Do artworks have an inner life? You might think so when you visit a new exhibition opening today at the Getty Center. The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display presents the life stories of four objects made to serve beauty and function, offering you the chance to examine them closely to understand how they [...]
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Tags: exhibition design, French art, furniture, gallery design, interactive features, iPad, porcelain
As you move through Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A.: Painting and Sculpture, closing this Sunday, the colors of the walls or the unusual angles of the wall panels might not be the first thing you notice. But Museum designers have plotted your journey through the galleries as meticulously as the curators have selected the [...]
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Tags: color, Crosscurrents, exhibition design, gallery design, interior design, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA
The current exhibition Gothic Grandeur abounds with images in the margin. These charming and often humorous additions, called marginalia (Latin for “things in the margins”), were introduced to manuscript illumination during the Gothic era. In the lower border of this French Gothic devotional book, three boys play a board game; in the illuminated initial in [...]
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Tags: games, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
One of my favorite details from the current exhibition Gothic Grandeur comes from a French psalter of the early 1200s. A hallmark of Gothic art was an increasing sensitivity to the natural world, which led not only to a new physical naturalism in images, but also to a new psychological realism. Here, a malicious demon [...]
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Tags: devils, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
On a Sunday, you might find artist Betye Saar at the Pasadena College flea market, scouting for treasures. The energetic 85-year-old is still an active hunter of offbeat and unusual objects, which she combines into sculptures filled with personal, spiritual, and political power. Saar sat down with us in the green room before she appeared [...]
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Tags: assemblage, Betye Saar, Hammer Museum, modern art, outsider art, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA, Q&A
On the opening page of the Abbey Bible, the first image we encounter is this roundel containing a scene of the Nativity of Christ. According to Christian tradition, late in her pregnancy Mary traveled with Joseph to Bethlehem for a census, where they were turned away from the inn because there was no room. In [...]
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Tags: Abbey Bible, Christianity, Christmas, Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, illuminated manuscripts, medieval art, Middle Ages, nativity
Much of what the world sees of L.A. is in movies or on TV. But a new exhibition opening today at the Getty Center offers an enticing glimpse of the city’s past through the lenses of photographers—some well known, some nearly unknown. The carefully selected group of images makes you look twice. In Focus: Los [...]
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Tags: Garry Winogrand, In Focus, L.A. art, Pacific Standard Time, photographs, PST, PSTinLA
Many know Lyonel Feininger as an accomplished painter, printmaker, and caricaturist whose work is forever linked to the Bauhaus movement. He was Walter Gropius’s first faculty appointment to the Weimar art school in 1919, and he helped shape an artistic movement that would influence artists for decades to come. Despite Feininger’s fame within the Bauhaus, [...]
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Tags: Andreas Feininger, Bauhaus, German art, Lyonel Feininger, modern art, photographs, T. Lux Feininger
The luxuriant locks sported by this medieval figure might seem to say more “Marilyn Monroe” than “Saint John.” Both he and the movie star sport hairstyles from the glamorous ‘40s—in the saint’s case, the 1340s. In the Middle Ages, it was thought that Saint John the Apostle wrote both the Gospel of John and the [...]
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Tags: Gothic art, Gothic Grandeur, hairstyles, illuminated manuscripts, Marilyn Monroe, medieval art, Middle Ages, The Manuscript Files
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Recently, we needed a little magic to get a sculpture in working order. Stephan von Huene’s Tap Dancer—which springs to life every half hour in the first room of our Crosscurrents exhibit—hadn’t danced since 2003, when it was on display in Germany for a von Huene retrospective. Problems with its electrical system had kept it [...]
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Tags: Crosscurrents, John Gaughan, magic, magician, Pacific Standard Time, PST, PSTinLA, sculpture conservation, Stephan von Huene, Tap Dancer
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