Tag Archives: paintings

Hammer Museum

By | |
Comments Off on Hammer Museum

Hammer Museum
Westwood
August 1, 2015

Enough digression for now! Time for a blog post which is both about a museum AND located in Southern California. On this visit we took Margaret to the Hammer Museum. We have taken her there several times before, although not since we started keeping this blog. The Hammer has several things to recommend it: admission is free, the permanent collection includes some very nice pieces, and it is relatively close to Margaret’s home in the Valley, although traffic is usually bad on the West Side. We are not big fans of contemporary art, which is the Hammer’s focus, so we only visit there when there are exhibitions of particular interest to us.

Today we saw all three of the featured special exhibitions. The Afghan Carpet Project is displayed in a small gallery on the ground floor and consists of six handmade carpets, all designed by contemporary Los Angeles artists, then handmade by weavers in Afghanistan. That exhibit runs through September 27, 2015, and when it has closed the carpets will be sold and the proceeds given to the nonprofit organization Arzu Studio Hope, working in Afghanistan.

Hammer cat

We enjoyed the photography exhibition Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition, which runs through September 13, 2015. Meredith had seen a review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times, Making Photos, Not Taking Them. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the photographs featured are very beautiful and carefully composed, truly works of art in photographic media. Meredith was particularly taken by a large photo of a river landscape. Margaret was struck by a still life featuring a cat statuette and a vase of flowers. Bob liked a camera shop photo staged recently but based on an old snapshot of a camera store in the 1930s. The third special exhibition, Scorched Earth, features paintings and mixed media pieces by Mark Bradford. It runs through September 27, 2015.

We finished our visit with a swing through the permanent collection, which features traditional art, mainly paintings, from the Renaissance through the Impressionist era. Several signature pieces are currently not on exhibit, and a guard said they were on loan to other museums. The galleries have been rearranged so no obvious holes in the collection exist. There were plenty of nice pieces left for us to enjoy, including a large Eakins painting and a small Monet.

Hammer cafe

Partway through our visit we stopped to have lunch in the museum café. The menu was more extensive than we had recalled, and we all enjoyed our meals. Margaret had a BLT, Bob a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and Meredith salmon benedict. The café is located in the museum courtyard, and the setting is quite pleasant, shaded by Chinese elms. The menu prices were a little high, but not unusually so for a museum restaurant or for Westwood.

As noted above, museum admission is free. (Their slogan is “free for good.”) On Saturday and Sunday parking costs a flat $3 charge for all day; during the week parking costs $3 for 3 hours with validation by the museum. Wheelchair accessibility is generally good. The elevator is quick and serves all floors. However, doors into galleries are heavy and do not have automatic opening mechanisms. Staff and other patrons assisted us with those doors today.

Margaret finds the car to wheelchair transfers harder than before. She tires easily. We are hoping that physical therapy will help her build strength so she can stand longer and take more steps, and we are trying to encourage her.

Getty Center — Turner

By | |
Comments Off on Getty Center — Turner

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
March 8, 2015

We went to the Getty Center primarily to see the special exhibition J. M. W. Turner, Painting Set Free. We first stopped in the museum café, though, and had some sandwiches. It was a beautiful sunny and clear day, so we seated ourselves near the windows and had a good view of the gardens and the surrounding hills while we ate.

We then went to the Research Institute building on the Getty campus, to see a special exhibition of art associated with the First World War: World War I: War of Images, Images of War. There were propaganda images from all the major countries involved in the war, both Allies and Central Powers. They were also drawings by artists caught up in the war, illustrating the horrors of war and its aftermath. At the end of the exhibit short video clips were running, from silent movies made soon after the end of the war. Those videos recreate the battlefield, as imagined by filmmakers soon afterwards. That exhibition closes on April 19, 2015, and we had been planning to see it for quite a while, since we are both interested in history generally and the history of World War I in particular.

Getty_Turner_MB&RA

We then went on to the special exhibition building. The Turner exhibition focuses on the last decade and a half of his life. We both liked his nautical paintings, particularly Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, which is the iconic painting used in the museum’s poster for the exhibition. Also of interest were the series of watercolors he did while traveling in Europe. He used those as studies to show potential patrons, who could then commission a larger oil painting of the subject. The watercolors themselves were well done and capture the imagination although they are smaller and simpler than his oil paintings. Several of the large oil paintings in the gallery were unfinished. Turner painted the base and general background on those but had not added detail. Bob was very interested in his painting Hero of a Hundred Fights, showing an industrial forge and reworked to add a bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington being removed from its mold. The Turner exhibition will be at the Getty through May 24, 2015. There was an extensive review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times about two weeks before we went.

Margaret grew tired near the end of the exhibition and wanted to leave early, so Meredith took her out while Bob finished looking at paintings in the last gallery, then we swapped off, and Meredith went back into the exhibition. Bob and Margaret strolled around on the plaza level and enjoyed the view out over the pass looking south.

Admission to the Getty is free, but parking costs $15. Despite numerous signs telling people to pay at a machine before going back to the car, we managed to get stuck in the exit lane behind someone who failed to do so. After that minor delay we headed back to the Valley and met up with Kathleen, Meredith’s sister, for coffee.

Wheelchair access at the Getty is very good. There are several levels but the buildings mainly connect just at the plaza level, so one has to go up and down in elevators as you move from one building to another, and the elevators can be a bit slow.

Timken Museum

By | |
Comments Off on Timken Museum

Timken Museum of Art
Balboa Park, San Diego
February 15, 2015

First, let us say this is one of our most favorite museums! Located in the heart of Balboa Park in San Diego, the Timken is a small museum with an excellent art collection which offers free admission.

We have been here many times over the years; we often stop by when doing something else in Balboa Park. On this most recent visit, we hiked 4 miles round trip, from the northwest corner of the park around the Aerospace Museum and back to where we started. We stopped at the Timken partway through the walk.

Timken_Raphael

We made this visit to see a special exhibition: Raphael’s painting The Madonna of the Pinks, on loan from the National Gallery in London. It will be here through April 26, 2015. Later this year the Timken will be exhibiting another piece on loan, Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, from May 11 through September 11, 2015, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. In exchange the Timken is lending its prize possession, Rembrandt’s painting Saint Bartholomew, to the National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum.

The permanent collection spans nearly six centuries, from early Renaissance to late nineteenth century paintings, and includes pieces from Italy, the United States, France, and the Lowlands. The museum also houses an extensive collection of Russian icons. The guards are very pleasant, and they are also knowledgeable about the collection, more so than we have found at most museums.

Bob was particularly taken by an 1880 Eastman Johnson painting in the American gallery, The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island. Meredith enjoyed seeing an old favorite, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1557 painting Parable of the Sower. Many years ago our youngest daughter, then in grade school, realized as soon as she saw the painting what parable it illustrated, displaying her Scripture knowledge without prompting from us.

As noted above, admission to the Timken is free. Please do make whatever donation you can afford, though; fine art needs conserving, and like all museums the Timken needs funds to operate. Parking is free in Balboa Park. We did not have Margaret with us this time, but handicapped access seems adequate here. There is no café in the museum; there is a café nearby in the park and several other grab and go snack options.

LACMA-Delacroix

By | |
Comments Off on LACMA-Delacroix

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile
February 7, 2015

This visit fell on the first full weekend of February, so we took advantage of LACMA’s participation in the Bank of America Museums on Us program, and strolled around the art museum campus today. Last month we had noticed an article in the Los Angeles Times about an Eugene Delacroix painting on exhibit for a short time, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. The painting is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, France. It is an allegorical painting made in 1826, featuring a feminine figure symbolizing Greece mourning over those killed by the Turks during the unsuccessful defense of the port city of Missolonghi. The exhibition did a good job of explaining the symbolism in the painting itself and also showing other contemporary pieces to give context to the work.

LACMA Colombia

We also went through a special exhibit, A Journey through the Cauca Valley, featuring prehistoric Colombian ceramic pieces in the Art of the Americas building, and we strolled through part of the permanent collection in that building as well. Although the Delacroix exhibit was easy to find, the Colombian and one other small special exhibition (Louise Nevelson) that we looked for were not well marked, nor did the guards we spoke to know where they were, which seemed a bit odd. Even a docent wearing a red apron with large lettering that said “ASK ME” could not tell us where the Nevelson exhibition was. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant outing. Our hunt for the special exhibitions let us through various galleries in the permanent collection we might not have browsed otherwise, and we enjoyed many of the pieces we looked at along the way.

The museum is located at the west end of Hancock Park; the Page Museum, better known as the La Brea tar pits museum, is at the east end of the park. We parked at the east end of Hancock Park, in the lot that is actually associated with the Page Museum. That lot cost us $10, the weekend rate. There is also parking in a garage at the west end of the museum, which costs $12. We strolled through part of the park, stopping to listen to a busker play first a piccolo and then a banjo.

Admission to LACMA is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors. Wheelchair accessibility throughout the museum is good, although we had to make frequent use of elevators, because different parts of the campus are connected on different levels, and there is a fair amount of going up and down to get from one building to another.

We had lunch at Johnnie’s New York Pizzeria, just a short walk east of the museum on Wilshire. That is our go-to lunch destination when we visit a museum on Wilshire’s Museum Row. We enjoyed Johnnie’s, as always, and the staff recognized us. Margaret and Bob had their usual dishes there, turkey panini for her and chicken panini for him. Meredith tried and liked the Chicken Puttanesca.

We had a nice visit with Margaret, apart from a little upset at the beginning. Bob’s aunt Min writes Margaret frequently and encloses photos with her letters. When we visit, Margaret always likes to share the latest letter she has received from Min. She had some trouble finding it this time, and snapped at her caregiver. He is very patient and hunted the letter out without taking offense, and we went on our way. After that, Margaret was calm and fairly alert and verbal. She asked after our daughters and commented on a news article Meredith had sent her a couple of weeks ago, about the possible restoration of the Southwest Museum. Margaret also mentioned her recent visit with Jennifer, the independent geriatric care manager we have check in on Margaret monthly, and she proudly told us that she had beaten Jennifer at Scrabble. We suspect Jennifer may have let her win, but we had heard independently that Margaret had done quite well with word formation. All in all it was good to see Margaret functioning well on this visit.

Huntington Library

By | |
Comments Off on Huntington Library

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
San Marino
February 1, 2015

The two of us made this visit without Margaret. Pasadena and the adjacent area boast several excellent museums, but they are too far from the San Fernando Valley to make it easy to bring her here.

We were in Pasadena for the weekend volunteering as extras on the set of Phd Movie 2, the second movie based on Jorge Cham’s webcomic, Phd Comics. The first movie can be streamed here. We were in several scenes filmed Saturday, on the Cal Tech campus, but they did not need us for Sunday, so we headed to the Huntington right after church.

Huntington_entrance

The Huntington is an extensive facility and even though we were there all day – weekend hours are 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM – we could not see it all. We decided to focus mainly on art, skipping the library building and seeing only part of the gardens. We first toured the European art collection, which is housed in the building which used to be the Huntington family mansion. It has a particularly strong English collection, including such artists as Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, and Reynolds. The museum has a particularly well known Gainsborough piece, The Blue Boy, and across the gallery is a portrait by Lawrence of a young girl known as Pinkie. The bulk of the European collection dates from the 18th and 19th centuries.

We next went on to the American art building. It holds pieces representing all periods from colonial through modern, and it was interesting to look at the pieces that were contemporary with the European art we had seen in the prior building. In the special exhibit gallery in that building was Samuel F. B. Morse’s painting Gallery of the Louvre dating from 1831-1833. Best known as the inventor of the telegraph, Morse began his career as a painter. In this colossal work he shows a gallery within the Louvre, populated with nearly 40 selected paintings of his choosing, including a variety of both sacred and secular works, such as the Mona Lisa, Caravaggio’s Fortune Teller, and a Raphael Madonna and Child.

In both buildings the decorative arts were also represented, and there were contemporary furniture pieces displayed with the paintings and sculpture, particularly in the American collection. We particularly enjoyed a room in the American art building given over to Arts and Crafts pieces and the work of Greene & Greene.

We went on from the American art building to see a special exhibition in a third building, the Boone Gallery, which was displaying photographs by Bruce Davidson and Paul Caponigro. The exhibition displayed photographs they each took during visits to Britain and Ireland in the 1960s and later. The exhibition was quite extensive and really gave a sense of photography as an art form, with compelling photos both of locations and people.

Huntington_M

As we walked around the gardens from one building to another and briefly over to the Chinese garden at the far end of the property, we saw many families with small children. We had not seen small children in the art galleries (wise parents), but we can understand that the gardens would be a wonderful place to stroll with family on a nice day. We saw a number of beautiful flowers in bloom. The rose garden, of course, was dormant given the time of year, but must be spectacular when in bloom. We did go into the conservatory building and stroll through the rain forest and bog rooms, looking at various orchids and also carnivorous plants.

Although we did not have Margaret with us, we did look around to assess wheelchair accessibility, which generally seems quite good. The grounds are so extensive that it might be a challenge for a manual wheelchair user, just because of the distances, but the grounds are mostly flat or gently sloping. We were surprised to see that the elevator in the European art building was out of service, and if we had brought Margaret we would not have been able to take her up to the second floor. A guard told us that was a rare occurrence, however.

We picked up sandwiches in the café and ate at tables outdoors. We each chose smoked salmon with cream cheese on a bagel and had some fresh fruit on the side. The food was pricey but of good quality.

Admission is $23 for adults. There is no additional charge for parking.

Getty Center — Tapestries

By | |
Comments Off on Getty Center — Tapestries

Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
November 15, 2014

We took Margaret to see the special exhibition at the Getty, of tapestries and related paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. The tapestries are part of a larger set celebrating the Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. The tapestries were woven in Belgium and installed in the Convent of the Poor Clares in Madrid, an institution closely associated with the Habsburg monarchy. We first learned about the exhibition through a preview piece Joyful Weaving of Art in the Los Angeles Times. After it opened there was a longer review in the Times, Wonders Unfurl, as part of an article which also looked at a tapestry exhibit in New York.

Getty-Rubens

The tapestries are of monumental size. Next to them were paintings on oak panels that Rubens had made as models from which the weavers could work. It was interesting to note that the paintings are mirror images of the tapestries. The weavers were working from the back side of the tapestries and this reversal of the pattern image made their work easier. Although the colors have faded slightly with time, the tapestries still show remarkable shadings of detail.

The overall spirit of the series is triumphalist, very much in keeping with the Counter Reformation period in which they were made. They are devotional works and celebrate one of the central mysteries of Catholic Christianity, the sacrament of the Eucharist. Some panels are allegorical, such as the victory of Truth over Heresy. Other panels illustrate scriptural stories which Catholics see as prefiguring the Eucharist, such as the sacrifice offered by Melchizedek for Abraham, and the gathering of manna in the desert.

After touring the special exhibition we went over to another building to see a Rubens painting in the permanent collection, of the Caledonian boar hunt. We strolled through that gallery and looked at other period paintings, mainly by Flemish artists. Margaret enjoyed a Rembrandt self portrait in which the artist is laughing.

Admission to the museum is free, but parking costs $15. The parking system has been changed so that one pays on leaving, rather than entering.

We ate at the museum café. A nice feature is that there are half a dozen different stations, so one can select from a variety of choices. We each enjoyed Mexican food; Margaret had a fruit salad from the grab and go section.

We enjoyed the tapestries and related panels a great deal. Margaret was not particularly interested in them. Her preferences run more to historical and anthropological museums, and less toward art. After the museum visit she was very interested to hear about our trip to Ontario last week, where we met three of her cousins. They had asked to be remembered to her, and she enjoyed hearing about our dinner with them. After we left the Getty we met up with Kathleen for coffee and showed both Margaret and Kathleen our slides from Brampton and Toronto. We gave Margaret a framed photo of Meredith with the cousins which she was very pleased to have.