Sassy Chahine print enters life of arts·meme
Feb
15
2017
A Sunday visit to the Los Angeles Fine Print Fair — seeking respite from the onslaught of Donald Trump — to attend a public conversation between gallerist Jack Rutberg and artist Ruth Weisberg, spawned a new relationship! A fateful encounter with a wonderful teensy engraving, reproduced above. That in turn makes me the proud owner ...
Docu-worthy: Yvonne Rainer in ‘Feelings Are Facts’
Oh jeez, in our nightmarish ‘new normal,’ an American existence in which mediocrity — so painful in a society in which political freedom enables the pursuit of excellence — rises to unimaginable levels; in which lies and blather pollute our air; in which values that can only be called contemptible predominate, into this setting enter ...
Klimt’s ‘Adele II’ rightly in private hands, says ‘Woman in Gold’ attorney 2
Feb
10
2017
News of media mogul Oprah Winfrey’s recent sale of Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II,” for a massive $150 million was the buzz of the art world this week. Bloch-Bauer died in 1925, and her Klimt paintings passed, against her wishes, to the Austrian state during the Nazi regime. Her descendants, led by her ...
Oprah Winfrey tires of Klimt masterpiece, sells to China
Feb
8
2017
Our dear (if somewhat fatigued) Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of two stellar portraits by artist Gustav Klimt, is again packing her suitcases … this time headed to China. One decade ago she made the rather massive move from the walls of the Belvedere Palace museum in Vienna, first to Los Angeles, then to New York ...
Pasadena Museum of California Art goes to the beach
Our winter is unusually wet and cold at the moment, making visits to our beaches prohibitive. The evocative exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, “In the Land of Sunshine: Imaging the California Coast Culture” (through February 19), will punch the emotional buttons of anyone who has sand in the shoes of their psyche. ...
A fond farewell to animator Hal Geer
Feb
6
2017
“Hal Geer, my great mentor at Warner Brothers Animation, has passed away at age 100,” writes Geer’s fellow animator Jack Enyart in a recent e-newsletter. As Enyart recalls, “I was in my 20s when Hal brought me into the department. On his desk, each time he faced me with his sly Bugs Bunny grin, rested ...
REVIEW: No)one. Art House presented by Saint Heron
Feb
4
2017
There was nowhere to park – zero spots – at Friday evening’s Immersive Dance Theater by No)One.Art House, an event sponsored by Saint Heron at an off-the-beaten track performance space in West Adams. And yet, scores popped up in the residential neighborhood, dropped by Uber or carpool. Once inside purchasing cocktails, the attendees, mostly ...
Review: Toba Khedoori, detailed draftswoman, at LACMA
If you love drawing, please run, don’t walk, to see LACMA’s exhibition of Toba Khedoori’s work through March 19. It covers two decades of the Los Angeles artist’s practice with 25 stunning works. Usually drawings would be dwarfed by the voluminous spaces of the BCAM building, but Khedoori’s manage to occupy the space beautifully. That ...
Exhibit spawns critical reassessment of West Coast-rooted pioneers of post-modern dance
The place to be in the dance world this past weekend was splendiforous Santa Barbara, California, for the opening of “Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” an exhibit at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Offering toasts, in photo above, to five years of research and writing, ...
‘Radical Bodies’ in California exhibit and on the streets of New York
Politics was not the intended focus of the day-long conference that opened “Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972,” an exhibit at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Art was. The hugely instructive exhibit unearths and traces the influence on American modern dance of three groundbreaking, bi-coastal dancer/choreographers. ...