Art & Artists
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140 posts found
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Wiesenthal The Collector
Simon Wiesenthal died last month at 96 in his sleep at his home in Vienna. This seems particularly fitting, since Wiesenthal spent the last 60 years troubling the sleep of Nazi war criminals, their henchmen, collaborators and supporters. During the Holocaust, 89 members of Wiesenthal’s extended family were murdered, including his mother who was deported to the Belzec extermination camp. Wiesenthal himself was a prisoner at a succession of charnel houses, such as the Janovska camp, Plaszow (the camp in… -
Tommywood: "Light of Day" (Robert Weingarten at the Weisman Museum)
As I drove toward Malibu the other day, Santa Monica Bay was anything but uniform, a shifting collage of textures and hues of blue. As the sun glinted off the water, I wondered: How does one describe the special quality of Santa Monica light? How do you explain it? How do you quantify it? To find the answer, I went to the new Robert Weingarten photo exhibit, “6:30 am,†which runs through July 17 at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum… -
Luck of the Exiles
Spring is upon us. My allergies have been acting up for weeks. So it seems the right time to talk about cross-pollination, a subject that it is at the heart of important new exhibits in Los Angeles and New York. When Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was running for president in 1988, he often talked about his father, a Greek immigrant who had come to this country with no money, had worked very hard and made a considerable fortune. When he… -
Conal's the Poster Boy for 'Art Attack' (Guerrilla Poster Artist Robbie Conal)
You’ve seen them around town: a poster of a grinning, gnarly Arnold Schwarzenegger with red eyes and the words, "Achtung, Baby," scrawled in German Gothic type across his forehead. It may have made you smile; you may have felt it was in bad taste. Perhaps a bit of both. In any event, you probably thought: There goes the poster guy again. By now, even if you can’t name the artist, Robbie Conal, the style has become familiar: a black-and-white head-and-shoulders… -
A Search for Intellectual L.A. (Paul Holdengraber and LACMA)
It’s a Friday night and an overflow crowd is jammed into the penthouse of the former May Co. store on Wilshire Boulevard — now Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) West — to hear a conversation between French journalist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. Presiding over this abundance of intelligence is Paul Holdengräber, the founder and director of LACMA’s Institute for Art and Cultures (IAC). Holdengräber is erudite, worldly, self-deprecating and all the more… -
Making L.A. Real (Developer Larry Fields and architect Frank Gehry)
This weekend the story of Los Angeles, and its future, is all about one building, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Critics have already hailed our new symphony hall as a triumph of design, determination and a marriage of form, function and acoustic feng shui. But more significantly, in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles is finally acknowledging Frank Gehry’s central role in our culture. One building, as Gehry taught us with Bilbao, can change a city (even as the… -
Kitaj the 'Diasporist'
Six years have passed since painter R.B. Kitaj moved from London to Los Angeles, following a hail of criticism and counterattacks (more on that later). Recently, I visited the artist at his home and studio on the occasion of "Los Angeles Pictures," a breathtaking exhibit at Venice’s LA Louver Gallery. Kitaj’s show in Venice includes more than 20 works, paintings, drawings, even a few abstracts. Clearly, Kitaj’s time in Los Angeles has been productive. But can a self-proclaimed "Diasporist" ever… -
Is Lucian Freud Hot?
His paintings ask: Is this all there is? British painter Lucian Freud is considered Britain’s greatest living painter, one of the towering figures of realist portraiture. The largest retrospective of Freud’s work has now come to Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the only U.S. venue for this exhibit. Organized in 2002 for the Tate Britain in London, this show gathers Freud’s work over six decades — paintings, watercolors, drawings, as well as new works for this exhibition —…