I like gruesome cowboy art like the Frederick Remington canvas at left.  [click on it for detail]

The show, “Scenery, Story, Spirit: American Painting and Sculpture from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art,” is a tour of the museums gems from its vaults –  examples of American art from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Between the 1830s and the end of WWI, American art came into its own, the Museum reminds us·. Sixty pieces spanning majestic Hudson River School paintings of Thomas Cole, John Kensett, and Albert Bierstadt to the gritty urban realism of Robert Henri and John Sloan figure in the show. 

Alas, I’ll just be missing the Pacific Standard Time show, Pasadena to Santa Barbara, A Selected History of Art in Southern California 1951 – 1969, which opens February 11.

Scenery, Story, Spirit: American Painting and Sculpture from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art | opens Feb 4

Like this? Read more:

• Amiri Baraka, visiting Los Angeles, raps about art

_{Twinkling Coppers (from “Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile”), 1986
Acrylic on canvas with penny and string of multi-colored flashing electrical Christmas lights
60 x 60 x 3 3/8 inches (152.4 x 152.4 x 8.6 cm)}

Artist Mike Kelley died today. Story here.

Peter Frank, Associate Editor of Fabrik magazine and art critic for The Huffington Post, eulogizes Kelley:

Mike Kelley was one of the less predictable, more original, and most committed talents of his — my — generation. His punk-driven suburban surrealism hit home, inspiring a distinctive discourse within, and helping to substantiate, the post-modernist trajectory. He was also notably devoted to and supportive of the community of artists. What a shame that the pain and isolation his art alternately bespeaks and thinly veils ultimately engulfed him.

Gallerist Jack Rutberg writes in an email:

Mike Kelley’s [death] is tragic. I met the fellow when he visited the gallery, and was impressed by him. He was hugely impressed with the work of Hans [Burkhardt], and brought one of his fans in a few years ago to introduce her to great painting. I’m always appreciative of breadth of appreciation and consideration — especially when it falls outside one’s own aesthetic engagement. 

_{Photo © Douglas M. Parker Studio
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery}

Like this? Read more:

• The expansive career of master artist Hans Burkhardt

Pollock, who died violently in a car crash at age 44, would have turned 100 on Jan 28.  I love his work, too.

Like this? Read more:

• Mat Gleason sorts out the ABCs of art for Eli Broad
• Mat Gleason’s birthday letter to Jackson Pollock (The Huffington Post)

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Sofia Coppola, Thomas Mars

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Michael Smith, Peter Schlesinger

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Peter Schlesinger, Eric Boman

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Cecilia Peck Voll, Veronique Peck

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Sophie Winkleman, Michael Smith

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Sofia Coppola, Peter Schlesinger

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Peter Schlesinger, Billy Al Bengston

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Eric Boman, Firooz Zahedi

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Peter Schlesinger, Billy Al Bengston

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Peter Schlesinger, Joan Quinn

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Sofia Coppola, Thomas Mars

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Luke G-Jones

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Gelila Puck

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  China Chow

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Charles Windisch-Graetz, Sophie Winkleman

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Michael Smith

• 

  Peter Schlesinger exhibition opening night

  Artist Peter Schlesinger

Peter Schlesinger | Duke & Duke Gallery | 8527 Melrose Avenue | thru March 16

I chatted on the phone with Schlesinger hours before his opening: “I grew up in the San Fernando Valley,” he said as an opener. “I attended Toluca Lake elementary school, and then my family moved to Encino. That was the late ’50s, and it was all pretty rural. I always did art, I started with private art lessons at ten. I was always doing extracurricular classes.

“My parents liked art. They took me to shows. They encouraged it. My Dad used to drive me to Saturday art courses [over the hill] when I was in junior high school.

“I attended UC Santa Cruz the year they opened it. I transferred to UCLA and studied with Diebenkorn, Llyn Folkes, Bill Brice and Ruba (?). There was an atmosphere to being in the L.A. art circle. I used to go to the La Cienega galleries.

“But I only wanted to get away. The Valley was so isolated. I always wanted to be a romantic expatriate artist. So I attended the Slade School [of Art in London]. I was in London for a decade, 1968-78, then I came back to New York where I’ve been ever since.”

The show features 25 ceramic sculpture works, awesome, weighty things that look lugged from ancient Greece, but were made in Schlesinger’s Brooklyn studio. Amidst the vessels and urns, a set of Schlesinger’s clear-eyed photographs of his European adventures. Now hanging on Melrose Avenue, they normally live in the artist’s 2003 memoir, “Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the 60′s and 70′s.”

_{arts·meme is honored to feature photography by alex berliner.}

Peter Schlesinger | Duke & Duke Gallery | 8527 Melrose Avenue | thru March 16

_{Hoppe photo credit: E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection, courtesy Graham Howe
Shawn photo courtesy, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Archive, courtesy Norton Owen}

Like this? Read more:

• Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival wins the National Medal of Arts.

The artist’s biography bears publishing because they don’ t make ‘em like this anymore.

1928
Born in Borownica, Poland.

1940-42
Concentration camp, Perm, Siberia. Permanently lost the use of right arm (had been right-handed). After escaping from the camp, joined and then deserted from the Polish army-in-exile.

Wandered alone through the Middle East before rejoining family in Teheran, Persia (Iran).

1942-48
Polish refugee camp, Uganda, Africa. First private art lessons.

1948-50
Went to Borough Polytechnic Institute in London, England.

1950
Emigrated to the United States.

1954
Recieved BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art.

1956
Became United States citizen.
Completed MFA at Yale University, studying under Josef Albers and
Conrad Marca Relli.

1995
Retired after 38 years of teaching. Resides in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.

Entering super-publicist Caroline Graham’s holiday party in Santa Monica last night was akin to navigating the human traffic-jam Blake Edwards conjured for Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It took a full forty minutes to cross Caroline’s cozy living room to greet a friend, and just as long in the other direction to reach the bar. Charles Windisch-Graetz, Caroline’s partner at C4 Global Communications, watched it all in wonder.

 L.A. creatives in attendance bustled with year-end news. They included:

• Jacqueline Bisset, actress, fresh off a London flight, having just finished work on writer/director Stephen Poliakoff’s latest drama for the BBC, “Dancing on the Edge.”

• Norman Pfeiffer, architect, a purveyor of award-winning theaters, chatting about his new performing arts center he’s designed for Chapman University in Orange County.

• Rona Sebastian, executive director of the Herb Alpert Foundation, describing how the arts-loving Alperts have increased their contribution, by $1.13 million, for a total of $2.37 million in scholarship aid at California State Summer School for the Arts.  

• Hunter-Drohojowska-Philp, author, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Arts Scene and the 1960s rushing her hubby, the musician, David Philp, lead singer for the Automatics, off to a Burbank band gig.

• Also clustered and carousing in Caroline’s cottage-like home were Martin Summers, art dealer, his wife, Ann Summers and daughter, the television  star Tara Summers of “Boston Legal” and “Ringer”; Jean Moore, widow of Irish author Brian Moore; John Walsh, ex-director of the Getty Museum and his wife, Jill Walsh; Lindsey Kozberg communications director of the RAND Corporation, and RAND Africa expert, Ed O’Connell. 

Like this? Read more:

• Party on, Faye McKenzie!
• Jacqueline Bisset meets Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev

The other evening, touring the Pacific Standard show at the L.A. Municipal Gallery on Olive Hill, I was caught off guard by a four-inch square print of this precious, heroic Julius Shulman photograph dating from 1936. It almost made me cry: the two caps, shape of building [it was then only years old], hills and the city stretching below ending in luminous light. Shulman’s “Looking over Griffith Observatory and Los Angeles from Mount Hollywood” burns a tiny hole in the wall of this retrospective on the role of the municipal art gallery in our city. If Pacific Standard Time is meant to deepen L.A.’s footprint in art history, with Shulman’s photo it succeeds.

What epic proportion he expresses in this shot. All of the possibility of L.A.

Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and The Watts Towers Arts Center | Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery | thru Feb 12

 Like this? Read more:

• My date with Julius Shulman
• Julius Shulman dies
• Happy 100th birthday, Julius Shulman

Learn how one woman reacts to this nonsense like an adult. Read it in the following item.