Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto's lush photo portraits of Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, Voltaire and Jesus are too good to be true. The photos, all black and white, are crisp, clear and larger than life. But most of Sugimoto's carefully posed subjects were dead, of course, long before the age of photography. In "Sugimoto: Portraits," on view at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo through Nov. 10, Sugimoto succeeds in melting perceptions of reality.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's lush photo portraits of Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, Voltaire and Jesus are too good to be true. The photos, all black and white, are crisp, clear and larger than life. But most of Sugimoto's carefully posed subjects were dead, of course, long before the age of photography. In "Sugimoto: Portraits," on view at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo through Nov. 10, Sugimoto succeeds in melting perceptions of reality.

One man's serenity is another man's boredom, and no one's photographs bring this fact into focus more clearly than Hiroshi Sugimoto's modestly scaled seascapes. If you're in the right mood, the 49-year-old photographer's intentionally undramatic prints may take you on tranquil escapes from the hubbub of modern life. But if you're in the wrong mood, then none of the 23 black-and-white pictures at Angles Gallery will even cause you to pause.

One man's serenity is another man's boredom, and no one's photographs bring this fact into focus more clearly than Hiroshi Sugimoto's modestly scaled seascapes. If you're in the right mood, the 49-year-old photographer's intentionally undramatic prints may take you on tranquil escapes from the hubbub of modern life. But if you're in the wrong mood, then none of the 23 black-and-white pictures at Angles Gallery will even cause you to pause.

Our great oceans are differently named but all run together in a vast unity covering nearly three quarters of the Earth's surface. No wonder they fascinate us as the elemental womb mother of the planet. Hiroshi Sugimoto spent the last 14 years wandering the globe taking pictures of all this brine. He's looked at it as the Caribbean Sea from a bluff in Jamaica, at the English Channel from Fecamp, at the Arctic Ocean from Nordkapp. Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 and works out of New York.

Gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel is making his hometown even more of a destination for photography, donating 26 works by Diane Arbus to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The 26 photos come from a series Arbus made between 1969 and 1971 that document mentally ill patients at different institutions. They will bring SFMOMA's total count of Arbus images to 64, making it the West Coast's largest repository of her works. The museum also announced the receipt of two other major gifts.

"The Black Mirror," an unusually fine group show, inaugurates Diane Rosenstein's handsome new Hollywood space. A taut and provocative visual essay, the show gathers 40 works by 21 mostly contemporary artists, including James Welling, who co-curated with Rosenstein. Process is key here, and few of the paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are conventionally made. In Farrah Karapetian's "Ruin 1: The Stones in the Wall," cut-out photograms of ice -- physical traces of a substance translucent and transient -- are collaged to suggest the building blocks of a dense and durable wall.

In a pledge that reinforces a philanthropic tradition, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has received the promise of a gift of 33 pieces from Clifford Einstein, chair of MOCA's board of trustees, and his wife, Madeline. The donation comprises works made over the last three decades by an international slate of prominent artists, including Kiki Smith, Nam June Paik, Mark Grotjahn, Sigmar Polke, Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman.

Museums, galleries and murals mentioned in Christopher Knight's roundup (Page 10) of the top art attractions in Southern California. MURALS Willie Herron's "The Wall That Cracked Open" (4125 City Terrace Drive, near Carmelita Avenue, City Terrace). The 1972 mural is painted at the site where Herron's younger brother was stabbed by local gang members. Judy Baca's "The Great Wall of Los Angeles" (Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street, Van Nuys).

Movies Jude Law plays a Russian sharpshooter who becomes a hero in the World War II siege of Stalingrad, and Joseph Fiennes, left, is the propagandist who chronicles his exploits in Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Enemy at the Gates," which also features Ed Harris and Rachel Weisz. Opens wide Friday.

Our great oceans are differently named but all run together in a vast unity covering nearly three quarters of the Earth's surface. No wonder they fascinate us as the elemental womb mother of the planet. Hiroshi Sugimoto spent the last 14 years wandering the globe taking pictures of all this brine. He's looked at it as the Caribbean Sea from a bluff in Jamaica, at the English Channel from Fecamp, at the Arctic Ocean from Nordkapp. Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 and works out of New York.

In 1922, at the age of 35, Rudolf M. Schindler designed and built an inexpensive house at 835 N. Kings Road. Made of poured concrete, planks straight from the lumberyard and hardware-store plumbing, the one-story structure combined studio space and living quarters the journeyman architect and his wife shared with another couple. Today, Schindler's Kings Road House is known the world over as a masterpiece of Modern architecture.

The photograph is almost famous: a shot by Kevin Winter of actress Jennifer Lawrence that caught her just as she stumbled on her way to receive an Oscar this year. The small drawings hanging beneath are less familiar: delicate images by P.E. Sharpe of a sparse figure, stripped of the voluminous Dior dress, in different positions as she recovers from her fall. It amounts to a strangely intimate meditation on our obsession with celebrity culture, made stranger by its location: The art installation hangs in a soundstage at the Paramount Studios as part of the new art fair Paris Photo Los Angeles, which runs this weekend.