Magritte “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” to hang @ LACMA

Visual arts
Just one incredible canvas of the approximately 47 works recently bequeathed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by collector A. Jerrold Perenchio is this incredible painting dating to 1935 by Belgian Surrealist artist, René Magritte. Fundamental to the work of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte is his play with pictorial reality, which is presented ...

How beautiful! French art bequeathed to LACMA

Architecture & Design · Visual arts
Love the work of French artist Pierre Bonnard and his inimitable ‘interior’ paintings, an example, “Apres le repas,” from 1925, above. That’s just one canvas of a huge trove of French and other European art bequeathed last November as a major gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) by the Los Angeles-based ...

Chris Burden’s elegaic floating sculpture @ LACMA

Visual arts
Beginning May 18, for four weeks, Chris Burden’s Ode to Santos Dumont a kinetic airship sculpture inspired by Brazilian-born pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, will be on view at LACMA. Burden, the noted conceptual/performance artist, completed his plans for the LACMA exhibit before he passed away May 10. Santos-Dumont, considered the father of aviation in France, flew ...

A mid-century moment for LACMA

Reviews · Visual arts
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Most everyone who has lived in Los Angeles any length of time has intersected with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since its 1965 inception, LACMA has been inextricably woven into the city’s cultural history. Maybe you remember the imbroglio over Ed Kienholz’s 1966 “Backseat Dodge” tableau that had the city council up on ...

Queen Liz gorgeously garbed in ‘Hollywood Costume’

Fashion · Film · Visual arts
The pinnacle (for this viewer), tour-de-force display of the Motion Picture Academy’s “Hollywood Costume,” now on view at LACMA’s May Company building, comes about mid-way through the multi-room exhibition and stretches across a long platform. “A Royal Romance” features a sumptuous swathe of historic Hollywood costumes that have dressed movie characters of British nobility — ...

Brilliant at ‘transforming people’ says Tippi Hedren of Edith Head

Fashion · Film
One of the marvelous interactive exhibits at the just-opened “Hollywood Costume” exhibition, a co-presentation by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Victoria & Albert Museum at LACMA’s May Company building, is a virtual conversation between three movie collaborators. Two, alas, are deceased, but one is still vibrantly alive. Director Alfred Hitchcock ...

Los Angeles (architecture) in the looking glass

Architecture & Design
An interesting architecture talk on tap this week at LACMA concerns seventies-era reflecting glass architecture as it developed in Los Angeles, and then became a corporate vernacular through the 1980s. In the 1960s and ’70s, Los Angeles was home to an era of experimentation and new advances in art and technology. The Light and Space ...

Find openness & clarity through art @ Honor Fraser Gallery

Visual arts
An intriguing and beautiful show that celebrates a cool-headed, fresh visual arts language dating back half a century opens this weekend at Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. Openness and Clarity pays tribute to the legacy of ‘Color Field’ artists who paved the way for Minimalism, Conceptual, and Pop art.  Assembling works rarely exhibited ...

Oh, Diane … DVF @ LACMA

Fashion
We admire the internationally acclaimed fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg — and occasionally mozey around her chic Melrose Avenue boutique perusing the imaginative and beautifully made clothing. Von Furstenberg first entered the fashion world in 1972 with a suitcase full of jersey dresses. Two years later, she created the wrap dress, which came to symbolize power and ...

Koehler on Cinema: Clips

Film
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African cinema is the most commonly overlooked in almost every corner of the world except France and Italy, where a combination of a tradition of cinephilia along with cultural and colonial ties make these movies a real presence. Here in the U.S., African movies are often treated as beyond exotic, which is ridiculous. The new ...