Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Established	1913
Location	5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California
Type	Encyclopedic
Director	Michael Govan
Website	http://www.lacma.org/

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also known as LACMA, is the official and world-renowned art museum of the County of Los Angeles, California, located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. The museum is adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits.

LACMA is the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago. Its holdings include more than 250,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. In addition to art exhibits, the museum features film and concert series throughout the year.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Directors 2 Collections 3 Acquisitions and Donors 4 References 5 External links

[edit] History

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a museum in 1961. Prior to this, LACMA was part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, founded in 1913 in Exposition Park near the University of Southern California. In 1965 the museum moved to a new Wilshire Boulevard complex as an independent, art-focused institution, the largest new museum to be built in the United States after the National Gallery of Art.

The museum was built in a style similar to Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Music Center and consisted of three buildings: the Ahmanson Building, the Bing Center, and the Lytton Gallery (renamed the Frances and Armand Hammer Building in 1968). The board selected LA architect William Pereira over the directors' recommendation of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the buildings.^[1] The LA Music Center and LACMA were concurrent large civic projects which vied for attention and donors in Los Angeles.

To house its growing collections of modern and contemporary art, and to provide more space for exhibitions, the museum hired the architectural firm of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates to design its Robert O. Anderson Building, which opened in 1986 (renamed the Art of the Americas Building in 2007).

The museum's Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by maverick architect Bruce Goff, opened in 1988, as did the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden of Rodin bronzes. In 1994, LACMA purchased the adjacent May Department Stores building, an impressive example of streamline moderne architecture designed by Albert C. Martin Sr. LACMA West increased the museums' size by 30 percent when the building opened in 1998.

In 2004, LACMA’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved plans to transform the museum, led by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano. The transformation consists of three phases. Phase I started in 2004 and was completed in February 2008. Phase III is scheduled to be completed toward the end of 2010.

On March 6, 2007, BP announced a $25 million donation to name the entry pavilion under construction as part of LACMA's renovation campaign the "BP Grand Entrance." Solar panels atop the pavilion attempt to cast BP as an environmental innovator. The $25 million gift matches Walt Disney Co.'s 1997 gift for Disney Hall as the biggest corporate donation to the arts in Southern California. Previously, in 2006, LACMA had announced that the new entrance would be called the "Lynda and Stewart Resnick Grand Entrance Pavilion," in honor of their $25 million gift.

The glass-encased entry pavilion is a key point in architect Renzo Piano's plan to unify LACMA's sprawling, often confusing layout of buildings. The BP Grand Entrance and the adjacent Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) comprise the $191 million (originally $150 million) first phase of the three-part expansion and renovation campaign. BCAM is named for Eli & Edythe Broad, who gave $60 million to LACMA's campaign; Mr. Broad also serves on LACMA's Board of Directors.^[2] BCAM opened on February 16, 2008.

(An earlier plan for LACMA's transformation by architect Rem Koolhaas proposed razing all the current buildings and constructing an entirely new museum.^[3]) Phase I of the Renzo Piano renovations required demolishing the parking structure on Ogden Avenue and with it LACMA-commissioned graffiti art by street artists Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee.^[4]

On February 2, 2007, LACMA's director, Michael Govan, with artist Jeff Koons, revealed plans for a massive 161-foot-tall sculpture featuring an operational 1940s locomotive suspended from a crane. The sculpture would be located at the entrance on Wilshire Boulevard, between the Ahmanson Building and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.^[5][6]

[edit] Directors

• Dr. Richard (Ric) F. Brown - 1961 - 1966^[1]
• Kenneth Donahue 1966 - 1979
• Earl A. Powell III - 1980 - 1992
• Michael E. Shapiro - 1992 - 1993
• Graham W. J. Beal - 1996 - 1999
• Andrea L. Rich - 1999 - 2005
• Michael Govan - 2006 - present

[edit] Collections

LACMA's more than 250,000 objects are divided among its numerous departments by region, media, and time period and are spread amongst the various museum buildings. ^[7]

The Modern Art collection is displayed in the Ahmanson Building which was renovated in 2008 to have a new entrance featuring a large staircase, conceived as a gathering place similar to Rome's Spanish Steps. Filling the atrium at the base of the staircase is Tony Smith's massive scuplture Smoke (1967).^[8] The modern collection on the plaza level displays works from 1900 to the 1970s, largely populated by the Janice and Henry Lazaroff collection. The plaza level galleries house African art and a gallery highlighting the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. The second floor of the Ahmanson Building has Greek and Roman Art galleries.

The Art of the Americas Building has American, Latin American and pre-Columbian collections displayed on the second floor and temporary exhibition space on the first floor. The Hammer Building houses the Korean and Chinese collections.^[8] Los Angeles sculptor Robert Graham created the towering, bronze Retrospective Column (1981, cast in 1986) for the entrance of the Art of the Americas Building.

The Pavilion for Japanese Art displays the Shin'enkan collection donated by Joe D. Price.

The Contemporary Art collection is displayed in the 60,000 square foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), opened on February 16, 2008. BCAM's inaugural exhibition featured 176 works by 28 artists of postwar Modern art from the late 1950's to the present. All but 30 of the works initially displayed came from the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad.^[9]

Surrounding the BCAM building the museum courtyard is a 100 tree palm tree garden, designed by artist Robert Irwin and landscape architect Paul Comstock. Some of the 30 varieties of palms are in the ground, but most are in large wooden boxes above ground.^[10][9] Directly in front of the new entrance to LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard is Chris Burden's Urban Light (2008), an orderly, multi-tiered installation of 202 antique cast-iron lampposts from various cities in and around the Los Angeles area. The lamp posts are functional, turn on in the evening, and are powered by solar panels on the roof of the BP Grand Entrance.

Originally Jeff Koons Tulips sculpture was inside the Grand Entrance building and the Fire Truck was outside in the courtyard. Both sculptures were removed after being on display for 3 months due to unexpected damage from patrons and wear.

External links to LACMA's collections.^[11]

• African Art
• Art of the Ancient Americas
• Art of the United States
• Arts of the Middle East (including Islamic Art)
• Chinese and Korean Art
• Contemporary Art
• Costume and Textiles
• Decorative Arts and Design
• Egyptian Art
• European Painting and Sculpture
• The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies
• Japanese Art
• Latin American Art
• Modern Art
• Photography
• Prints and Drawings
• South and Southeast Asian Art

[edit] Acquisitions and Donors

On January 8, 2008 Eli Broad revealed plans to retain permanent control of his roughly 2,000 works of Modern and contemporary art in the independent Broad Art Foundation that makes loans to museums rather than give any of the art away. Mr. Broad, as recently as a year prior, had said that he planned to give most of his holdings to one or several museums, one assumed to be LACMA.^[12]

Broad, vice chairman of LACMA's board of directors, financed the $56-million Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at LACMA, as well as $10 million more to buy two artworks for the inside. BCAM will display 220 pieces borrowed from Broad and his Broad Art Foundation when it opens in February 2008. LACMA was criticized in 2001 for hosting a major exhibition of Mr. Broad’s collection without having secured a promised gift of the works, an act that is prohibited at many prominent art institutions because it can increase the market value of the collection.^[13]

In December 2007, Janice and Henri Lazarof gave LACMA 130 mostly Modernist works estimated to be worth more than $100 million.^[13] The collection includes 20 works by Picasso, watercolors and paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and a considerable number of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore. William de Kooning, Joan Miró, Louise Nevelson, Archipenko and Arp.^[14][15]

In 2001 the museum lost out on the collection of Nathan Smooke, a former museum trustee and industrial real-estate developer whose heirs sold much of his collection rather than donating it.

LACMA boasts one of the largest collections of Latin American art due to the generous donation of more than 2,000 works of art by Bernard Lewin and his wife Edith Lewin in 1996.

In the early 1970s Norton Simon, the Hunt's food magnate, donated his collection the Pasadena Art Museum, forming the Norton Simon Museum, after making some indication of donating the work to LACMA.^[13][12]

Armand Hammer was a LACMA board member for nearly 17 years, beginning in 1968, and during this time continued to announce the museum would inherit his whole collection. Hammer's collection included works from Van Gogh, Sargent, Eakins, Gustave Moreau and Chardin. When LACMA was offered a collection of works by Honore Daumier, Hammer bought the works on the promise that he would give them to the museum. To LACMA's surprise, Hammer instead founded the Hammer Museum, built adjacent to Occidental's headquarters in Los Angeles.^[16]

From 1946 to his death in 1951, William Randolph Hearst was LACMA's largest benefactor. He remains the largest donor to the museum in number of objects. His donations formed the museums collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, medieval and early Renaissance sculptures and large parts of the European decorative arts collection.^[1]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Official Website
• LACMA's online collection: Access to more than 60,000 artworks from the museum's permanent collection. You can also view numerous special exhibitions here that are only available online.

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