Artreview

Last year, when President and Mrs. Obama were selecting art for temporary White House display, I felt a twinge of regret that they were limited to work by American artists. At least two pictures by 51-year-old Belgian painter Luc Tuymans would offer a lot of contemplative substance hanging in the national residence. Both are now in his remarkable and cautionary traveling retrospective of some 70 paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "The Heritage VI" (1996) is a portrait of the late Joseph Milteer, a notorious Georgia white supremacist who figures in numerous conspiracy theories about the 1963 JFK assassination.

Last year, when President and Mrs. Obama were selecting art for temporary White House display, I felt a twinge of regret that they were limited to work by American artists. At least two pictures by 51-year-old Belgian painter Luc Tuymans would offer a lot of contemplative substance hanging in the national residence. Both are now in his remarkable and cautionary traveling retrospective of some 70 paintings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "The Heritage VI" (1996) is a portrait of the late Joseph Milteer, a notorious Georgia white supremacist who figures in numerous conspiracy theories about the 1963 JFK assassination.

Studio slang that expressed effusive approval in the Abstract Expressionist 1950s, whether swaggering or sentimental, became literal subject matter for numerous artists in the 1960s. Jasper Johns was a leading practitioner. For instance, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, his infamous "Painting With Two Balls" -- a pair of actual spheres inserted into a canvas vigorously brushed with gestural color -- lampooned the era's machismo posturing. Billy Al Bengston is another artist who took slang at its pictorial word.

Watching "Avatar," it's hard not to be struck by the utter strangeness of a fantastically complex high-tech movie that worships fervently at nature's mysterious altar. Digital primitivism is a peculiar faith, especially with 3-D glasses. Thirteen mostly recent, mostly large paintings by Mark Grotjahn at Blum & Poe knock that sort of faith upside the head. Emphatically handmade, with layer upon layer of pigment built up with brushes and palette knives on cardboard sheets affixed to canvas, they wear their secrets on their sleeve.

Drew Heitzler 's new triptych of three appropriated Hollywood films re-edited and transferred to video is an elaborate, highly stylized bit of historical theater. Think of it as mass-media kabuki. The piece was originally planned as part of the Focus series for the Museum of Contemporary Art, a show canceled in the wake of last year's fiscal crisis. In the second-floor gallery at Blum & Poe, the work is projected on a wide wall, its three parts layering the subtle shifts between the Beat Generation and the Pop era as the early 1960s unfolded.

The six solo gallery debuts in Los Angeles that I admired most this year confirm something about the new millennium that we pretty much take for granted. The city's cosmopolitanism and art's internationalism are here to stay. Two of the six artists were born in the United States. At L.A. Louver, Ben Jackel showed stoneware sculptures on militaristic themes that fuse brutality, fragility and play, while humility wrestled with grandiosity in Justin Hansch's witty paintings at Circus.

Sean Duffy ramps up his familiar garage-band aesthetic in a large new body of work that contains a few surprises. It's the final exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects' current space, before the gallery moves four blocks west in January. The show includes two of Duffy's patented "hybrid record-players," in which several turntables are cut apart and reassembled into one working machine. Put on a vinyl album by Dusty Springfield or, appropriately, the soundtrack to the 1961 Ingrid Bergman film "Goodbye Again," which tells of the entanglements of May-December romance, and the turntable does the rest.

In no particular order, these are the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year: Roger Kuntz: Kuntz (1926-75) was not a major artist, but his fusion of traditional American Scene painting with Pop-inflected L.A. freeway imagery got wide notice in the early 1960s. The Laguna Art Museum's "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction," the first full-scale retrospective of this artist, put those unusual paintings in revealing context. "Two Germanys": East met West in the bracing "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," and our understanding of Germany as a contemporary art powerhouse will never be the same.

Watching "Avatar," it's hard not to be struck by the utter strangeness of a fantastically complex high-tech movie that worships fervently at nature's mysterious altar. Digital primitivism is a peculiar faith, especially with 3-D glasses. Thirteen mostly recent, mostly large paintings by Mark Grotjahn at Blum & Poe knock that sort of faith upside the head. Emphatically handmade, with layer upon layer of pigment built up with brushes and palette knives on cardboard sheets affixed to canvas, they wear their secrets on their sleeve.

In a 1506 drawing made as a study for an altarpiece in Venice, German artist Albrecht Dürer placed the dark pupil of an angel's right eye smack in the compositional center of the sheet. The eye of a mystical, mythological creature is the visual and conceptual pivot around which everything else turns, and it corresponds with the human instrument of visual perception. Tom LaDuke is up to something similar in "A Gothic Plot," one of seven paintings and five sculptures, all recent, in a terrific show that inaugurates Angles Gallery's new home.

Studio slang that expressed effusive approval in the Abstract Expressionist 1950s, whether swaggering or sentimental, became literal subject matter for numerous artists in the 1960s. Jasper Johns was a leading practitioner. For instance, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, his infamous "Painting With Two Balls" -- a pair of actual spheres inserted into a canvas vigorously brushed with gestural color -- lampooned the era's machismo posturing. Billy Al Bengston is another artist who took slang at its pictorial word.

In a 1506 drawing made as a study for an altarpiece in Venice, German artist Albrecht Dürer placed the dark pupil of an angel's right eye smack in the compositional center of the sheet. The eye of a mystical, mythological creature is the visual and conceptual pivot around which everything else turns, and it corresponds with the human instrument of visual perception. Tom LaDuke is up to something similar in "A Gothic Plot," one of seven paintings and five sculptures, all recent, in a terrific show that inaugurates Angles Gallery's new home.

Drew Heitzler 's new triptych of three appropriated Hollywood films re-edited and transferred to video is an elaborate, highly stylized bit of historical theater. Think of it as mass-media kabuki. The piece was originally planned as part of the Focus series for the Museum of Contemporary Art, a show canceled in the wake of last year's fiscal crisis. In the second-floor gallery at Blum & Poe, the work is projected on a wide wall, its three parts layering the subtle shifts between the Beat Generation and the Pop era as the early 1960s unfolded.

The six solo gallery debuts in Los Angeles that I admired most this year confirm something about the new millennium that we pretty much take for granted. The city's cosmopolitanism and art's internationalism are here to stay. Two of the six artists were born in the United States. At L.A. Louver, Ben Jackel showed stoneware sculptures on militaristic themes that fuse brutality, fragility and play, while humility wrestled with grandiosity in Justin Hansch's witty paintings at Circus.

In no particular order, these are the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions I saw this year: Roger Kuntz: Kuntz (1926-75) was not a major artist, but his fusion of traditional American Scene painting with Pop-inflected L.A. freeway imagery got wide notice in the early 1960s. The Laguna Art Museum's "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction," the first full-scale retrospective of this artist, put those unusual paintings in revealing context. "Two Germanys": East met West in the bracing "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," and our understanding of Germany as a contemporary art powerhouse will never be the same.

Sean Duffy ramps up his familiar garage-band aesthetic in a large new body of work that contains a few surprises. It's the final exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects' current space, before the gallery moves four blocks west in January. The show includes two of Duffy's patented "hybrid record-players," in which several turntables are cut apart and reassembled into one working machine. Put on a vinyl album by Dusty Springfield or, appropriately, the soundtrack to the 1961 Ingrid Bergman film "Goodbye Again," which tells of the entanglements of May-December romance, and the turntable does the rest.

It is the art world's equivalent of the Forbes 100, and multimillionaire wheeler-dealer Larry Gagosian is at the top. ArtReview magazine's list of the top 100 movers and shakers on the international art scene, published Thursday, moved the New York-based art dealer and gallery owner up to first place from fourth last year. Gagosian, an L.A. native, represents the estate of Andy Warhol alongside living artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Serra.

British artist Damien Hirst, perhaps best known for a startling work featuring a tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, tops ArtReview's annual Power 100 List of the most influential people in the art world. On the highly subjective list, compiled by the London-based magazine for its November issue, Hirst jumped from last year's ranking of 78, reflecting a growing demand for his work worldwide, according to the ArtReview website. Investor Steven A. Cohen of Greenwich, Conn.

It is the art world's equivalent of the Forbes 100, and multimillionaire wheeler-dealer Larry Gagosian is at the top. ArtReview magazine's list of the top 100 movers and shakers on the international art scene, published Thursday, moved the New York-based art dealer and gallery owner up to first place from fourth last year. Gagosian, an L.A. native, represents the estate of Andy Warhol alongside living artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Serra.