I didn’t want to read about the new LACMA buildings, the David Geffen Galleries, until I walked into the spaces myself. This wasn’t easy considering if you live in Los Angeles over the last 10+ years, and I have been here for nearly 5, the construction of Peter Zumthor’s curvaceous and rounded-edged museum space that slithers over Wilshire and back toward the older LACMA, has, well, slithered in and out of the news. It’s an ambitious art monument, a magnificent structure, a sprawling and unique place to walk in and out of the art history of the collection that challenges you to wander, and brings new surprises to the viewing experience. It will age well. It will test the curatorial teams to think a bit of the box. But at it’s best, the curations will be better and the audiences will appreciate a new way of thinking about how we show art. I loved it, and I assume many others will, too.
But if you ask a room of 100 people how a museum is to best serve a community, a city, you are probably going to get 100 different answers. The Unibrow was lucky in that we had a bit of sneak peek into the process of how some of collection for the new space was born, as Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Pearlman Collection President, Daniel Edelman discussed the gift of not only parts of the collection to LACMA this year, but the grand gift of Vincent van Gogh’s Tarascon Stagecoach, painted in 1888, (which is the museum’s first van Gogh), in our Issue 02. Collections at a museum of the stature of LACMA have to serve a multitude of audiences, from being central to the story of Los Angeles, but also to the patrons and international epicenter that the city is.
The David Geffen Galleries do both. It feels like an LA space. Light and space are abundant, the sun shines in, protected by the incredible chrome curtains of textile artist Reiko Sudo. The walls are concrete and feel historic, almost anchored in time. The pigment-painted rooms give the feel of something rather spiritual, a Rothko Chapel like peace. The experience can be overwhelming because, even if it doesn’t appear so driving under the building on Wilshire, the galleries are immense. But that takes time to settle in. The overwhelming part I felt was mostly because I wanted to see every inch, understand all the architect's choices, the curators’ focus, and the collection itself. And the collection, from Asawa to Matisse, Saar to Léger, looks good with a little concrete behind it. And of course, a new van Gogh.
“As the largest museum in the Western United States and one with a very diverse global collection, LACMA was missing a Van Gogh painting,” Govan told us. “And having a Van Gogh of such quality energizes the rest of the 150,000 works in the collection; it’s like putting an electric charge into the whole enterprise because it's a doorway people can come through.”
The city views will give you a moment of pause, give you a moment to think of the expense of LA and a new treasure that will certainly become an epicenter of the arts here. One thing that Govan said about the van Gogh stagecoach painting struck me on my tour. He said “The subject itself matters. Van Gogh painted many things—magical landscapes, night skies, interiors—but this stagecoach was painted while he was waiting for his friend, Paul Gauguin. There’s a sense of simpler times, of slowing down, when people traveled by stagecoach and not yet trains. In museums, pausing and reflecting is part of the message. This painting invites that pause.” It feels like he might have meant this new building, too. —Evan Pricco
