Art Institute

ELDON, Iowa - Beth Howard sits at her kitchen table on a Sunday morning and pulls back the curtain to peer at a group of rosy-cheeked youths taking pictures on her front lawn. They pair off to stand side by side in the pose familiar to millions - the dour farmer with a pitchfork, the unsmiling woman beside him in front of the white house. No one notices the woman in flannel pajamas sitting inside. "People seldom know that people live here, much less that there's someone watching them from the other side of the curtain," says Howard, who rents the house made famous in Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic.

Juan Gris, recipient of a Google Doodle on the 125th anniversary of his birth, was a Cubist painter who was a legend in his own right. But he seems to have rubbed another legend -- Pablo Picasso -- the wrong way. Gris was a minor player in the art world before he went to France. He was an engineering student in Madrid, took painting lessons and created humorous drawings for local newspapers. But in 1906, he left the country for a French tenement -- a "gloomy heap" that was in the midst of a transformation into an artists enclave.

Sculptor Abdul Hameed is proud of how his art form holds a mirror up to society, from Iraq's ancient civilization to its current times of pain and hope. Sculpture "is one of the means which reflect the reality of life," says the chief of the sculpture department at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts. "We can't cancel this art in our society. If we do so, we isolate ourselves from the world. " Sometimes, however, reflecting reality can be a hardship. During the Saddam Hussein years, only statues for — and of — Hussein were encouraged, Hameed remembers.

Along the 405 is L.A.'s version of a shining city on the hill -- a castle of culture in all its incarnations. The Getty Trust is more than its collections and museums; it's about worldwide research, preservation and philanthropy. Its new chief, James Cuno, blew in four months ago from the Windy City, where he headed the Art Institute of Chicago and, before that, Harvard's art museums. Cuno regards himself as something of a California kid, spending his teen years at Travis Air Force Base and later heading the Grunwald Center at UCLA.

George Kuchar was perhaps the most prolific and influential filmmaker most moviegoers have never heard of. With his twin brother, Mike — and later, alone — Kuchar made some of the earliest films in the 1960s explosion of underground movies. He often sent up the B-movies of his youth in irreverent parodies with equally campy titles. In the mid-1960s, Kuchar followed "Corruption of the Damned" with a work that came to be regarded as a classic of the alternative scene, " Hold Me While I'm Naked.

James Cuno Age: 60 Previous jobs: Director, Art Institute of Chicago, 2004-2011; director, Harvard University Art Museums, 1991-2003 Education:  Bachelor's degree,  Willamette University, 1973; master's, University of Oregon, 1978, and Harvard, 1980; Ph.D., Harvard, 1985 Recent book: "Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage," 2008

James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, was named president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, taking over the world's wealthiest arts organization, with a $5.3-billion endowment and $250-million annual budget, but one that has suffered management turnover in recent years. Cuno, 60, has led the Art Institute through its most ambitious expansion in its 130-year history. He will take over the vast Getty Trust, which consists not just of the museum — its most public face — but a grant-making foundation, a conservation institute and a scholarly institute.

The J. Paul Getty Trust has just announced that James Cuno will become its president and chief executive starting Aug. 1. A respected museum leader and scholar, Cuno has been the director of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2004, where he oversaw the completion of the museum's $280-million Modern wing, designed by Renzo Piano. Before that, he had served as director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and the director of the Harvard Art Museums. Cuno, an expert in 19th century French printmaking, was also director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA in the mid-1980s.

Inside the old mosaic-covered building housing Self Help Graphics & Art, the packing has begun ? of the angels and the devils, of the colorful skulls, of the masked lucha libre wrestlers. Thousands of prints collected over four decades are headed to a new home, as the East Los Angeles art center known for shaping the city's most successful Chicano artists ? Frank Romero, Patssi Valdez, Gronk ? prepares to leave its longtime home at East Cesar Chavez and North Gage avenues.

It was not your usual scene from "Keeping Up With the Kardashians. " In a crimson gown by Georges Hobeika, Kim Kardashian was touring the new Renzo Piano-designed Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After posing on the red carpet, she tweeted, "I'm at the most magnificent masquerade ball at the LACMA Museum!" to some 5 million followers. Welcome to gala season in the art world, the time when L.A.'s leading museums roll out red carpets and stage black-tie parties to raise money ?