Southern California art exhibits
Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t frequent adult entertainment establishments. Not anymore. But whenever I drive from the airport to Balboa Park, while going up Laurel I sometimes give a friendly nod to Pure …
Not being a musician or performer, I have no idea what it’s like to be in a life that lurches from on-the-road lulls between gigs to the raw, over-the-top energy of performance. Like most of …
We usually think of the Greek gods as figures, as human embodiments, but to the Greek mind the gods were also, above all, states or conditions of being. Poseidon is god of the sea, yes, …
Photography is a great dumping ground of sentimental clichés. Lovebirds, autumn leaves, maternity-ward prune-faces, sublime mountain streams, birthday antics... Fill in the list. Grand illusion-maker that it is, and connoisseur of the uncanny, photography is …
By the 1880s, Renoir was well established and well to do. He’d already fought what he called les combats de l’impressionisme and triumphed as the impressionist with the most glamorous palette, the sunniest disposition, and …
Tough times, tightened belts, tighter budgets — from households and big industry to small businesses and major museums. No surprise that in a time of unstable markets, museums everywhere — threatened by leaner endowments, stiffer …
In the late 1640s and 1650s, the Netherlands’ prosperous Golden Age dimmed. Hundreds of businesses failed, and a major recession enfeebled the entire society. Even Rembrandt, renowned and rich, hit a wall, partly of his …
A few years ago, when the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown converted the Santa Fe Depot’s old baggage-claim area, it did what museums all over the country have been doing in recent years, from remote, …
One of Ansel Adams’s most familiar and famous images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, is the photographic equivalent of Aaron Copeland’s orchestral suite Appalachian Spring, John Ford’s movie Stagecoach, or Edward Hopper’s painting of a corner …
In 1810, a black Khoisan woman from South Africa named (by her slave-master) Saartjie Baartman was brought to London and became an entertainment sensation. Kept in a cage, she was exhibited seminude in sideshows and …
Photographs and words have been doing their rather stiff box-step dance since the beginning. In the 1840s, Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative-to-positive process, published The Pencil of Nature, a collection of photographs accompanied …
Asilk thread seams together the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, the tarot, feminism, and Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer whose impresario activities in the early 20th Century promoted American modernism and the careers of Charles Demuth, …
I’ve seen every cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and yet when I watched his new-absolutely-last-I-promise director’s cut, I’d never felt so pierced by the importance of photographs in the movie. The Terrell Corporation manufactures …
When the painter Asher Durand first journeyed to New York as a teenager in 1817, from his rural home in Essex County, New Jersey, the city was a knockabout place of 10,000 souls — without …
Why is it that the most intimate, mysterious performance photographs are of jazz musicians? Maybe because two things get exposed at once: the expressiveness of the body (Mingus knitting his brow, Charlie Parker sweating, Roy …
During off hours while working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange before the outbreak of the Great War, the young André Kertész took photographs and began to nurse ambitions about making it his …