Great Trip to the New Geffen Galleries at LACMA

 

NOT my picture - the rest are

So LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) has opened a really cool new building. It undulates over Wilshire Blvd, offering ever-changing views of the area, and I loved it. Here are some images and impressions.

It is long above you when you get your tickets. These sculptures are all by Rodin. It doesn't seem quite as big from the street as it does in the drone image above.

First, it is clear that the museum has an esoteric collection, so they encourage wandering. Much of the open space on the west / south side of the building is coordinated by regions. For example, this area is in the Mediterranean. You see Greek vases (and yes, just on an open table, but tied down), along with some statues and chests from later times.

Further along is the Egyptian Area. Everything along the back wall is old Egyptian, but then this Sphinx was part of the collection from the met (I quote them below).

American artist Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles) has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for The Met's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Halsey will create a full-scale architectural structure imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the South Central Los Angeles Community where she was born and continues to work. Titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), the installation is designed to be inhabited by The Met’s visitors, who will be able to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions like tagging that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own.

Tucked inside many of the walls are intimate rooms, arranged by interests and sometimes tenuous connections.

The two pictures from above are of a single room that handles impressionism. It includes a handful of Degas, Monet, and others. It is interesting and not overwhelming. Those are the good parts. On the bad side, it is all kind of scatter-shot.

In the area before this, it had a lot of Baroque and old religious images. This section then looks at how more recent artists have revisited it.

This section was all about American Artists in the 19th century, followed a movement of European Classicism and reinvented it for America.

There was a section on how American artists (and some Europeans) interpreted car culture. And yes, that is an original Studebaker Avanti.