One of the two best things about the new Geffen Galleries at LACMA, opening to members on Sunday and to the general public on May 4, is the long-overdue prominence given to abundant art from Mexico and Central and South America – ancient, Colonial and Modern. (The other is the ample display of usually stored costumes and textiles – notably the exquisite Indonesian batiks – from the museum’s important holdings.) Among the standouts is an extraordinary 18th century document cabinet/writing desk from Paraguay, acquired in 2022 while LACMA was mostly closed, and just now having its public debut.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
The ravishing cabinet, attributed to the region’s indigenous Guarani people and Franciscan missionaries from Spain, is conventionally Colonial in its straightforward, rectilinear exterior style. Inside, though, it's a whole different story -- not unlike the way Spanish Colonial churches elaborately decorate the surfaces, both facades and interiors, of buildings constructed in simple geometric forms
The drawers and pull-out desk are lavishly decorated. An astounding profusion of animals and mythological symbols is enlivened by light-glinting mother-of-pearl – some of which even suggests speech balloons emanating from creatures’ mouths. Drawing details on the nacre have yet to be fully deciphered, but they appear to be chatting up a storm.
Across from the cabinet, a beautiful, earth-toned figurative abstraction by Spanish Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García gains a marvelous new dimension from the smart juxtaposition. The 1938 painting, “Construction with White Line,” has been in LACMA’s permanent collection for nearly a quarter-century.
The ugly installation design for "Frida & Diego: The Last Dream," a small exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, is a first-of-its-kind collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, where performances of the same name are now being presented. It demonstrates the fundamental error of a museum trying to foreground the life of an artist in a gallery display, rather than privileging the artist's art. The maladroit set design is intrusive.
Paintings and drawings by the two great artists hang on, or are framed by, wrinkly dark blue plastic tarps. The tarps line the walls, apparently meant to recall Mexico City's famous Casa Azul (Blue House), but they look like cheap shower curtains.
Other works hang on sturdy two-by-four wooden structures, loosely suggestive of a muralist's scaffold. The perhaps unintended -- but inescapable -- reference to architect Frank Gehry's many brilliant museum installation designs, made with similar workman's materials, does the inconsequential scaffold scheme no favors.
The clumsy centerpiece of one area stupefies. A big, blue, four-poster bed is pierced by a crimson 'tree of life' crossed with allusions to a branching web of blood vessels, all visually doubled beneath a mirrored ceiling. As a representation of Kahlo's familiar heart motifs (see "The Two Fridas," her first large-scale painting, not in the show) and the invalid artist's mirrored set-up for making self-portraits, could the installation be more corny?
What seems to work well on the stage -- the opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, has been generally well-received since its 2022 debut -- is a fiasco when elements are translated into an art museum's galleries, where sets do combat with the art. The modest show has some fine paintings and drawings, but they're overwhelmed by the tacky trappings. We're left with El Mal Sueño de Frida y Diego.
On a second visit to the great "Raphael: Sublime Poetry" exhibition at the Met Museum in NYC, I encountered this 1509-11 red chalk study I hadn't seen earlier (there are scores of drawings.) It's for the complex pinwheel composition of the Virgin Mary in the Alba Madonna tondo.
Raphael had asked an athletic male studio assistant to don a linen dress and pose as the Madonna. (And don't even think that it prefigures Bryon Noem's recently revealed dress-up kinks.) Remarkable.
At the Metropolitan Museum, "Raphael: Sublime Poetry" opens with lowly doggerel, describing the painter as "one of the greatest influencers of all time."
Oof.
Never mind. See the show anyway, now in previews, a knockout especially for the abundance of marvelous drawings, which lay out the extraordinary evolution of Raphael's artistic brilliance. (Side bonus: The works by Perugino, his first mentor, comprise a virtual show-within-the-show.)
This 2002 survey of visual art critics at general interest news publications in America could be updated for 2026, a quarter century on, with like two phone calls.
Marian Goodman, the legendary art dealer who died in Los Angeles last week at 97, published Robert Smithson’s wonderful and wordy multiple, “Torn Photograph from the Second Stop (Rubble). Second Mountain of 6 Stops on a Section,” right after he finished “Spiral Jetty” in Utah in 1970. That project, his most well-known, had him in the mountain West for a lengthy period, the first experience of it he ever had. The most famous contemporary images of the mountain West were of course photographs by Ansel Adams – camera aimed heavenward, lush, dramatic, Romantic, black-and-white, exclusive, exquisitely hand printed to emphasize a claimed status of “fine art” for a medium long regarded as second class.
So Smithson went in exactly the opposite direction: camera aimed downward, crude, mundane, pragmatic, in cruddy color, inclusive, cheap photolithographs machine produced. And he carefully tore the prints into mapping quadrants – north, east, south, west – a teardown. The American image, as the title says, is rubble, not “mountain majesties.” Fitting for the year that saw both the first Earth Day and the anti-war slaughter at Kent State. Nature’s decay is mirrored in culture’s collapse – entropy brilliantly embodied. Art as criticism.
'Rude Copper,' 2002, from "Banksy: The Prints," Roberto Campolucci-Bordi (Thames&Hudson).
Concise description of the Trump Administration's position toward Americans right now.
For Xmas I got myself 20/20 vision, thanks to two recent eye surgeries and intraocular lenses with extended depth of focus . Haven't had that for a couple of decades, but now I can read a book again without struggling.
1. Leonardo da Vinci, "Eye Anatomy," circa 1500
2. Ibn al-Haytham, "Book of Optics," 1021
3. Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Samuel Johnson (Blinking Sam)," 1775
On June 15, two days after Marines deployed to join National Guard troops in intimidating peaceful L.A. protesters against federal immigration raids, I stopped into the landmark U.S. Courthouse near City Hall. It’s a block from where soldiers would soon line up. I hadn’t been there for a while, but Trump’s General Services Administration had marked the massive, 1930s Moderne building for quick sale, with an estimated $60 million price tag. My aim was to revisit a marvelous mural in the lobby.
Edward Biberman’s 1938 “Los Angeles: Prehistoric and Spanish Colonial,” is big – 14 feet wide and more than eight feet high. In a sleek gilded frame, the canvas hangs just inside the front door. Not widely known, the federally commissioned New Deal-era oil painting is nonetheless one of the city’s primary artistic artifacts.
The center shows L.A.’s first surveyed map, an 1849 drawing by engineer and U.S. Army officer Edward Ord. (Ord and his West Point roommate, William Tecumseh Sherman, would later trap Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army at Appomattox.) The pueblo’s streets, lot lines, farms and churches are framed by two vignettes.
One depicts nature, the other culture. The two images hold the cartographic city in a visual embrace.
At left, Biberman painted a pair of vultures. Nature’s prehistoric predators perch on the gnarled limbs of a dead tree. The birds hunch in eager anticipation over saber tooth tigers and giant ground sloths, now long-extinct foes hungering for a fight.
On the right, Biberman painted a cultural mirror. These two predators are church and state.
Father Juan Crespi, the Catholic priest who chose the map’s colonial site, points toward heaven, as if the pick were divinely ordained. Felipe de Neve y Padilla, horseback-mounted Spanish governor of the Californias brandishing a sword, is accompanied by rifle-wielding conquistadors. Weapons overlap a cross, from which an L.A. banner hangs. Church and state loom over a naked, anonymous Tongva Indian, soon to be the genocidal target of extinction.
If the courthouse building gets sold, a GSA spokesperson told me, Biberman’s painting remains in its possession. Where it will be installed, however, is unknown.
