Spring art preview: Robert Adams at LACMA, Aphrodite at Getty Villa

After six months of Southern California museum shows dominated by Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-sponsored studies of L.A.'s post-World War II emergence as a major international production center for new art, the spring season turns in several other directions.

Aphrodite meets Quetzalcoatal, to name just two:

Natalie Bookchin: Now he's out in public and everyone can see

The stark and evolving differences between corporate-owned commercial television and personally created online video should get thrown into high relief in an 18-channel installation by Natalie Bookchin, provocatively titled "Now he's out in public and everyone can see." The subject of the work, developed over the course of more than two years, is publicly reported scandal involving African American men.

Bookchin, who teaches in the photography and media program at CalArts, has designed a montage of independently produced online video diaries to scrutinize similarities, distinctions and relationships among individual interpretations of those news events. Social media is creating a new public platform for documentary television. The installation, especially timely during a presidential election year, aims to add another dimension to the mix.

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 957-1777. March 8-April 15. Closed Mon. and Tue. Free. www.welcometolace.org
 

Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs

Forty years of pictures by Robert Adams, a former English literature professor in Colorado who didn't devote his primary energies to photography until he was 30, will survey his long-term engagement with the radically changing Western landscape. Between 1968 and 1971, Adams photographed suburban housing and shopping developments being newly built in the region where the Great Plains rise up into the Rockies, which he published as a book titled "The New West."

MOCA chooses a questionable guest curator for a new exhibition

If an art museum organized an exhibition of paintings and engaged a gallery owner as guest curator, the conflict of interest would be obvious. Even if the art dealer didn't represent any of the painters in the show, the perception of inappropriate commercial entanglements would be the same.

So, what if an art museum opens an exhibition of vintage clothing whose guest curator owns a vintage clothing store? Does the same conflict arise?

Of course it does. But, disappointingly, that didn't stop the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Art review: 'Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series' at OCMA

"Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series" opened Sunday at the Orange County Museum of Art, nearly three years after it was originally planned to debut but was nearly derailed by the national economic crisis. The wait might have been a lucky break. Now, it turns out to be one of those odd and unexpectedly rewarding  museum exhibitions that you might have wanted to see but that you didn't know you really had to see -- until you see it.

Let me explain.

The large abstract paintings Diebenkorn made in his Santa Monica studio between 1967 and 1985, in which translucent veils of vaporous color seem suspended in shifting space from a tremulous linear scaffolding, have always seemed like the culmination of something. On a grand scale, they're the end of a century-long wrestling match between color and line as the dual engines driving Modern painting.

For American art in its ambitious, often aggressive postwar efflorescence, they bring a commitment to abstraction to a virtuoso climax. For the artist, who died in 1993 at age 70, they enfold into one grand and glorious whole everything learned in earlier nuanced series, which shifted back and forth between Abstract Expressionist and figurative canvases.

Foes of Eisenhower Memorial design hit snag

In the aftermath of President George W. Bush's disastrous escapade in Iraq, the right-wing clamor for a triumphalist monument to a wartime Republican president has gotten loud. But on Tuesday, the mounting political attack on architect Frank Gehry's more modest design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington slammed head-on into a wall.

The Associated Press obtained documents showing that David Eisenhower, the late president's grandson and the family representative on the memorial commission, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the project for a decade.

The younger Eisenhower joined the memorial commission in 2001. The AP reported that he "played a central role in selecting Gehry as the lead architect, according to the documents. David Eisenhower was the only person to serve on both the design jury and an evaluation board that recommended Gehry as the top choice to the full commission. When Gehry's selection was approved, David Eisenhower praised the 'integrity and excellence' of the selection process, according to the minutes."

Last July, Gehry told the commission that he was considering inclusion of a sculpture of the 34th president as a boy and metal "tapestry" images depicting Eisenhower's childhood home in Abilene, Kan., "bringing a representation of America's heartland directly into the heart of the nation's capital." Juxtaposed with sculptural reliefs of then-Gen. Eisenhower at D-day and later as president, the design would extol his role as leader of an army of ordinary citizen-soldiers who achieved greatness in World War II.

Commission member Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) offered a motion to support Gehry's concept, the AP reported, while "David Eisenhower seconded it, and it passed unanimously."

Ceramics artist Kenneth Price dies at 77

Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture since the 1960s, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77.
 
Price had struggled with tongue and throat cancer for several years, his food intake restricted to liquids supplied through a feeding tube. Despite his infirmity, he continued to produce challenging new work and to mount critically acclaimed exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.

At the time of his death Price had completed preparations for a 50-year retrospective, scheduled to open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall in an exhibition designed by architect Frank Gehry. The show will travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A full obituary will follow on latimes.com/obits.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photo: Kenneth Price (1935-2012). Credit: LA Louver

 

Eisenhower Memorial opponents' McCarthyite attack

The nostalgia patrol has been out in full force in recent weeks, shrieking like Hecuba over designs for the planned memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States, to be built just off the National Mall in Washington near the Air and Space Museum.

The 4-acre project by Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry was chosen by the U.S. Fine Arts Commission in 2010, and its general concept of a tree-filled park lined on three sides with woven metal-mesh "tapestries" hung from large stone pillars was approved last fall. It's set to go before the National Capital Planning Commission in the next several weeks.

What's the complaint? Gehry's design is contemporary, not Neoclassical.

Seriously. Welcome to the 21st century.

Having seen only photographs of the model, I'll let others weigh in on the full design. (Philip Kennicott's enthusiastic, Dec. 15 Washington Post review is the most informed.) Some members of the Eisenhower family have expressed concerns, but it's worth noting that the late president's role as family man is not why he's getting a national monument. The opinions of kin are no weightier than any other  American's.

Yet the loudest -- and most troubling -- noise is coming from something called the National Civic Art Society, a club founded in 2002 to wage culture war. (In Washington you can call yourself "national" and a distracted public might be duped into thinking it means something.) Never mind that the last faux-Neoclassical monument built on the Mall -- the ugly 2004 World War II Memorial -- is imperial kitsch worthy of a totalitarian state. This fusty guild wants more.

How determined are they? In a tinpot version of the McCarthyism that bedeviled Eisenhower's own administration, the Civic Art Society is willing to smear people to get it.

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.

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.

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

Art reviews: 'Common Ground,' AMOCA; 'Clay's Tectonic Shift,' Scripps

The soul-shattering shock of World War II rattled American art to its core. From the ashes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, humanity's wartime collapse into barbarism propelled a roiling wave of artistic urges aimed at starting over. Two absorbing museum shows lay out a critical part of the story.

One is a sprawling survey that beautifully articulates the breadth and diversity of postwar studio ceramics, charting how they came to be. The other is more closely focused, homing in on the potent artistic revolution that grew from the larger context. Together they unfold one of the most distinctive tributaries of American art being chronicled in the raft of postwar Southern California exhibitions presented under the Getty-sponsored umbrella of Pacific Standard Time.

Perhaps nothing better expresses the prescient yearning for renewal than a 1944 Surrealist painting by Russian immigrant Mark Rothko. "Slow Swirl By the Edge of the Sea" is a hallucinatory vision of spindly, archaic forms rising up from the vapors of the primordial ooze. Painting was powerful, a sophisticated visual language in which those fundamental urges could be spoken. Yet it had its limitations. Painting wasn't omnipresent at human society's inception.

Pottery, on the other hand, was. Pottery was global in its origins, the material of the earth shaped by prehistoric humankind from the Red Sea to the Yellow River to the Rio Grande. And pottery as a primary postwar vehicle flourished nowhere more than in Los Angeles.