If it's Monday it must be LACMA

I roamed over to the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts to see what's new.  I found Stephen Prina's installation "As He Remembered It."  It is made up of copies of built-ins for houses designed by architect R.M Schindler.  The houses were later demolished but he found the surviving plans and photographs and he had copies made of the unit furniture which Schindler designed to be arranged to follow the lines of the rooms.  These 28 objects that Prina painted pink are staged in a grid pattern.

Then I strolled over to see the plans for the new LACMA East called "Black Flower"...if the $650 million is raised to raze the current 1960's and '90's buildings and build a new "organic shape, like a water lily, floating and open with 360 degrees of glass" designed by Peter Zumthor.  He writes:  "intended to have a unique urbanistic energy..stands apart from other buildings yet is integrated into its environment."  "A huge roof covered in solar tiles litterally soaks up the energy of the California sun....The grand scale of the organic whole is assembled from smaller pieces within, providing a village of experiences."  We'll see.

Then I went into the Hans Richter:  Encounters exhibit.  Hans was born in Germany in 1888 in Berlin and lived with his rich parents.  He traveled around Europe with a home in Switzerland and moved to the U.S. in 1940 after escaping the Nazi's in 1933.  He became a U.S. citizen and died in his Switzerland home in 1976.  This retrospective of his works include paintings, films and writings.  He collaborated with creative folks such as Max Ernst, Marcel Cuchamp, Fernand Leger and Man Ray.  The exhibit presents 150 works and some works of his colleagues.  His styles  ranged from expressionism, cubism, dadism, contructivism, surrealism and New American Cinema movement.  Several films are being shown plus many I Pads display his creative film work.

"Workers," 1911  "As a young artist, Richter was inspired by French Post Impressionist Paul Cezanne to experiment with movement and the fragmentation of forms...he transformed the human body into rhythmic forms, abandening convention spatial laws for a unified surface.  As Richter increasingly focused on such rhytghmic movements, each captured in a specific moment, the paintings' subjects became less and less important."

"Skating," 1915

"Visionary Self-Portrait,"1917

"Visionary Portrait," 1917

"Blue Man," 1917

"Landscape," 1912 by Otto van Ress, Dutch 1884-1957 and Adya von Ress, Dutch, 1876-1959

"Hourglass," 1914 by Adya van Rees, Silk embroadery on linen

"Poster for Dada Movement,"1918 by Marcel Janco, Romanian 1895-1884.  Dadism orginated in Zurich in 1916 among a group of artists who fiercely rejected the political beliefs, cultural conformity, and capitalism values they held responsible for the disaster of World War I.  Dada may just be a nonsense word that captured the movement's spirit of subversive irreverence.  The movement largely dissipated by 1924 but many went on to Surrealism and later Pop art...punk rock and countercultural movements we see today.

Wall of films

"Liberation of Paris," 1945 by Richter

"The Three Cypresses," 1951 by Max Ernst, German 1891-1976

"From Major to Minor," 1960 by Richter

"Neither Hand..." 1955-56

"Pro-Camera Variations," 1970's by Richter  (It is interesting that like Matisse he was making cut-outs and aranging them during the last years of his life.)