Photography

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and LACMA are both about to come into a little bit of an inheritance.  The private collection of Sidney and Frances Lasker Brody, which is filled to the brim with enviable works, will go up for auction at Christie’s in May.  According to the LA Times’ Culture Monster, The Huntington is set to get a share of the upcoming sale, while LACMA will be the lucky recipient of a 12-by-11-foot mural that the Brody’s commissioned from Matisse.  Go back. Read that again.  They commissioned a mural, called “La Garde,” from Matisse.

The Brody’s served on both museum boards and their collection and their house are both points of pride for art and architecture lovers in Los Angeles.  Christie’s has estimated that the sale will garner $150 million especially considering that they’ll be auctioning off works by Picasso, Giacometti, Braque, and Degas.

Click here, or here, to read more about it.  Wonder if we can afford anything up for auction!

Ever wonder what happened to Ed Templeton?  That professional skateboarder turned internationally renowned artist, photographer, D.I.Y. innovator, entrepreneur, ‘Beautiful Loser,’ and book publisher?  Well if you haven’t, then Ed Templeton has.

His eclectic career as both a skater and an artist has always seemed to be about his own relationship to time and motion.  In his famous photography book, Teenage Smokers, for instance, each medium to close-up image of a young person with a cigarette has the feeling of personal impermanence, like a flash-memory of a kid you might have seen at the mall once when you were nine.

Templeton, especially in his most recent work, seems to be obsessed with these fragile, ephemeral moments, and what they might mean.  His 2008 book, Deformer, which took him 11 years to complete, examines his youth growing up in the ultra-conservative suburban “incubator” of Orange County, using childhood letters, notes, photographs, sketches, and paintings to tell his story with as much physical accuracy as possible—even if it’s all long gone.

His latest photography show, The Seconds Pass, at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City once again has Templeton on the move.  These thirty-some separate collages of pictures, mostly all taken from the vantage point of a moving vehicle, attempt to capture exactly where he’s been these last few years, so as not to miss a passing second.

Ed Templeton’s The Seconds Pass can be viewed at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City until April 3.  Roberts and Tilton is located at 5801 Washinton Blvd.  For more information, please call (323) 549-0223, or visit www.robertsandtilton.com.

When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind.  When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence.  But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum presented by John Klein, Associate Professor from Washington University in St. Louis, that reminded me of the magnetism and presence of portraits. In his lecture, “Matisse, Picasso and Beyond: How Portraiture Survived Modernism,” he examined the means by which the art of human representation prevailed through an era defined by its antipathy to historical convention.  Through the study of modernist masters like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti, Klein arrives at a universal truth: human beings will always and forever be obsessed with themselves, others, and how others perceive them.

“Damn Portraits!” began Professor Klein, quoting Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—an abrupt and honest exclamation that served as a perfect prelude to the difficult battle that portraiture was doomed to fight once the modern age descended on a timeless artistic tradition.  Ingres, like many artists of his time, despised portraiture.

He often complained that the overwhelming number of commissions from high society kept him from focusing on “more important” subject matter.  In the 19th Century, it seemed as if the only demographic that had an affinity for portraiture was the social elite.  When the 20th Century began, many creative figures decried the art form’s declining relevance.  Portraiture posed a series of difficult questions for the artist: How does one capture the complexity of human identity? How can an inner quality be expressed outwardly?  How can a still representation do justice to a personality trait that is defined by its movement? Modernism, says Klein, provided the platform that was so desperately needed: a movement that joined portraiture with the abstraction of the avant-garde.

Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental.  In works like Girl with Green Eyes (1908), Matisse blended his sitters into a decorative pattern where no single component of the painting could dominate.  Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1906), on the other hand, showcases both the artist and the sitter, serving as a visual statement of the height and legitimacy of both Stein’s and Picasso’s careers. Klein taught the audience that through the execution of her face, as was common with many of Picasso’s portraits, the artist imposed a mask-like quality that hardly resembled Stein’s genuine appearance. The primitivization of her face is a symbolic and telling mark of the beginning of an important aesthetic shift.

After the First World War, artists became increasingly cynical of humanistic values, and rapid advances in photographic technology threatened representational portraiture.  Expressive abstraction began to take hold, providing the artist with infinite ways to communicate power, status and legitimacy—and the line between art and vulgarity became harder to define.  Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995) is an example of how modern portraiture could become a PR dream come true. Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, a woman convicted of murdering multiple innocent child victims, is comprised of tiny flesh colored hands, hands meant to represent those of the children that she murdered.

Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion.  I could feel the tension in the lecture hall when Myra came on screen, and I could see that the man next to me was trying to conceal his goose bumps.

Professor Klein’s lecture was most certainly a personal highlight of my many years of studying and appreciating portraiture. Regardless of one’s knowledge of art, he was able to communicate his subject with admirable passion and vigor.  Professor Klein carried the double-barreled theme of portraiture and its modernist survival from the turn of the 20th Century through the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was quite frankly one of the most fun Saturdays I’ve had in a while, and I don’t think I was alone.  The jam-packed lecture hall’s enthusiastic applause was proof enough that nobody was falling asleep before Klein could finish his sentences.

-By Brittany Krasner

The Norton Simon’s calendar of educational lectures will certainly expand your art related intellectual repertoire.  For more information on upcoming lectures, please visit their website.

From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know.  And Los Angeles is no exception.  Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the L.A. River remains hopelessly barren, and provides a better bike path to Long Beach than it does a waterway.  But if you’ve ever actually step foot into that mighty concrete divider of our city, then you’d know it’s every bit as organic and symbolic as any other great river.  Whether it’s the plastic bag trees, the graffiti-worn banks, or the garbage disposal current, one would be hard-pressed to not find the same beauty that Mark Twain once described in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, as “…a wonderful book…which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice.”

On show until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the collective exhibition entitled The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River (UGLAR for short) also uses the metaphor of a book, only this one screams its secrets.  Consisting of a wide range of contemporary, LA-based artists, this unique assortment of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and illustrations all converge like tributaries into one central theme: the Los Angeles River.

One oil painting called “Confluence” by Tyson Dolan portrays the intersection of two concrete canals, meeting and opening into the space of the viewer.  The colors are muted, almost foggy, and with the installed background sounds of dripping water and distant train bells echoing throughout the room, one gets the distinct feeling of being alone and drifting through Dolan’s industrial river-basin.

Another piece, up-and-comer Rob Sato’s “Land Admiral Lefebvre’s Fleet Makes Sail”, takes a more surreal, maximalist route.  This multi-medium, ‘Where’s Waldo’ mash-up depicts an elaborate, farcical, eighteenth-century showdown between the Blue-Coats and the Reds on the battlefield of the Los Angeles River.  There’s of course no water for the huge wooden ships, so the implied Admiral Lefebvre sails upon his own ocean, with hundreds of tiny minions carrying the actual waves themselves.  Not to be ignored in this spectacle are Sato’s frequent dips into brash absurdity: slave-like giants, a monstrous fish-man-beast riding a whale like an Avatar pterodactyl, and if you look hard enough, a modern car wreck upon the bridge over the river.

The biggest work on show, however, is a mural completed by all the contributing artists.  It’s title is “The River Experiment,” and it speaks to the theme of the collection, which is one of evolution, or perhaps more accurately, mutation.  Because The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River – to complete Mark Twain’s quote – “[is] not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River runs until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  For more information, please visit pmcaonline.org, or call (626) 568-3665.

When you stop to think about women in countries like Argentina or in the countryside of Spain, what do you picture? If you’re anything like me, it’s a romantic vision of a flamenco dancer in a black dress with dramatic makeup, a lace fan, and the attitude of a seasoned temptress.  Ruven Afanador knows this woman – in fact, he knows many of them.

Photographed in a desert looking uncomfortably hot in long black dresses and striking wigs, Afanador’s women are the bold image of Latin women that remains burned in our brains from John Singer Sargent paintings and films by Luis Bunuel and Federico Fellini.  They are the women who look like they could teach you about the ways of the world in the most basic sense – they look like they’re from the earth.  That’s particularly why Afanador’s photographs, in his “Mil Besos” exhibition are so memorable, enticing, and true.  He photographs women of all shapes and sizes in various forms of undress at their most intense – one image shows two women nearly kissing, one shows three women who look like they’re on the verge of spontaneously imploding (in good and bad ways), and one shows two women in the midst of a certain kind of dance and wearing long skirts that almost seem connected.

In his “Torero” exhibit, showing in the smaller of Fahey/Klein’s two rooms, the images are more portrait-like and show the young men who become bull-fighters in all their embroidered, detailed, costume-like majesty.  There are the simple parts, like a dusty pair of shoes with a bow, there are images that celebrate the male body, and there are images that show the emotion behind such a dangerous and historically rich sport.

All in all, Afanador’s images, from both exhibits, succeed in so many ways.  They not only enhance the melodramatic and quixotic vision of Latin men and women, but they also seem to show the familiar and human side of these gorgeous specimens.

Ruven Afanador’s “Mil Besos” and “Torero” will be on view at Fahey/Klein Gallery through March 27.  Please click here for more information.

There’s that old rule of thumb that you shouldn’t worry too much about little things – will you even remember what you were worried about 6 months from now? What about a year from now?  Well… what about ten years ago – do you remember?  This video does.  It’s a great time capsule of magazine covers published over the last ten years that chronicle all we’ve been through.  We think Kanye West’s “Stronger” would have been more appropriate for background music, but… anyway, enjoy!

It was only a little earlier today that the Los Angeles City Council voted down the proposition to eliminate the Transient Occupancy Tax (the TOT), the sole source of governmental funding behind of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA).  This action, had it been carried through, would have effectively shut down 18 cultural centers—including the Barnsdall Arts Center in Hollywood and the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, host to the Sony Pictures Media Arts Program for middle school youth—as well as five professional theatre facilities, and an array of classes, programs, and cultural events.

Such a worthwhile institution as the DCA might seem like an easy stronghold in such a creatively centered city as Los Angeles, but it was largely due to incredible advocacy organizations like Arts for LA that the proposition was shot down.  They, along with other activist groups and privately-funded museums such as the Hammer, urged their supporters to write letters to their councilmen, and voice their opinions at the City Council public hearing this Wednesday.  Some handed out stickers with the phrase “Arts Fuel LA,” others toted hand-made signs, and one woman addressed the council in a full-on angel costume.

Lo and behold, these efforts proved successful, and as a website strictly devoted toward promoting the arts, artists, and cultural community of Los Angeles, FineArtsLA would like to sincerely thank both the City Council members, and the hard-working advocacy organizations for their aid and congratulate them on their accomplishment today.

Of course the fight for the arts is never through—the council issue still undecided is whether the current cultural grants will be honored—but in celebration of this week’s victory, may I suggest checking out the DCA-funded Municipal Arts Gallery in the Barnsdall Arts Park.  From January 24th through April 18th, they are hosting an enormous series of participatory exhibitions entitled “Actions, Conversations, and Intersections,” all aimed at enhancing the artistic community of Los Angeles.  In residency this week is Smart Gals Productions, whose patented “Reading Preserve and Speakeasy Collection” features public readings from some of LA’s best authors, including John Albert, Noel Alumit, and Aimee Bender (my personal favorite).

The Smart Gals will toast off their weeklong program on Sunday, February 7th at 2:00pm with the collaborative “Winter Picnic Performance,” a fun mix of music, theatre, fresh bread courtesy of the Bicycle Bread Company, and hot coffee from Cafécito Organico.  So come along, fuel the arts that fuel LA, and if you get the chance, thank somebody.

Curated by Edith Abeyta and Michael Lewis Miller, “Actions, Conversations, and Intersections” runs until April 18th, 2010 at the Los Angeles Municipal Arts Gallery in the Barnsdall Art Park.  For more information, visit www.actionsconversationsintersections.com

The relationship between people and animals, domesticated and wild, is endlessly fascinating. Some we admire from afar with awe, like the cuddly-looking but ferocious polar bear, while others play ball with us on the front yard or beg us incessantly for a bite of our burrito.  Living closely with an animal reveals just how intelligent, emotional, and unabashedly different they are.  Currently, Louis Stern Fine Arts is hosting an exhibition that through a number of critically acclaimed black and white photographs, captures the physical reality of animals with remarkable emotion. Anima: The Photography of Jean Francois Spricigo explores the relationship between animals and nature, but also provokes the viewer to contemplate our place amongst these wonderful creatures.

Belgian-born Spricigo, winner of the 2008 Laureate of the Prix de Photographie de l’Academie des Beaux-Arts, is one of the art world’s most eloquently outspoken animal advocates.  His admiration and respect for his subjects is evident in his photography.  Many popular animal photographers subject the animal to human confines a la Hallmark (kittens in picnic baskets), but Spricigo’s photographs capture more candid and intimate moments.  It’s easy to forget that he and his camera were present—his photographs evoke such an untouched solitude.

The first images that I experienced on entering the gallery were a combination of animals and natural objects, displayed in a double-triptych form.  This series of six images, some of abstract landscapes, others of animals in motion, immediately set the stage for the exhibition’s narrative. Two ducks swim along their way, utterly oblivious to the camera, while the sweet and vulnerable eyes of a dog stare right at the viewer, beckoning compassion and understanding.  In another photograph, a single dog almost lost in a blanket of night sky, offset by blurred city lights in the distance, serves as a harsh reminder of the divide that separates the manufactured human world from the visceral animal world.

The cats, dogs, birds, leopards, horses and cows represented in Spricigo’s work are captured as if caught off guard.  Spricigo’s photographs reveal a deep, soulful quality in his otherwise “common” subjects.  One piece captures the hearty laugh of a bah-ing billy goat with such depth that you feel as if you’re in on the joke.  Other heartwarming images include a fluffy, tiny, inquisitive square-shaped bird, and a playful, rambunctious dog, equipped with a stick and ready for the chase.  These images call to mind feelings of companionship, and at times lend a “family portrait”-like quality to the exhibition.

The interesting thing about Spricigo’s approach to his subject matter is that while his photography does call to mind the connection we have for animals, it also exposes them in moments of isolation and reflection.  Many of his photographs resemble impressionistic paintings in that they are mildly surrealist, blurred, and depict the animals in their natural, daily, and often private activities.  The third room of the exhibition houses the greatest number of these photographs, where Spricigo’s skill is just as impressive as his subject matter.  A lone horse at pasture is practically absorbed into the mist—something Spricigo depicts as hundreds of softly focused dots, while across the room, a sharply focused shot of a bird’s feet on a fence seamlessly coexists.  It is this diversity and range, not only in the photographs of Anima but also in the natural world, that make the psychological complexity of animals so enthralling.

-by Brittany Krasner

After a two month run at the Palais de l’Institute de France, Anima: The Photography of Jean Francois Spricigo has made quite a splash at its American debut in West Hollywood and is on view at Louis Stern Fine Arts through February 13. For more information, please call (310) 276-0147 or click here.

Pablo Uribe, Atardecer, 2008 (Dusk) - video still

This year, the Los Angeles Art Show made its home at Los Angeles Convention Center.  This venue change provided more space for gallery booths that ranged from contemporary works such as the Wall Project’s Shepard Fairey and Thierry Noir painted walls to landscapes galore — and even more space for project-based installations. The Vox Humana on-site art performance presented street artists Mear One, Kofie, Retna, and El Mac who showed off their talents over the length of the fair on large-scale canvases.  And speaking of more room, I wondered how Sidestreet Projects got one of their woodworking workshop buses into the fair.  These school buses are outfitted with project stations for elementary school children so they can make a nuts and bolts washer sandwich and one FUNdred dollar bills, which I am sure we all could use more of these days.

One of my favorite pieces of the art fair was Pablo Uribe’s video, Atardecer (2008), which screened in a makeshift dark room in the Guest Country program booth’s rear.  While looking at the other works from the 34° 53’ 0” S – 56° 10’ 0” W show, I heard animals sounds curiously mix with the ambient art fair noise.  Upon stepping into the screening area, there was a video of an older man standing before a black background looking as if he were about to perform a gorgeous aria.  Instead of sweet notes pouring out of his mouth, the sound of a dog’s bark came out.  And then the cooing of a bird!  The actor was imitating the sounds of native rain forest animals.

Willy Rojas, Egg

Willy Rojas’ photographs at Barcelona’s Villa del Arte booth depicted miniature figurines interacting with their food-based environment.  Tiny people ski down slopes of salt or a wedge of hard cheese.  A man broke the shell of an egg with his sledgehammer while a couple ice skates on an orange hued soup.

Speaking of food, the Timothy Yarger Gallery presented Jean Wells’ The Giant Kiss quite literally.  The huge chocolate-scented foil wrapped sculpture demanded a tongue-in-cheek presence while paying homage to Claes Oldenburg’s shop.

The Rebecca Hossack Gallery held quite a few treats, including a gorgeous papel picado-esque paper cutting in the shape of a peacock (Ian Penney), a piece of toast with an image of Shakespeare burnt onto it à la the Virgen de Guadalupe (Maria Morrow), and also Phil Shaw’s photographs of brightly colored bookshelves, which was a voyeur’s delight to snoop the book titles.

And on my way out, I spotted three Jeff Koon’s puppy vases filled with fresh flowers guarding Jean Dubuffet’s Tapis at the Jane Kahan Gallery.  In my mind, they were the guardians of the LA Art Show — a much friendlier and kitsch version of Cerberus.

Los Angeles deserves some more recognition and maybe some better press, while we’re at it.  The reputation that many of our more blonde and ditsy denizens have created for us can often precede the fact that our art scene is one to be reckoned with.  If not, how would we have something to write about everyday?

In Spring 2009 when the LA Philharmonic, alongside their new Music Director Gustavo Dudamel, was invited to be a resident orchestra of the Barbican Centre in London, it was clear that the world of classical music was officially interested in what was happening out West.  It was just the right kind of recognition, of international press, that LA’s prized artists had been working toward.

In February, we can all look forward to moving up another notch on the world stage.  At the 29th annual International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, called ARCOmadrid, Los Angeles will be honored in a special exhibition entitled Panorama: Los Angeles.  For the first time in the history of the festival, the special exhibition will focus on a singular city instead of a country; it will be the first time Los Angeles has been celebrated as a city whose contemporary art scene is vibrant, prolific, and significant.  Curated by Kris Kuramitsu, some of the galleries and artists represented in the exhibition are Cherry and Martin Gallery, L.A. Louver, Regen Projects, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, and Steve Turner Gallery.

As if this weren’t enough, the Getty Research Institute will also present their exhibition Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles. Featuring over 100 rarely seen photos from Julius Shulman’s photography archive, the exhibit will showcase the passion that Shulman had for this sprawling, culturally rich City of Angels.

We all love Los Angeles in different ways – some love to hate it, some just love it unabashedly.  But no one can deny how enticing, unique, and powerful our art scene has become, even just in recent years.  Locals can’t deny it and now even the Spanish can’t deny it.