Galleries

While many local Latino artists aspire to recognition during the upcoming landmark art exhibit, "Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries," Francisco Cisneros and several other Mexican-born artists got the wrong kind of attention early Monday morning. Thieves with a connoisseur's eye for art broke into La Galeria Iguana in the 600 block of South San Pedro Street in Los Angeles' Skid Row and stole $20,000 worth of works by Cisneros and four other artists.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — A South African art gallery that displayed a controversial painting showing the country's president with his genitals exposed announced Tuesday that it was closing its doors temporarily because of threats. The decision came after vandals defaced the artwork earlier in the day. Lara Koseff, spokeswoman for the Goodman Gallery, said there had been numerous threats made against the gallery after its display of "The Spear," by Cape Town artist Brett Murray.

Reviews by David Pagel (D.P.) and Leah Ollman (L.O.). Compiled by Grace Krilanovich. Critics' Choices John Baldessari: Blue Line (Holbein) One of the most sharply focused shows of recent memory. It's also one of the most moving. Its two pieces, installed in three galleries, reveal a side of the 78-year-old artist often overshadowed by the irreverent wit and gee-whizzing of Baldessari's hilariously deadpan pictures. Mortality and memory take center stage while leaving plenty of room for humor and happenstance.

ART English musician Will Sergeant is famous for being the guitarist in the darkly melodic Liverpool rock band, Echo & the Bunnymen. Now he's turned his attention to art, opening his first major United States exhibition, "My Own Worst Enemy," at the Substrate Fine Art Gallery. Abstract paintings, collages and screen prints open a window on this brash entertainer's inner vision. Substrate Fine Art Gallery, 709 N. Ridgewood Place, L.A. 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Fri. Free. (323) 833-6459; facebook.com./substratefineartgallery.

If you think owning an art gallery means holding elegant Champagne receptions for sophisticated clients and fascinating artists every day, think again. Owning a fine art gallery is like running any other small business: It's risky, expensive and challenging. "Too many people go into this business because they think it's going to be fun," said Karl Borenstein, who owns a 7-year-old Santa Monica art gallery bearing his name.

The late British supermarket tycoon Simon Sainsbury left 18 paintings worth as much as $200 million to Tate Britain and the National Gallery in a bequest that the two galleries described as the most significant in memory. The paintings, including works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough and Francis Bacon, came from Sainsbury's private collection. He died last year at age 76. The Tate will receive 13 works and the National Gallery will receive five paintings.

Artists throughout the ages have faithfully preserved and even improved upon the fashions of each era, and today is no different. This month and next, three artists -- two photographers and a painter -- are staging showings of works that capture unique moments in the evolution of fashion.

In reference to Eli Broad's July 9 Counterpunch article, much of what he has to say is true. Yet, there is far more to collecting and showing art than he states. Public museums, private museums, foundations and private collectors buy and/or exhibit art for myriad reasons. Some do it as a public service or for the sheer love of art and some, I suspect, for tax benefits or ego justification. Then there are those who buy and sell for a profit. Yet collectively, very little art by younger artists is purchased or exhibited by those entities or individuals.

TWO years ago, when contemporary art dealers Anna Helwing, Tim Blum and Jeff Poe opened galleries on a forgettable strip of South La Cienega Boulevard, it wasn't easy to guess what they were thinking. The adjacent section of Culver City had sprouted design and architecture offices, and the civic center had been spiffed up considerably. No longer stuck in a time warp, circa 1950, the city was on the move. But who knew it would be the home of Southern California's next big visual arts scene?

L.A. artist Craig Stecyk has a reputation for making socially conscious art that's a little too weird for conventional art world transactions. His current project, an elaborate multi-media installation, titled "Northwest Passage" (referring to the migratory path that ducks follow on the Pacific Flyway), is an inquiry into power, victims and victimizers as symbolized by the precarious existence of our friend the duck.

WASHINGTON - Joan Miró, the great Spanish painter of dreams and symbols, lived through so many harrowing eras of the 20th century that critics believe his masterpieces surely reflect the tensions of political events in one way or another. But Miró's world of art was so special - with stars and moons, biomorphs and delightful dogs and sly monsters and wonderful color - that it has always been difficult to find much politics there. An exhibition that just arrived at the National Gallery of Art - "Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape" - makes a spirited attempt to find and explore the politics.

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

There is a simple plaque near the entrance of the Chateau Marmont hotel that reads: "Helmut Newton: 1920-2004. " The sign commemorates the death of the famous German photographer, who died at age 83 after crashing his car into a wall outside the hotel, but it's also a reminder of Newton's ties to L.A. By the end of his life he spent winters here and shot extensively in and around the Sunset Strip hotel. And throughout his career as a fashion photographer with fans in the art world, he idealized a blond, long-legged, athletic sort of female beauty that could alternately be described as Germanic or Californian.

While revelers shuffle into every Mexican restaurant and bar in town to shoot Patron and shovel in enchiladas this Saturday, the following alternatives - all happening May 5 - promise to be just as festive and maybe even more feliz ! Beastie Boy Mike D's Transmission LA: AV exhibition and festival at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary has been getting tons of buzz both for its vibrant art and for its music offerings (opening night with Santigold, last week's DJ set by Thom Yorke)

Kodak Gallery users, prepare to get better acquainted with Shutterfly. The Eastman Kodak company will probably be selling its online photo business Kodak Gallery to Shutterfly, a company that offers a similar suite of photo services including storage of pictures, sharing of pictures and, for you luddites, the printing of pictures, too. The $23.8-million deal was announced back in March, but because Kodak is currently in bankruptcy, other...

To write about this city is in some essential way to create it. Not in cement and steel, but in the imagination of its citizens, as well as in the minds of people who will never come here but who nevertheless carry an image of it in their heads. An image that is, in its way, as important as the concrete place where people live and sleep and look for places to park. So many people come to Los Angeles with an idea of the city, some apotheosis of the American Dream with palm trees plus a really nice car. Then they settle down into ordinary jobs and don't even understand the part of town they live in, let alone how it fits into the city as a whole or how the city started and grew.

The closing of Santa Ana's Legacy Art Gallery amounted to a blip on the city's cultural radar. But four months later, local artists -- many Latino -- are lamenting the demise of the gallery, which owner Margie Tabor Zuliani turned into a venue not only for Orange County's established artists but also for budding talent from local schools. "It leaves a big void," said muralist Emigdio Vasquez. "This was a special gallery because I think [Zuliani] was more inclusive.

The 5-year-old Works art gallery in the Crystal Court shopping mall will be closed by the start of next month, largely because of waning sales, gallery director Richard Iri said Wednesday. Over the past two years, sales have dropped about 40%, Iri said, attributing the decline to general economic doldrums and not to the level in Orange County of art collectors' sophistication.

Mary Corse has been making versions of the same painting since the 1960s: large canvases, divided into discrete geometric units, with a pale, shimmery surface. The examples on view at Ace Gallery, all created last year, are no exception. Still, it's a bit unfair to say that they are uniformly silvery white. Corse's paintings are not uniformly anything; they shift continuously in infinitesimal gradations as the viewer moves about the room. This is due to the glass microspheres the artist embeds in her paint, which capture the light in different ways depending on the angle of viewing.

ART Join sculptors Scott Hove and Joe Sorren for an opening reception at La Luz de Jesus gallery. Their two shows titled, "My Own Private Apocalypse," and "When Rain Comes," respectively, display work that captures the unique, rebellious spirits of both artists. La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. 8 to 11 p.m. Fri. Free. (323) 666-7667; http://www.laluzdejesus.com.