live chamber music series.

Scott Tennent

One of those exemplary figures is Trina Turk, an incredibly distinguished designer and entrepreneur. She is that rare breed—a genuine California native—and her aesthetic is informed by both the casual yet sophisticated lifestyle and the natural environment of her home state. She founded her company in 1995 with her husband, photographer Jonathan Skow, and they have built an incredibly successful line of clothing, accessories, and home décor that is heavily influenced by her passion for architecture and design. It is a little-known fact that Trina is a formidable collector of California design and has filled her two homes with an outstanding collection of furniture and objects. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Trina to talk about her design inspiration and her passion for collecting.

Trina Turk and Bobbye Tigerman

Bobbye Tigerman: Trina, can you tell me about the origins of your interest in design?

Trina Turk: My husband, Jonathan, and I were really interested in New Wave music in the early 1980s, and I think a lot of the interest in mid-century design stemmed from that. We spent much more time thrift shopping than we actually spent in classes at the University of Washington (where I studied apparel design). We were fascinated by rockabilly, which was a 1950s-derived style, and also the B-52s, so our interest in the decorative arts really started with fashion and then led to the architecture, ceramics, and furniture that complemented those fashion styles.

BT: And is thrift shopping still a favorite pastime?

TT: Yes, but it’s not as good as it used to be.

BT: That’s what they all say.

TT: It’s true. Even ten years ago in Palm Springs, we could go thrift shopping and leave with bagfuls of beautiful vintage clothing, but those days are over.

BT: Where do you go now for your inspiration?

TT: We still do a lot of shopping, although we’ve moved up the food chain from Value Village in the Seattle area. We make a habit of going to both the Palm Springs and the Los Angeles Modernism shows. One of the places where I’ve learned a lot about design is Los Angeles Modern Auctions. Poring over those catalogues and looking at objects at previews have been incredible learning experiences for us.

BT: One could say that you truly personify and live California design. You own two remarkable modern homes, one by architect J.R. Davidson in Los Feliz, and the incredible Ship of the Desert, a streamlined, boat-like house that hugs the hills in Palm Springs. Can you talk a little bit about how you found your houses and what drew you to them?

TT: My husband, Jonathan, was working as a fashion stylist in the 1990s and did a lot of photo shoots in Palm Springs, so we started looking for a mid-century home there. Our real estate agent took us to see the Ship of the Desert and, although it was not what we were looking for at the time—it was too big, it was in terrible shape, we couldn’t afford it—we just fell in love. At that point, it was a stretch for us to buy it, but we felt a deep emotional connection to the house and decided to take the plunge. We found our house in Los Angeles later. It was built in 1948 for the Schapiro family. Jonathan had frequently done photo shoots at that house and would always come home after a shoot and describe it as the house we needed to find. Once when he was out of town, our real estate agent took me to a modern house, and I realized it was the same one that he had described to me so many times. We bought the house and have lived there for ten years.

BT: What is the house like?

TT: It’s classic mid-century. It was designed in the early 1940s, but not built until the late 1940s because it was difficult to build during World War II. It’s exactly what I think of as the epitome of California living. It has walls of glass, a very bright interior, and of course, a pool.

BT: I know you’ve filled your house with lots of amazing objects, and it sounds like it started way back in Washington with the thrift stores. But can you talk a little bit about your collecting and the particular designers that you collect in depth?

TT: One of the designers that I admire a lot is Claire Falkenstein. She did a lot of jewelry and sculptures, as well as the gates of Peggy Guggenheim’s museum in Venice. They’re made of twisted metal with pieces of colored glass embedded in them.

BT: That was a remarkable commission. And if you don’t want to go all the way to Venice, Italy, to see them, you can see the model for the Guggenheim gates in the California Design show at LACMA now.

Claire Falkenstein, Model for garden gate of Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1961, collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Mrs. Peggy Guggenheim

TT: You can see Claire’s work all over town. She did stained glass windows for St. Basil Catholic Church (at Wilshire and Kingsley Dr. in Koreatown), and she made a monumental sculpture fountain for the courtyard of the Long Beach Museum of Art. The museum restaurant is actually named “Claire’s” after the sculpture. She also did extraordinary jewelry that didn’t attach to your body in the usual way and was often made of non-precious materials like brass.

BT: A favorite curator’s game is “What would you take home?” If you could keep one piece from the California Design show, what would it be?

TT: I would take home the Eames house and I would live in it, and then I would park my white Avanti in front of it! And I would wear the Claire Falkenstein necklace.

Installation view, Charles and Ray Eames House living room, California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” October 1, 2011–June 3, 2012, © 2012 Eames Office LLC (eamesoffice.com), photo © 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA

Installation view, Raymond Loewy for Studebaker Corporation, Avanti, 1961, collection of the Petersen Automotive Museum, California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” October 1, 2011–June 3, 2012, photo © 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA

Claire Falkenstein, Necklace, c. 1948, collection of the Long Beach Museum of Art, gift of the Falkenstein Foundation

BT: My last question is about how you combine the essence of the mid-century period with contemporary style and how you make it relevant to today.

TT: In women’s fashion, it never really works to just knock off a vintage garment exactly because today’s bodies are different, today’s foundation garments are different, and there’s been a lot of technological development in fabrication since the 1950s. We use patterns found in vintage clothing for inspiration and interpret them for today’s taste and color preferences. I see that my job is to be inspired by the vintage material but to make it modern and relevant for today.

Bobbye Tigerman, Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts and Design 

Special thanks to Aralyn Beaumont and Karen Kitayama for the transcript of this conversation.

We talked to Yucef about the project by email, during one of his trips to the Andes; here is an excerpt of that exchange:

A screenshot from Quetzelcoatl2012.net by Yucef Mehri.

Yucef: When LACMA contacted me to ask me to participate, I was in my studio in New York, spending most of my time coding and building microcontrollers. I was exploring different ways to communicate with nature, placing sensors in public parks. The invitation was a great opportunity to interpret the formidable heritage of Mesoamerican civilizations: an opportunity to translate 600 years of enigmatic cultural signs by means of our current technological and cultural codes, codes that can be virtually experienced by anyone in the world.  The fact that we are in 2012, an exceptional date for those who believe in the end/beginning of a new cycle, made me realize that the timing was perfect.

What interests you about the legacy of Quetzalcoatl and about the exhibition?

Yucef: I understood Quetzalcoatl as a natural force and guide that allows us to have a harmonic and direct relationship between ourselves, the Earth, and the Universe. I was attracted to the codices, specially the Codex Nutall. The drawings and stories depicted in the Mixtec codices are fascinating. Additionally, I read the descriptions of Quetzalcoatl in the book of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain.

Tell me about your project: what was the original concept?

Yucef: Since my response was going to be developed using the web, it was important for me to be aware of the technological medium and its parallels with the exhibition. The technology we use nowadays provides a common ground for communication, economy, politics, health, arts, and human advancement. However, the intrinsic bond with the Earth and the Universe seems to be either virtual or lost.

When people (especially those who live in cities) want to know if it’s going to rain, they don’t bother to see the sky or watch the birds flying. They simply go to weather.com or any news website. To find Venus we don’t look at the firmament, we browse Google Earth or Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. These are two simple examples that portray our divorce from nature.

The project is a multidimensional art portal comprised by several individual modules, some interactive and others designed to promote reflection. I wanted to translate verbally and visually the ancient experience of a ubiquitous but discernible “platform” known by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl.

The historical and cultural symbols are mixed with contemporary signs and elements that are being generated on real time: changing tweets, instant news, stock market quotes, and so on. For Quetzalcoatl 2.0.1.2, I programmed and re-wrote a wide range of applications in order to retrieve information from Twitter, CNN, Wall Street, Google Images, and NASA, among other real time data. I think this aspect of the work engages people to perceive the past and the present as a unified construction. The navigation is simple and intuitive. One line of text puts you in the next page.

Technology is for me like paint is for a painter. I grew up in a technological world. The internet has been crucial for me to think in different ways to assemble the poetic-art experience. WizArt.org (1998–2001), Artboom.net (1999–2012), PoeticDialogues.com (2002), WhiteonWhite.net (2003), VersesVersusVerses.net (2008) and Supernumerarios.net (2009), are some of the internet projects I have created that involve interactivity and randomness. I like to create non-lineal poetic narratives. The design attached to these projects is not only based on algorithms and scripts, but in human relationships and social interactions as well.

What else are you working on right now?

Yucef: I am currently teaching two courses on Digital Art at Universidad de Los Andes, in the Andean region of Venezuela. Teaching poses a great and exceptional responsibility. Also, I will be traveling soon to Ecuador to teach a seminar on New Media Art at the MA in Design and Multimedia program of Universidad del Azuay.  Some of the projects I am working on right now involve the production, assembly and programming of Arduino-related applications that fuse social interaction and poetry.

Note: Quetzalcoatl 2.0.1.2 cannot be experienced with Internet Explorer: we advise Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Amy Heibel

On the plaza at 12:30 and 2:45 pm, renowned Los Angeles group George Kahn and the Jazz and Blues Revue will play catchy jazz originals and upbeat jazz versions of popular songs.

Throughout the day, docents will be leading tours throughout permanent collection galleries. Here’s the full schedule:

1–1:20 pm Decorative Arts
1:30–1:45 pm European Painting and Sculpture
2–2:50 pm Art of Japan
3–3:50 pm Art of the Ancient World
4–4:50 pm European Painting and Sculpture

Bilingual gallery educators will also be stationed throughout the day in Chris Burden’s Metropolis II which is running for special hours just for this Target Free Holiday Monday. The piece will be on view throughout the day and running from 12:30–1:30 pm; 2:30–3:30 pm; 4:30–5:30 pm; and 6:30–7:30 pm.

After soaking up inspiration from the galleries, visitors are welcome to create their own work of art in an outdoor sketching activity from 12:30 to 3:30 pm. The Boone Children’s Gallery will be open throughout the day where families can take part in a brush painting activity. Make sure to get your timed tickets to the gallery on site when you arrive! Families can also venture to our Korean art galleries at 2 pm for a special interactive story time.

Boone Children’s Gallery

Don’t miss your chance to see the acclaimed exhibition California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way” before it closes this Sunday. Kids and adults alike will appreciate the vibrant colors and forward-thinking aesthetic of the midcentury masterpieces in the show.

California Lobster two-piece swimsuit, swim trunks, and man’s shirt, Mary Ann DeWeese, 1949, Catalina Sportswear (Los Angeles, 1907–93), collection of Esther Ginsberg/Golyester Antiques, photo © 2011 Museum Associates/LACMA

Also on view are gritty photographs of Japanese urban life in Fracture: Daido Moriyama, beautiful and idyllic photographs of the American West in Robert Adams: The Place We Live, intricate art and objects from ancient Mexico in Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico, and much more!

Alex Capriotti

Two of our big special exhibitions are entering their final days, so be sure to catch them if you haven’t yet. Robert Adams: The Place We Live and California Design, 1935–1960: “Living in a Modern Way” both close next weekend.

Robert Adams, Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969, Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund, © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

If film is your thing, our California Noir film series concludes this weekend with five pot-boilers. Tonight, The Damned Don’t Cry, starring Joan Crawford, followed by Allan Dwan’s 1956 Slightly Scarlet. Saturday night, three in a row: Murder by Contract, Nightfall, and The Prowler.

Finally, this is a nice long weekend—and LACMA is free all day on Memorial Day, thanks to Target. Enjoy live music on the plaza, bring your kids to the Boone Children’s Gallery, and enjoy all of the many artworks on view in our galleries.

Scott Tennent

Daido Moriyama, Untitled (trash cans), printed 2009, courtesy of Courtesy Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, © 2012 Daido Moriyama

In Memories of a Dog, Daido Moriyama—with a slight smile—declares, “I’m like a stray dog,” unconcerned with the allusion. His black-and-white images are not memory, but the stylized theater of urban reality caught as moving targets by a modern man, testosterone-rich and unapologetically masculine. The striking drama as the white glares to diffusion of the black images—be they objects or people—injects loads of glittering glamour to the odd collection of groupings. For instance, trash-canister tops are in the foreground of a group of people as if something nefarious were present. The human condition is made provisional, alluring, and infinitely mysterious. Sometimes it’s obliquely erotic and other times straight up and in-your-face sexual—and always through a scrim of menace. There’s a fierce motion in his photos, blurring to abstraction on one hand, yet with the intense need to capture the immediacy and vitality of living presence on the other.

Daido Moriyama, Kariudo (Hunter), 1971, printed 2009, courtesy of Courtesy Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, © 2012 Daido Moriyama

Like all voyeuristic imagery, he makes you a party to his vivacious lens, and thus you are made predator in Hunter. You are unable to turn away from the giant lips, their pout like creased pillows. It’s hallucinogenic, as a sullen chubby boy’s face presses forward into the frame. Wired fences are so close as to form a grid, while the vague cars and buildings are mere palettes of grays and charcoals. The world is shadows, broken into pieces and seen through the zoom lens of confrontation. Mountainously sensual rear ends in jeans or fishnet stockings force themselves on you. It’s physical, and it’s intimate.

Daido Moriyama, Untitled (shadows with tires), printed 2009, courtesy of Courtesy Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, © 2012 Daido Moriyama

Moriyama, more than most, to me, epitomizes the realization that photography is an alien third eye with the power to create an alternate reality—a reality which is as repulsive as it is seductively attractive. It’s a reality we know is exaggerated, dipped in a lugubrious ink the color of midnight—those down-and-dirty blues which we associate with the dark side of American life. His Tokyo—or rather his neighborhood, Shinjuku—is made somehow precious, vulgar, clownishly regal, and elegant. Take the picture of the coat covered in pearl buttons—where he shoots in perfect relationship to the light, somehow sharing the darkness—making it almost weightless and ethereal, kind of heavenly. Texture abounds in his images. Old dogs and old tires are transformed into junk beauty or elegant brutal realism. It’s our safe passage to the other side, though we are uneasy and somewhat fearful. Japan is no longer white cranes fluttering across a sea-green kimono or white-masked smoky mythic dramas on folded silk screens taking us out of our hard metal world of acid-washed jeans and plastic dreams.

Daido Moriyama, Shinjuki #11, 2000, courtesy of Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, © 2012 Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama repositions us with his macho zing and daring honesty; he sees the beauty where we would look elsewhere, and plays in the dark.  You get to walk with him in his video—it’s close contact. You sense the flash of his captured moments like some adrenaline-high quick-draw artist. He’s a modern-day samurai, eyeing with laser speed the disjunctive elements. In spite of this, it’s an embrace. And then you squeeze down the narrow stairwell when he declares the city a sexual entity, which from his point of view it could hardly be otherwise.

Moriyama’s photography braids us constantly into the fabric of the singularity of our actual “looking” and ties the knots to our deepest sensual signals. For those split seconds, our eyes are amoral, panoramic, and restlessly inventing beauty. But for Moriyama they are not seconds but a jet stream of a life in motion—and at some existential level—making all encounters mean something in the deep well of his visual cortex.

Hylan Booker

Collectors from left to right: Jesse Williams, Aryn Drake-Lee, Linda Gotskind, Paul Gotskind, Lyndon Barrois, Janine Barrois, Halima Taha

In opening remarks, LAMCA deputy director Brooke Davis Anderson addressed why we were focusing on African American art to begin with, noting that first and foremost African American artists make, and historically have made, great art, museum-worthy and therefore LACMA-worthy art that should be acquired and exhibited. Furthermore, she cited the fundamental necessity of focusing on historically marginalized artists, such as artists of African descent, to reinvigorate and transform traditional conceptions and collections of historical American art (my area of specialty), collections typically defined within museums and academia as art of the United States created from the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century.

To bring this mission forward to the present day is also the responsibility of collectors and curators of contemporary art who, in the words of collector and panelist Janine Barrois, “need to work to preserve the history of African Americans figuratively and conceptually and document our time so that African American artists have a place at the table, and we will know what African American artists were saying.” To provide a foundation for the museum’s historical-to-contemporary collecting mission, contemporary art curator Franklin Sirmans and I offered a brief history of the building of LACMA’s African American art collections, from the first acquisition in 1922 to the most recent, an ongoing process introduced in a previous post on the subject.

Richard Howard Hunt, Extended Forms, 1975, purchased with funds provided by The Ahmanson Foundation, the League of Allied Arts, the Charles R. Drew Medical Society Auxiliary, and the Los Agneles Chapter of Links, Inc.

One important African American art acquisition we highlighted was a major collaborative effort between donors and the museum to acquire Extended Forms (1975) by Richard Hunt (b. 1935), one of America’s foremost sculptors.  A 1957 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he continues to live and work, Hunt was the first African American artist to have a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1971). In celebration of LACMA’s acquisition of Hunt’s Extended Forms in 1980, the artist created a limited edition lithograph, Untitled, 1980, for the museum’s then active Black Historical Advisory Group led by former trustee Robert Wilson.

Richard Hunt, Untitled, 1980, signed and numbered edition of fifty, printed by Will Petersen, Master Printer, with Cynthia D. Archer, Associate, Plucked Chicken Press, Chicago, IL

The prints were sold to support the acquisition of additional works by African American artists. Though the group no longer exists, proceeds made possible acquisitions of works by John Biggers, Adrian Piper, and Therman Statom.

John Biggers, Cotton Pickers, 1947, purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas H. Crawford Jr. and the Black Art Acquisition Fund

Adrian Piper, Ur Mutter #4: Relax. We don’t want what you have., 1989, Black American Artists Fund

Therman Statom, Chair on Base, 1987, Black American Artists Fund

We announced on Saturday that the remaining thirty-nine prints have been made available again to benefit LACMA’s African American Art Fund. (For more information, or to purchase, please call 323 857-6587 or email artcatalogues@lacma.org.)  We hope that the works we may be able to acquire with the African American Art Fund will inspire many more lively discussions like Saturday’s panel, scholarship, and exhibitions of African American art at LACMA and beyond.

Austen Bailly, Associate Curator, American Art

Megalith slated to become part of Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass,” arriving to LACMA on March 10. Photo by Tom Vinetz, © Michael Heizer

As a special thank-you to the many communities through which the megalith traveled on its historic journey, LACMA is offering free admission to residents of select zip codes from along the route for the entire week of June 24–July 1. With proof of residence, such as a driver’s license, members of these communities will be granted free admission to LACMA’s galleries. Check this list to see if your neighborhood was on the route.

So, mark your calendars! The countdown begins.

Scott Tennent

In pursuit of a career as an artist, Whistler sailed to Europe at the age of twenty-one. He arrived in Paris in 1855, where he received artistic training, and later settled in London, never to return to the United States.  Whistler travelled broadly throughout England and the continent, chronicling in prints his response to the urban scenes, built landscapes, and people he encountered.  Through his paintings, prints, and writings on art, he was to achieve lasting international acclaim; but his combative and polemical character also earned him his share of notoriety, as he abruptly ended significant personal and professional relationships and engaged in public critical debate. The reception of Whistler’s paintings and prints at the time of their making was divided.  One of the most damning statements about Whistler’s work was made in a review of the painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket (Detroit Institute of Art), in which the influential English art critic John Ruskin accused the artist of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”  Whistler sued for libel and won the case. He was however, awarded a mere farthing, leaving him in financial ruin.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Under Old Battersea Bridge, 1876/78, The Julius L. and Anita Zelman Collection

The title of the installation, Whistler’s Etchings: An Art of Suggestion, is taken from a review of the artist’s 1871 Thames Set, which, while in itself positive, makes note of the criticism his etchings did receive:

“It is one of the obvious charges against Mr. Whistler, as against many other masters of the etching-needle, that he constantly contents himself with slurring and hinting, instead of working patiently to a finish.  The etcher, when this is alleged against him, has to say for himself that his art is not an art of finish, but an art of suggestion, that what he uses this method and material for is to make notes and set down impressions, not to produce elaborate pictures, therefore, that he has a perfect right to stop where he pleases, and that it pleased no other etcher to stop so often as the chief of them all, Rembrandt.”  (Pall Mall Gazette, 1 January, 1872)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, The Forge, 1861, from the Thames Set, 1871, the Julius L. and Anita Zelman Collection

Indeed, with their summary style, abbreviated forms, and fragmentary views, Whistler’s etchings and drypoints promoted an aesthetic language counter to the prevailing Victorian taste for the elaborate narrative description and meticulous finish of reproductive engravings.  Whistler exploited the marks of artistic process (for example, taking his plate through as many as twenty states in his Doorway) and treated individual impressions in a singular manner by varying the application of ink and the supports used, thus challenging conventional notions of finish.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Palaces, 1879/1880, from the Second Venice Set, 1886, the Julius L. and Anita Zelman Collection

Among the twenty-five works exhibited are seven images of Venice.  In 1879, Whistler travelled to Venice to execute a suite of etchings commissioned by the Fine Arts Society of London.  These etchings, which beautifully render the effects of light and atmosphere through a skillful use of reserves of paper and expert manipulation of ink, are today considered among the most prized of Whistler’s oeuvre. In Whistler’s day, they did much to restore his reputation and finances, which had both suffered from the protracted Ruskin legal trial.  Yet when they first appeared, the Venice etchings were not met with universal approval. In a collection of writings published in 1890—titled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies—the artist reprinted some of the unsympathetic responses his etchings had elicited (alongside his own acerbic retorts).  These remarks speak of an abiding apprehension towards the question of finish.  Whistler was disparaged as “an artist of incomplete performance,” his Venice etchings having been “done with a swiftness and dash that preclude anything like care and finish.”

While many of the prints on view are indeed seemingly spontaneous in execution, at times resembling preliminary studies taken from life, Whistler continuously reworked his plates, fastidiously redefining details and often reinforcing areas of shading to compensate for the wear of the plate.  His economy of means belies his great expense of labor.  This is especially the case with Whistler’s informal and concisely executed portraits.  Although spared of details of costume and setting, they are convincing likenesses that successfully convey distinct character and mood.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, C. L. Drouet, Sculptor, 1859, the Julius L. and Anita Zelman Collection

Not all critics failed to admire Whistler’s mastery of the etching medium.  Many appreciated his resistance to the strongholds of Victorian convention, and praised the bold quality of his compositions which often have the appearance of being casually rendered: “they are singularly felicitous, dashing, dexterous, and suggestive” (The Critic, 25 May 1861).  This selection of Whistler’s etchings and drypoints considers—indeed celebrates—the printmaker’s exploration and subversion of artistic resolution.   It examines in particular the variety of technical means Whistler deployed to achieve his carefully considered and desired ends.

Naoko Takahatake, Assistant Curator, Prints and Drawings

This weekend is also your last chance to see Maria Nordman FILMROOM: SMOKE, 1967–Present, on view in the Art of the Americas Building. FILMROOM: SMOKE is one of Nordman’s earliest pieces; the single-room, two-channel video documents the same scene from two positions—a fixed tripod and a hand-held camera, moving in concert with the breath of the actors and the ocean behind them. Outisde of the exhibition you’ll find a new sculpture Nordman created just for this exhibition, YANG-NA 2011–Present—a frame scaled to the same size as the Filmroom, through which you can become the actor yourself.

Maria Nordman, Filmroom: Smoke, 1967–Present. Photo: Courtesy of the Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal

Stay at LACMA into the evening and catch bassist Henry “Skipper” Franklin performing for Jazz at LACMA, right in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light. Over in the Bing Theater, tonight is the start of our latest film series, The Sun Sets in the West: Mid-Century California Noir. Get here early to see the sunny objects in our California Design exhibition, then see the shadows fall in ten noir thrillers set in the Golden State, presented this weekend and next. Friday night we present two from the 1950s: Kiss Me Deadly and The Crimson Kimono (the latter directed by the legendary Samuel Fuller). On Saturday night we screen three in a row: Blake Edwards’s Experiment in Terror, the Burt Lancaster vehicle Criss Cross, and the 1951 remake of Fritz Lang’s M. 

We’ve got two great talks happening this weekend too. On Saturday afternoon, LACMA curators Austen Bailly and Franklin Sirmans introduce a talk about African American art between collectors Aryn Drake-Lee and Jesse Williams and scholar Dr. Halima Taha, author of Collecting African American Art.

On Sunday, artist Lawrence Weiner will join LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan and assistant curator Jarrett Gregory in conversation about contemporary aesthetics. Stick around to tour the bevy of new installations on view now, and then head to the Bing Theater for our free Sundays Live concert featuring Young Musicians Foundation Chamber Ensembles.

Textile Panel (Mola), Panama, San Blas, Kuna people, last quarter of 20th century, gift of Lindy and Ellen Narver in memory of Grace Narver, from the installation Stitching Worlds: Mola Art of the Kuna

Finally, to cap off a busy weekend, we’re screening Wes Anderson’s latest, Moonrise Kingdom, Sunday night at 8:30 pm in the Bing Theater. Though the film is sold out, there will be a standby line forming at the Hammer Building Ticket Office at 6 pm.

Scott Tennent