Mike Kelley tribute to open Saturday at MOCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art will present “A Tribute to Mike Kelley,” an exhibition dedicated to the work and legacy of the late contemporary artist, from Saturday to April 2.

The show will include 23 of Kelley’s works, plus others by John Altoon, Cody Choi, Douglas Huebler, William Leavitt, Marnie Weber and Johanna Went, donated to MOCA by Kelley. Also on display will be eight parts of Kelley’s 1982–83 performance and installation “Monkey Island,” as well as a series of ‘90s creations including the sculptural installation “Silver Ball.”

Kelley was found dead in his South Pasadena home Feb 1. His sudden death rocked the art community.

“Mike had a profound impact on the world’s perception of Los Angeles art and artists,” MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel said in a statement announcing the exhibition. “He was an intellectual force of nature, a real catalyst for a whole generation of artists.”

MOCA has 34 works by Kelley in its collection.

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-- Jamie Wetherbe

Photo: Mike Kelley. Credit: Associated Press

The Getty Museum has a new director but an old problem

Ten days ago some Australians were speculating in and out of print that countryman Timothy Potts, erstwhile director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas and now in that job at Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum, would take the helm at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales. In no time flat the Sydney job went to Michael Brand, another countryman and erstwhile director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Today, the Getty Trust announced that Potts would become director of its museum, filling a vacancy created by Brand's departure more than two years ago.

Confused? Don't be. That's why art museum directorships are often characterized as a game of musical chairs.

At the Getty, the game is not necessarily fun. With Potts now coming aboard (he starts work in September), four talented museum people will have occupied the director's office in the last 12 years. The turnover is not hard to explain. Alone among major art museums in the United States, the Getty's director reports to a paid president, not to a board of trustees.

Getty Museum hires Timothy Potts as new director

After years of leadership turmoil and turnover, the Getty Museum is ramping up for a new chapter. At an 11:30 staff meeting Tuesday, the relatively new Getty Trust head Jim Cuno announced his decision to hire Timothy Potts as his new museum director, starting Sept. 1.

The position has been vacant since the early 2010 departure of Michael Brand, who had reported to the late James Wood, who died in June 2010.  Cuno, who took over Wood’s position as the head of all Getty branches last fall, repeatedly said that hiring a new museum director — one with an “appetite” for big acquisitions — was his top priority.

A Sydney native who early on ran the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, Potts, 53, is currently the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England. He is best known in the U.S. for running the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1998 to 2007, which compares to the Getty Museum in the size of its acquisition budget. During his tenure at the Kimbell, he made several high-profile acquisitions, including Donatello, Michelozzo and Bernini sculptures.

Art review: 'Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone' at Hammer Museum

Alina Szapocznikow, who died at 46 in 1973, is a Polish sculptor little known outside her home country. Her work ranges from traditional Expressionist figures in plaster, bronze and cement to inventively grainy images that she called photo-sculptures. It has been garnering some attention in small gallery exhibitions in Europe and New York in just the last five years or so.

Now, a traveling retrospective has arrived at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Near as I can tell it is Szapocznikow's West Coast solo debut.

The show and its comprehensive catalog do an admirable job of introducing the development of her sculpture, which went a long way in a relatively brief period, while also sorting out her often harrowing life. "Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972" does not reveal a major artist; however, for American audiences it does significantly broaden the horizon of Eastern European art during an era still shrouded in Cold War mists and myths.

Valentine's Day ideas: 6 nights out for culture lovers

If you haven’t made plans for Valentine’s Day and you consider yourself the classy type who won’t resort to buying a six-pack of Bud and some 7-Eleven roses for your loved one, fear not -– choices still abound in the arts, performance, film and music world. Here are some suggestions for love with a degree of culture:

'Dirty Looks: Long Distance Love Affairs'

This New York-based roaming screening series plays matchmaker with East Coast and California-based queer experimental filmmakers currently working and the recent past. Featuring works by Cecilia Dogherty, Deanna Erdmann, Rhys Ernst, Glen Fogel, Mariah Garnett, Jonesy, Dani Leventhal, Charles Ludham, Narcissister, Luther Price and Michael Robinson. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. hammer.ucla.edu. 8 p.m. Tuesday. Free.

'Cyrano de Bergerac'

On the Knightsbridge Theatre’s production poster for this classic play, there’s a cheeky tagline: “He’s famous for his long… sword.” Oh, my! Actually, in Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano suffers for his grotesque nose but we recommend you make as many puns and double-entendres as your significant other can stand. Knightsbridge Theater, 1944 Riverside Drive, Los Angeles. (323) 667-0955. 8 p.m. Tuesday through March 18. $18-$20.

'Two Pianos, Four Hands'

Racy title, we know, but that's how Pasadena Symphony is selling its Live at Noor, a night of piano music in the sleek digs of Noor Restaurant. Hosts Yana Reznik and Esther Keel will tickle the ivorys and chat elegantly, all the while treating the audience to selections from Brahms, Bearber, Chopin and a closing sensual tango by Piazzola. Noor Restaurant, 260 E. Colorado Blvd. Pasadena. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. pasadenasymphony-pops.org. 

Jackie Kennedy papers reveal taste for fine art

Is it any surprise that Jacqueline Kennedy had sophisticated and exacting tastes when it came to fine arts? In case you needed proof, new papers released by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston show the extent to which the first lady oversaw White House renovations, including securing paintings and other works of art.

The documents, released Monday, contain thousands of pages revealing new details about the Kennedys' first years in office and preparations for Jacqueline Kennedy's famous televised White House tour in 1962, which aired 50 years ago on this date. Tom Putnam, director of the Kennedy Library, said in a statement that the papers show the range of the first lady's understanding of "art, history and public diplomacy."

As reported in the Washington Post, the papers show that Kennedy created the White House Historical Assn. and the Fine Arts Committee within a month of moving into the White House. The documents also show that she formed relationships with philanthropists and collectors of fine antiques, including Walter Annenberg, who donated a portrait of Benjamin Franklin to the White House.

The Franklin portrait was painted in 1767 by David Martin. It was described in a document as "the first major acquisition of art for the White House" under the then-new Kennedy administration.

Jacqueline Kennedy also managed the transfer of four Cezanne paintings to the White House that had been hanging in the National Gallery of Art.

Book review: 'The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography'

Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982
Daniell Cornell, ed.; Prestel pp.256; $60

A splashy picture book makes sense for a large-format volume on post-World War II photographs that include swimming pools.

With more than 200 images by nearly 50 artists, starting in the 1940s with Ruth Bernhard and ending with David Hockney's early 1980s multi-Polaroids, this handsomely printed catalog to a large Pacific Standard Time show at the Palm Springs Art Museum accomplishes that.

It fudges a bit by including a few seashore pictures; but together with the photographs' pleasurable indulgences, the five essays also have larger, smarter points to make.

Along with the artificial Eden represented by the swimming pool construction-boom and the emerging gay sub-theme in the arc from Bernhard's babes to Hockney's boys, camera-work underwent a simultaneous shift.

Sharp-focused Modernist purity gave way to postmodern multiplicity, and America's narrow domestic environment changed along with it.

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-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Mary Todd Lincoln painting deemed a fake by art experts

 

A portrait supposedly of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of Abraham Lincoln, that has hung in the Illinois governor's mansion for years has been deemed a fake by art experts.

James Cornelius, a curator at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, told the Chicago Tribune  that restoration work revealed that the real subject of the portrait is actually an anonymous woman and not Mary Todd Lincoln. The artist signature also appears to have been added after the painting was completed.

The Tribune reported that the painting was sold to the Lincoln family in the late 1920s under the pretext that it was a gift that Mary Lincoln planned to give to her husband before he was assassinated in 1865.

A report in the New York Times states that the offending artist, Ludwig Pflum, probably added details to an existing painting of an unknown woman to make the portrait appear to be of Mary Todd Lincoln. 

The portrait stayed in the Lincoln family's possession until Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith gave it to the Illinois historical library in 1976, according to the Tribune's report. The painting has hung in the governor's mansion in Springfield, Ill.

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-- David Ng

Photo: A detail of the painting that was believed to portray Mary Todd Lincoln. Credit: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

Dance review: 'Cleopatra, CEO' by Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre

 

The 51st floor penthouse suite at 515 S. Flower St., the site of Heidi Duckler’s latest dance-theater piece, “Cleopatra, CEO,” is a scenic design come true for the Los Angeles choreographer.

 

At “Cleopatra’s” premiere over the weekend, audiences were guided through dance-theater scenes spread across 30,000 square feet of marble, burnished wood, beige carpeting, exquisite cabinetry and executive boardrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, and one with a fireplace.

What more could a site-specific artist want than these rambling hallways and power chambers — once the opulent headquarters for oil corporation Atlantic Richfield — as settings for seduction, legislative mischief, war and suicide? 

PHOTOS: "Cleopatra, CEO"

For the most part, Duckler unleashed her imagination for a poetic riff on events from Cleopatra's life and mythology. Johanna Sapakie, a charismatic Cleopatra, climbed atop the furniture and upon the shoulders of her servants while yards and yards of fabric unfurled across the chamber. Greek attendants, with clipboards attached to their paddles, “rowed” their stationary boats (two stone secretary cubicles). The battle between Greeks and Romans for control of the ancient world was a mad dash through a hallway, while viewers pressed against the walls.

Michael Brand named new director of Art Gallery of NSW

Former Getty Museum director Michael Brand has surprised the art world yet again — this time by taking a job instead of leaving one. After a six-month global search, the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, Australia, announced Friday that Brand has been appointed the museum’s new director.

Brand will be the ninth person to assume the role in the gallery’s 120-year history when he steps into the position in the middle of this year, following Edmund Capon’s 33-year tenure.

The native of Australia is currently acting as a consultant to Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum and from 2005 to 2010 served as director of the Getty.

Brand shocked the art world when he left his coveted Getty post 10 months before his five-year contract was to expire. He told the Times in 2010 that leaving "is my decision,” but would not say why he was going: "I really don't want to get into the reasons for my resignation."

Getty officials pointed to a possible “personality clash” and strategic differences between Brand and former Getty Trust President and chief executive James N. Wood.

Down under, the Art Gallery of NSW recently hosted one if its most popular exhibits "First Emperor," featuring China’s long entombed terra-cotta warriors, and is currently showing the touring Picasso collection, 150 of the artist's works from the Musee National Picasso in Paris, which are rarely seen outside of France.

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-- Jamie Wetherbe

Photo: Michael Brand. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times