Cubism

After a little coaxing and a couple of anise aperitifs at the bar of his port side Hotel des Templiers here, it is not hard to persuade Rene Pous to open the hotel safe and bring out his guest books. Pous, 65, is justifiably proud of the two leather-bound volumes.

Museum leaders are generally reluctant to see themselves engaged in competition, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York just lost a big one - and will lose its reputation as the city's only great destination for the Cubism of Picasso and Braque as well. Collector and former cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder confirmed Tuesday that he was giving his collection of 78 Cubist sculptures, paintings and drawings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art instead of MoMA, the modern art citadel on 53 rd Street.

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.

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.

Prints from Roy Lichtenstein's "Brushstroke Figure Series" are Pop art renderings of Abstract Expressionist paint swipes that wind up being faintly representational. They are fun loving, art-smart prints that toy with the language of mechanical Cubism, Surrealism and the comic strip while pushing hard on the technical end too. Each is a composite of lithograph, woodcut, screen print and encaustic. The multiple media give Lichtenstein's trademark screen print dots and cartoony brush strokes a genuine richness of surface that further stretches the work into a self parody about what looks smart and what looks like art. (Glenn-Dash Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to July 15.)

Museum leaders are generally reluctant to see themselves engaged in competition, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York just lost a big one - and will lose its reputation as the city's only great destination for the Cubism of Picasso and Braque as well. Collector and former cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder confirmed Tuesday that he was giving his collection of 78 Cubist sculptures, paintings and drawings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art instead of MoMA, the modern art citadel on 53 rd Street.

Today, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Temporary Contemporary, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new Robert O. Anderson Building are showing many of the world's finest artists and greatest masterpieces of modern and contemporary art. It seems unfortunate that Bob Kelemen and his buddy from New Jersey who profess "a very strong understanding and interest in the world of art" found these works neither "serious or noteworthy" (Calendar Letters,...

Donald Albrecht, an architect by profession with an obvious affection for the movies, has combined his two loves to bring us a meticulous examination of the period between 1920 and 1939, in which the glamour industry brought modern architecture to the attention of the world. His scholarly exposition of modern architecture's influence on film design is a book for students of both architecture and film, and for anyone who wonders about the forces that shaped those magical celluloid fantasies.

Maybe life really is as gentle as an old Hollywood family comedy. If it is, Richard Diebenkorn, who died Tuesday, is currently sitting on a celestial cloud reading laudatory obituaries to his life and art. He adjusts his glasses, pulls his nose and runs his hand through his dark hair. "This is lovely and well-meant," he'd think, "but so complimentary to me that, personally, I'm a bit embarrassed. All this business about my life is redundant, really.

When they converged in San Francisco about 45 years ago, Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican wanted nothing less than to be image makers of cosmic freedom. The purpose of art, they thought, was self-transcending awareness.

A few years back, I went to Mexico City to learn to cook at the apron strings of my step-grandmother, Josefina Figueras viuda de (widow of) Carreno. Josefina is one of those women -- you'll find them anywhere in the world where home cooking has not been superseded by "home meal replacement" -- who shuffles into the kitchen at dawn and stays there until well after she's served her family dinner.

The Purist movement in France is an episode in early 20th century Modern art that is less fully understood in its own right than vaguely acknowledged (when acknowledged at all) as having influenced subsequent important developments, especially in the field of design.

Artistic movements nearly always spring from a desire to throw out the old and bring in the new. That's certainly true of Purism, a post-World War I, Paris-based movement that promoted an aesthetic of refinement and clarification. The founders of Purism, artists Amedee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known by his pseudonym, Le Corbusier), titled their manifesto "Apres le cubism" ('After Cubism") and dismissed their Cubist predecessors' work as outdated decoration.

Los Angeles-based artist Kirk Saber is not one to accept the painting process at face value. As seen in his exhibition at Gallery One One One, Saber relies on an assortment of strategies to build up his art, only to tear it down and reinvent it. Essentially, he's using the techniques of deconstructivism in search of a new means of expression. By now, the will to deconstruct in contemporary art has been around long enough that its effects can seem gimmicky.

David Hockney's art masks deep feeling behind lighthearted surfaces. His current exhibition in the sleek new quarters of the L.A. Louver Gallery constitutes the most copious presentation of his work since his 1988 retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art. This is hardly a comparable event, but, with 50 pieces on view, it's not chopped liver, either.

But is it art? And does it taste good? The answer to both of these questions will be yes if Ventura artist Ron Walker has anything to do with it. From the guy who brought us "Basic Drawing for Klutzes" and "A Humorous Approach to Modern Art" comes an intriguing morsel called "The Taste of Art." From any other instructor one might assume by the course title that this class, being offered through the Ventura Recreation Department, is straightforward art appreciation.

First came "Jammy Man," the pajama-bottomed man in a Benson & Hedges cigarette ad a couple of years ago. No one had a clue as to what he was doing. Now comes the cube guy. Last week's Business Week featured an executive fashion spread, including a man shown in a $425 Henry Grethel trench coat holding a clear plastic cube covering his head. No price given for the accessory. Readers weren't the only ones perplexed.

If you love art and have an extra $20, dial 1-800-PM-CUBISM. That's the number to order the video of the recent "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art at a special price of $19.95. The hourlong video "New Ways of Seeing: Picasso, Braque and the Cubist Revolution" (Home Vision) includes more than 150 works illustrating the collaboration of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and the development of Cubism from 1907 to 1914.

Maybe life really is as gentle as an old Hollywood family comedy. If it is, Richard Diebenkorn, who died Tuesday, is currently sitting on a celestial cloud reading laudatory obituaries to his life and art. He adjusts his glasses, pulls his nose and runs his hand through his dark hair. "This is lovely and well-meant," he'd think, "but so complimentary to me that, personally, I'm a bit embarrassed. All this business about my life is redundant, really.

After a little coaxing and a couple of anise aperitifs at the bar of his port side Hotel des Templiers here, it is not hard to persuade Rene Pous to open the hotel safe and bring out his guest books. Pous, 65, is justifiably proud of the two leather-bound volumes.