Everything about The Los Angeles County Museum Of Art totally explained
The
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also known as
LACMA, is the official and world-renowned
art museum of the
County of Los Angeles, California, located on
Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the
Miracle Mile vicinity of
Los Angeles. The museum is adjacent to the
George C. Page Museum and
La Brea Tar Pits.
LACMA is the largest encyclopedic museum west of
Chicago. Its holdings include more than 250,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. In addition to art exhibits, the museum features film and concert series throughout the year.
History
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a museum in 1961. Prior to this, LACMA was part of the
Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, founded in
1913 in
Exposition Park near the
University of Southern California. In 1965 the museum moved to a new Wilshire Boulevard complex as an independent, art-focused institution, the largest new museum to be built in the United States after the
National Gallery of Art.
The museum was built in a style similar to
Lincoln Center and the
Los Angeles Music Center and consisted of three buildings: the Ahmanson Building, the Bing Center, and the Lytton Gallery (renamed the Frances and
Armand Hammer Building in 1968). The board selected LA architect
William Pereira over the directors' recommendation of
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the buildings.
The LA Music Center and LACMA were concurrent large civic projects which vied for attention and donors in Los Angeles.
To house its growing collections of modern and contemporary art, and to provide more space for exhibitions, the museum hired the architectural firm of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates to design its
Robert O. Anderson Building, which opened in 1986 (renamed the Art of the Americas Building in 2007).
The museum's
Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by maverick architect
Bruce Goff, opened in 1988, as did the
B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Garden of
Rodin bronzes. In 1994, LACMA purchased the adjacent
May Department Stores building, an impressive example of
streamline moderne architecture designed by Albert C. Martin Sr. LACMA West increased the museums' size by 30 percent when the building opened in 1998.
Local sculptor
Robert Graham created the towering, bronze
Retrospective Column (1981, cast in 1986) for the entrance of the Art of the Americas Building.
Directors
- Dr. Richard (Ric) F. Brown - 1961 - 1966
(An earlier plan for LACMA's transformation by architect Rem Koolhaas proposed razing all the current buildings and constructing an entirely new museum.) Phase I of the Renzo Piano renovations required demolishing the parking structure on Ogden Avenue and with it LACMA-commissioned graffiti art by street artists Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee.
On February 2, 2007, LACMA's director, Michael Govan, with artist Jeff Koons, revealed plans for a massive 161-foot-tall sculpture featuring an operational 1940s locomotive suspended from a crane. The sculpture would be located at a redesigned entrance on Wilshire Boulevard, between the Ahmanson Building and the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum.
Acquisitions and Donors
On January 8, 2008 Eli Broad revealed plans to retain permanent control of his roughly 2,000 works of Modern and contemporary art in the independent Broad Art Foundation that makes loans to museums rather than give any of the art away. Mr. Broad, as recently as a year prior, had said that he planned to give most of his holdings to one or several museums, one assumed to be LACMA.
Broad, vice chairman of LACMA's board of directors, financed the $56-million Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at LACMA, as well as $10 million more to buy two artworks for the inside. BCAM will display 220 pieces borrowed from Broad and his Broad Art Foundation when it opens in February 2008. LACMA was criticized in 2001 for hosting a major exhibition of Mr. Broad’s collection without having secured a promised gift of the works, an act that's prohibited at many prominent art institutions because it can increase the market value of the collection.
In December 2007, Janice and Henri Lazarof gave LACMA 130 mostly Modernist works estimated to be worth more than $100 million.
In 2001 the museum lost out on the collection of Nathan Smooke, a former museum trustee and industrial real-estate developer whose heirs sold much of his collection rather than donating it.
LACMA boasts one of the largest collections of Latin American art due to the generous donation of more than 2,000 works of art by Bernard Lewin and his wife Edith Lewin in 1996.
In the early 1970s Norton Simon, the Hunt's food magnate, donated his collection the Pasadena Art Museum, forming the Norton Simon Museum, after making some indication of donating the work to LACMA.
From 1946 to his death in 1951, William Randolph Hearst was LACMA's largest benefactor. He remains the largest donor to the museum in number of objects. His donations formed the museums collection of Greek and Roman antiquities, medieval and early Renaissance sculptures and large parts of the European decorative arts collection. Note that these are external links to LACMA's collections.
- African Art
- Art of the Ancient Americas
- Art of the United States
- Arts of the Middle East (including Islamic Art)
- Chinese and Korean Art
- Contemporary Art
- Costume and Textiles
- Decorative Arts and Design
- Egyptian Art
- European Painting and Sculpture
- The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies
- Japanese Art
- Latin American Art
- Modern Art
- Photography
- Prints and Drawings
- South and Southeast Asian Art
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