On the Road – Los Angeles 2024 Day 3

I set aside my third and final full day in Los Angeles last week to visit the Getty Center, which I last saw almost 20 years ago. My son and I headed for Santa Monica early, planning to have a quick breakfast in town before our 10 o’clock ticket time at the Getty, which is a short drive into the hills above the city, but we found it hard to locate a place to sit for a quick bite on a Sunday morning. There must be somewhere in Santa Monica with shops and cafés open early, but we didn’t find it. We eventually located a coffee shop in a mostly deserted business district, ate, and headed for the museum.

So much to see! We started with Van Gogh. One of the most famous objects in the Getty’s collections is one of Van Goghs iris paintings. A small one-room exhibit is currently devoted to an analysis of pigments used in the painting showing how some of them have changed over time through exposure to light. The irises are a violet-blue today, but, based on the analysis, Getty conservators believe the irises would have been noticeably more violet when new because the red pigment the painter used to mix his violet – geranium lake (known to be fugitive) – has faded. The original is displayed along with details of the analysis and a re-created version of the painting that the conservators believe is what it would have looked like when fresh. The irises are more violet in the reconstruction, the earth at the bottom left is a more vibrant terra cotta color, the orange flowers at upper left are more orange.

Another one-room exhibit, Magnified Wonders: An 18th-Century Microscope, focuses on a large gilded microscope made in the 1750s, complete with an elaborate case, various accessories, and contemporary slides prepared for use under its lenses – a beautiful instrument. 

Perhaps the main event at the moment is a large, multi-room show called Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800–1600 that examines the human fascination with light from the early Middle Ages to the late-Renaissance/early Enlightenment period. The exhibition presents a wealth of material on the subject from religious, scientific, and artistic perspectives. 

After viewing Lumen, we had a quick lunch and took a break from viewing art as a group of falconers (looking like they had just been teleported from a Renaissance fair) was giving a talk about birds of prey used for hunting in one of the open spaces just outside the museum buildings. I was disappointed that they didn’t let any of the birds fly, but it was fun to see owls (a Barn Owl, a Great-horned Owl, a Burrowing Owl, and a Western Screech Owl), hawks (two Harris’s Hawks), and a Gyrfalcon up close and to hear about how they’re handled. I hadn’t known that owls have traditionally been used by falconers, but not for hunting. They are used instead to stir up birds that get spooked in the presence of owls, such as crows and blackbirds, which are then hunted on the wing by the hawks and falcons. 

After seeing the birds, we looked at a small show of drawings and watercolors focused on how artists have depicted light through history using these media and we also saw the permanent collection, which includes paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and furnishings from various periods. It was a long, tiring, but satisfying visit. 

Between the Getty and dinner, there wasn’t a lot to do. We mostly walked around rather uninteresting neighborhoods back in town until the time of our reservation at a restaurant called Rustic Canyon, which turned out to be excellent. We had an Anjou pear, walnut, honeyed date, and blue cheese salad to start. The pears were extraordinarily fragrant – like perfume. We had a birria of beef with polenta and delicata squash. We had trout with sunchokes and sorrel and we had one other dish, which I can’t recall. Along with the food, we enjoyed a Domaine Breton Bourgeuil Rosé. I’m always happy while traveling when I’ve eaten well and grateful to have the privilege of being able to eat well. 

After dinner, my son dropped me off back at my hotel in East Hollywood before heading back to his own hotel, in Torrance, where he is doing job training. It was a good visit. We had a lot of time to talk.

The following day, after taking the bus back to The Record Collector (as described in an earlier post here), I hailed an Uber to LAX. From there, it was an uneventful flight back to Sonoma County.  When it comes to flying, uneventful is how I like it. 

Art I'm Looking At: "Looking East" at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco

By now, most anyone with more than a passing interest in art history understands there was a period of intense interest in Japan and things Japanese in the second half of the 19th century that had a profound impact on Western art and design. Because of that, I suspect "Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists" at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum will seem like a rehashing of the obvious to more than a few visitors. But don't let that keep you from going. There is much of interest on display, all from the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston—well known for the quality of its Asian collections in particular.

The Boston museum must be bursting at the seams. I ran into a couple at the show from Boston who said its best pieces seem to be perpetually on loan somewhere (they came here to see work they rarely get to see at home), and, although I've never visited the Boston museum, I have seen many of its masterpieces on tour in Tokyo, including Van Gogh's 1888 portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin, which is now in the San Francisco show.

All the familiar points are made. Wall texts and a short video presentation touch upon the freshness of much of Japanese art and design to Western eyes when things Japanese began to arrive in quantity in Europe and the United States in the late 1850s. In particular, Western artists and designers were inspired by Japanese attention to scenes of everyday life; by bold compositions that often relied on large expanses of black, a lack of perspective and shading as illusionary techniques resulting in a flattening of the picture plane, use of strong patterning, sharp diagonals, and a fondness for boldly truncated scenes (and asymmetrical balance in general); by attention to detail in the applied arts; and by highly advanced full-color woodblock printing techniques—perhaps the most sophisticated in the world at the time. These and other ideas are illustrated by more than 170 Western and Japanese pieces, including examples of the decorative arts, paintings, prints, drawings, and textiles. Shown here is Kikukawa Eizan's Otome (c. 1818–23) and a painting by Cassatt (Caresse Maternelle, c. 1902), inspired by Japanese depictions of mothers with their children.    

Even if the ideas aren't new, the show is worth seeing for the individual works of art on display, and a worthwhile attempt has been made to show pieces side-by-side that illustrate the ideas discussed. In addition to the Van Gogh portrait, highlights include works by Monet, Cassatt, Toulouse Lautrec, Edvard Munch, and others, among Western artists; prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, Eizan, Kunisada, and others, among Japanese print designers—including some of the finest individual impressions I've ever seen; some excellent decorative art; and, at the end of the show, a small group of photographs showing Japanese influence, including work by Karl Struss and Alvin Langdon Coburn. The latter's Tower Bridge (1909) is shown below.      

"Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists" closes February 7, 2016. At the Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA 94102, (415)-581-3500. Open Tues—Sun  10AM—5PM. Closed Mondays. Prices for the show vary. Members get free admission. Children (12 and under) and SFUSD students are free. Adults $20 on weekdays, $25 on weekends. Seniors (65 and over), youths (13-17), and college students with ID are $15 on weekdays, $20 on weekends. These prices seem a bit steep, although they include general admission. That said, you'd need an entire day to see both the Japan show and the permanent collections, so, essentially, you're paying the entire amount to see the special exhibition–unless you move through galleries far more quickly than I do.