Modern Art

Twenty-two contemporary works, including a prime early painting by Francis Bacon that is expected to break the British artist's record of $1.76 million, will be offered May 2. Four modern works, by Rene Magritte, Jean Delville, Giorgio Morandi and James Ensor, will be sold May 9 in a sale of Impressionist and modern art. Though Janss and his family made their fortune in the American tradition of developing land--about 90,000 acres of Southern California...

It's only natural, given their proximity to Mexico and rapidly growing Latino constituencies, that California art museums would be engaged with Latin American material. But the robust lineup of exhibitions, exchanges and educational programs indicates that the days of focusing on historic "treasures" or romanticized figures such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are over. Museum directors and curators are talking about examining fresh topics and weaving Latin American art into a global fabric — in projects that require inter-departmental collaboration, international networking and community outreach.

So there's my name, on Page 1 of "Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980," the Getty's massive overview catalog for its monumental effort to get Southern California modern art into the heretofore New York-centric history of American modernism. The mention isn't so much about me as about my 1974 book, "Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast" (which was reissued by the University of California Press as "Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970" in 2000)

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On Jan. 26, 1970, days after delivering the State of the Union address and just weeks before announcing the incursion of U.S. troops into Cambodia that led to nationwide student strikes, President Richard M. Nixon sent a memo to H.R. "Bob" Haldeman on the subject of Modern art. "Decadent" was the operative adjective he used, and he wanted something done about it. On Monday, the National Archives and the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda released...

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art said it raised $250 million to boost its endowment and build a new wing that will triple the size of its galleries and house the collection of Gap Inc. founders Donald and Doris Fisher. The gifts from the museum's leadership bring it more than halfway toward a $480-million goal. From funds raised so far, $100 million is earmarked to double the endowment. The rest will go toward the expansion. The project will increase the museum's current galleries to 150,000 square feet and consolidate offices scattered around the neighborhood into one building.

When Grace McCann Morley became director of the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1935, she knew what she wanted to focus on: the art of her time. "If art of today is today overlooked or misunderstood, the loss is serious," she once wrote. "Art fails then to give its full value to daily life." She championed such artists as Klee, Matisse and Picasso and gave first solo museum shows to Clyfford Still, Arshile Gorky and a young Jackson Pollock. It was only some 40 years later, long after Morley had ended her tenure, that the museum finally got the word "modern" inserted into its title, befitting the art it had shown and collected and the institution it had become.

By most standards the qualities of cultivation, refinement and cosmopolitanism are virtues. Modern art, however, made its reputation as a bracingly abrasive poetic irritant out to upset comfortable preconceptions and so it is a matter of some sadness to watch it slowly settle into well-mannered domesticity. This house-breaking of the modernist tradition is so widespread as to almost escape notice, like a mildly smoggy day you barely register because of the uniformity of the atmosphere.

A cleaner at London's Tate Britain modern art gallery threw out a bag of trash that was part of an artwork, British media reported. The transparent bag -- full of newspaper, cardboard and other paper -- was part of a work by artist Gustav Metzger called a re-creation of his first public showing of auto-destructive art. The bag was recovered, but it had been damaged and Metzger had to replace it with another one, a Tate spokesman said.

New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a Museum of Modern Art affiliate, is creating ear candy for art devotees by launching an Internet radio station, www.wps1.org. If you cross pirate radio with contemporary art and add a splash of NPR, it comes close to defining the station's programming. "There is no model for WPS1," says station Managing Director Brett Littman, who is also senior administrator for the Art Center. "It's an all-inclusive means of expression about art."

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A man suspected of hiding precious artwork stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art last year claims that in a panic, he threw the paintings into the garbage. Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Matisse and Leger paintings stolen in May 2010, and worth about $134 million, may have been dumped in a garbage bin on a Paris street and destroyed with the rest of that day's trash, according to testimony by one of three suspects connected to the theft. The suspect, a 34-year-old watch repairman, was identified only as Jonathan B. by the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

Rico Lebrun was probably the most famous Modern American artist working in Los Angeles in the decade following World War II. Yet, when the J. Paul Getty Museum opened "Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970" on Saturday, kicking off the mammoth, region-wide survey of Los Angeles art dubbed Pacific Standard Time, Lebrun's paintings were nowhere to be seen. Reputations rise and fall. Lebrun arrived in L.A. in 1938, worked at the old Chouinard Art Institute and got a job teaching Disney animators how to draw convincing animal motion for "Bambi.

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens "California Design, 1930-1965: 'Living in a Modern Way'" on Saturday, curators will celebrate midcentury innovation with 11,000 square feet of furniture, fashion, toys and one 60-year-old magazine cover brought to life. The museum has re-created an October 1951 cover of the Los Angeles Times Home magazine showing a plastic Eames armchair, Van Keppel-Green cord patio furniture and other pieces of modern living along with a headline that confidently declared: "What Makes the California Look.

So there's my name, on Page 1 of "Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980," the Getty's massive overview catalog for its monumental effort to get Southern California modern art into the heretofore New York-centric history of American modernism. The mention isn't so much about me as about my 1974 book, "Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast" (which was reissued by the University of California Press as "Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970" in 2000)

In the early 1970s, when Shifra Goldman proposed a doctoral dissertation on modern Mexican art, her professors at UCLA sneered. Compared to European art, the art of Latin America was, in their view, imitative, too political, unworthy of serious scholarly attention. But Goldman, a scrappy civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist who went back to school in her mid-30s, refused to consider a more mainstream topic. Describing herself years later as a person who was "born on the margins, lived on the margins and … always sympathized with the margins," she bided her time for several years until a more open-minded professor arrived who was willing to supervise her research.

After 20 years awaiting, Los Angeles has a dramatic new flagship structure for modern art. It is, of course, the County Museum of Art's Robert O. Anderson Building, which opens to a curious, eager and slightly apprehensive public next Sunday. It is the culmination of a dream harbored by art folks here ever since the museum located in Hancock Park on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965.

Maria Gaetana Matisse, 58, a longtime New York gallery owner and modern art patron. The daughter of a German diplomat who helped found Germany's Christian Democratic Party after World War II, she was born in Vienna and studied art and languages in Munich and London before moving to New York. She married Pierre Matisse, the son of French impressionist Henri Matisse, in 1974 and worked in the Matisse Gallery, which had been founded by the artist in 1931.

1945: Alfred Hitchcock's psychological thriller "Spellbound" opens, with memorable dream sequences by Salvador Dalí. 1946: Bassist and composer Charles Mingus, who grew up in Watts, records with his band the Stars of Swing. The recordings, now lost,anticipated the next decade's influential West Coast jazz sound. 1946: Theodor Geisel, who writes children's books under the pen name Dr. Seuss, moves to Hollywood to work for Warner Bros. 1947: Beginning of organized resistance to Modernism and abstraction in art as well as the beginning of "the painting witch hunt," in the words of art historian Peter Plagens.

In September 1945, under a pall of ocher smog and summer heat, Los Angeles entered the postwar world. The city then was bigger, wealthier and more diverse than ever. Its established people — mostly past middle age and conservative, a few who were really rich — still had the narrowness of the Midwest towns from which many of them had come in the 1920s. The city's new people — Okies and Arkies, black Southerners, and white ethnics — had arrived with the war. Few of them had much interest in art. Of course, there was art in Los Angeles they could have seen.