Primitive wonderment by Eleanor Swordy at Moskowitz Bayse

Visual arts
I like these vivid oil paintings by French-born artist Eleanor Swordy soon to be showcased at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles. And I admit being intrigued by the show’s title, “Who Died?” Both the title and the imagery on display in this female artist’s work — the geometric shapes, the primary colors, the bulky human ...

Thank you for your art and for reading arts·meme, Burt Barr 1

Visual arts
At this time of sadness over the death of the great post-modern-dance choreographer, Trisha Brown, it stung to learn that Brown’s husband, video artist Burt Barr, too, passed away just last November. I met Barr when he accompanied Trisha Brown for her company’s performances at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the summer 2011.  At the ...

Hendrix gives free concert @ The Grammy Museum

Music · Visual arts
In the photo, the great Jimi Hendrix performs a free concert in the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, June 1967. This seminal image is among sixty now on view as the GRAMMY Museum celebrates one of the most pivotal years in music — and the photographer who captured it, in Jim Marshall’s 1967. Jim ...

Sassy Chahine print enters life of arts·meme

Visual arts
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 ...

Klimt’s ‘Adele II’ rightly in private hands, says ‘Woman in Gold’ attorney 2

Visual arts
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

Visual arts
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

Visual arts
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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. ...

Review: Toba Khedoori, detailed draftswoman, at LACMA

Visual arts
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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

Dance · Visual arts
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, ...

Los Angeles in freeze frame, courtesy of photographer Michael Grecco

Visual arts
Michael Grecco, an award-winning purveyor of commercial photography, fashion spreads and film direction is exhibiting, as part of LA’s month of photography, a new body of fine-art photography at the Leica Store LA. Printed larger than life, the viewer feels as though they can step into the photographs, and thus, into another realm into Los ...