Art & Artists
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140 posts found
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City of Images
Los Angeles has long held a fascination with the visual; beholden to looks, surfaces and images, it is a city where even the buildings seem to strike a pose. So it might seem surprising that until now, there's never been an institution here devoted to photography. But that all changes this week with the opening of the stunning new Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City. Located on the site of the former Schubert Theater, in the shadow of the… -
Zap! Pow! Bam!
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's two Jewish kids from Cleveland! The fact that Superman, the defender of truth, justice and the American way, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was not so much from Krypton as, in the words of cartoon artist Jules Feiffer, "from Planet Minsk," is one of the many things to be learned from "Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950," which opened… -
"Breakdowns" & The "Maus" that roared (or Art Spiegelman through the looking glass)
Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist whose graphic memoir, "Maus," won a Pulitzer Prize, was in town recently to promote a reissue of "Breakdowns," a collection of his underground comics work first published in 1978. As Spiegelman pointed out to me, his name in German means "Mirror Man" (mine means "Pond-wood") -- and revisiting "Breakdowns," now subtitled, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" was like finding a letter you'd written 30 years ago. For this new edition, Spiegelman spent two… -
The Grammy Museum: The Culture We Keep
The Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Venus de Milo, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Pete Seeger's banjo, the handwritten lyrics to Grandmaster Flash's "The Message." You might wonder what all these cultural artifacts have in common. But as of Dec. 6, they can all be seen in museums -- the last two items just went on view at the new Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles. I place them together because they underline the question that… -
Yoram Kaniuk: Israel's Interior monologuist
Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk first grabbed my attention in 2006 when he wrote a series of diary entries about life in Tel Aviv during Israel's war with Lebanon. Kaniuk, who will be appearing at American Jewish University on Sunday as part of the second annual Celebration of Jewish Books, painted a cranky portrait of himself as aged (he was 76 then), losing his hearing, limping and living in a Tel Aviv old-age home -- a man older than the nation… -
The Genesis of Early Dylan
When it comes to Bob Dylan, I think it's fair to say that I'm a fan of long standing -- my wife still teases me about the time, shortly after we'd moved to Los Angeles, when in her car, radio on, she was surprised to hear me as a call-in contestant to KSCA's "Lyrically Speaking" correctly identify the author of the verse in question as, "My man, Bob Dylan." So you might think that I would be excited to see… -
LACMA gets Contemporary
In February, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will unveil the first phase of its renovation and expansion, including the opening of a new building devoted to contemporary art -- the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (that's Broad as in Eli and Edythe Broad, our local Medicis) or, as the acronymists at LACMA have dubbed it, BCAM. On a recent afternoon, I surveyed the new construction with Barbara Pflaumer, LACMA's associate vice president for press relations, as my Virgil. Given… -
Picturing LA (Julius Shulman)
Julius Shulman, the still much-in-demand architectural photographer, famous for his photos of Modernist homes, turned 97 a few weeks ago, and the partying has been pretty much nonstop -- which is the way Shulman likes it. The Getty Research Institute, which houses Shulman's photographic archive of more than 260,000 negatives, prints and transparencies, organized "Shulman's Los Angeles," an exhibition of 150 of Shulman's photographs, spanning his 70-year-career, which is currently on view at downtown's Central Public Library through Jan. 20.… -
Mark Rydell's Passion
Summer movies provide thrills, chills and laughs and are more noted for their special effects and star actors than for the acting and the seriousness of their purpose. Which makes this a good time to visit with Mark Rydell, a man whose more than 50-year career as an actor, director and producer speaks of his integrity, his commitment to being an artist and his devotion to the craft of acting. Rydell's current offering as director is "Even Money" (now playing… -
Schimmel's Summer School (Paul Schimmel & MOCA)
Paul Schimmel, the Museum of Contemporary Art"s (MOCA) chief curator, wants us to spend our summer looking back -- 50 or so years to around the time of his birth, and to the city where he grew up, New York, to focus on the remarkable work of a young, poor and not-yet-famous Robert Rauschenberg, who was gathering junk and detritus from his life (clothes, family photos, fabric) and incorporating them into paintings that then became three-dimensional constructs, which Rauschenberg called… -
Who's Your Mummy?
On a day when a hot desert wind whipped through town, I found myself in a darkened chamber contemplating death and the afterlife — not my own, for a change, but rather that of the ancient Egyptians. Currently the L.A. area is hosting two world-class exhibitions of ancient Egyptian artifacts: King Tut has taken up residence in Mid-Wilshire in the LACMA annex. Less than an hour away, in Santa Ana (of the eponymous hot winds), the Bowers Museum is showcasing…