We’ve come to the end of our American trip. It’s been fantastic. Meeting our new American family in New York and Los Angeles. Doing and seeing so much. Here’s a selection.
That’s all Folks!
Category: Los Angeles
Brent’s and Santa Monica
Monday 27 May was a public holiday in the US – Memorial Day – when the country honours US military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Services. It was a beautiful, sunny day (though the wind was chilly) and everyone was out enjoying themselves. Our cousins first took us to one of their favourite eating places, Brents – a famous family run Jewish deli and restaurant which has become one of the best delicatessens in the state. The place was packed with families enjoying their day off and we left feeling very replete.
We then drove to Santa Monica, a coastal town (or “city” as they call it in the US) west of downtown Los Angeles. It too was buzzing. We strolled along a delightful pedestrian street called 3rd Street Promenade and noticed lots of brightly coloured wooden rocking chairs (we discovered these are called Adirondack chairs) just sitting on the pavement for people to use. Then we walked to Santa Monica’s wide, sandy beach for our first sight of the Pacific ocean. Interestingly Santa Monica is the western end of the famous Route 66.
LA The Broad
The Broad is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum is named for philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, who financed the $140 million building that houses the Broad art collections.
In the entrance hall is an installation by Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. This was in a separate room which you entered and stood on a platform in darkness, and then ….
It is a fantastic gallery and has a standing exhibition of works by Roy Lichtenstein, so this was our next port of call.
When Eli and Edythe Broad acquired Rauschenberg’s Untitled in 1983, they traded Vincent van Gogh’s drawing Cabanes à Saintes-Maries, 1888, which they had cherished for a long time. For the Broads, Untitled represented a turning point in their lives as collectors, a symbol of their increasing commitment to the works of contemporary artists.
Jean Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents in 1960, and left home as a teenager to live in Lower Manhattan. In the late 1970s, he and fellow artist Al Diaz became known for their graffiti, a series of cryptic statements seen around Manhattan.
Many of Basquiat’s works have been likened to the improvisational and expansive compositions of jazz. Often themes accumulate through multiple references on a surface, emerging as patterns out of gestural brushstrokes, symbols, inventories, lists, and diagrams.
Basquiat’s work celebrates histories of Black art, music, and poetry, as well as religious and everyday traditions of Black life. At the same time, his paintings and drawings offer these references against the American and global backdrop of the white supremacist legacy of slavery and colonialism.
In his work, Basquiat integrated critique of an art world that both celebrated and tokenized him. He was keenly aware of the racism frequently embedded in his reception, whether it took the form of positive or negative stereotypes. Basquiat saw his own status in this small circle of collectors, dealers, and writers as connected to an American history rife with exclusion, invisibility, and pater-nalism, and he often used his work to directly call out these injustices and hypocrisies.
Jeff Koons created the ‘Puppy’ outside the Gulbenkian in Bilbao and here he is in Los Angeles with Balloon Dog
There were many other artists but we’re saving them for the next time!
LA – The Getty Centre
Our friend Sheryl took us to the Getty Centre for the day. It’s an extraordinary set of buildings set high up on a hill with stunning views of Los Angeles and the surrounding area (click on a picture to enlarge).
The architecture is beautiful. The buildings are very light in colour with clean lines.
The entrance hall has a superb installation by Mercedes Dorame entitled ‘Looking back’
Camille Claudel
A trailblazing woman artist working in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Camille Claudel defied the social expectations of her time to create forceful sculptures of the human form. Her innovative works of art treat the universal themes of childhood, old age, love, and loss with an expressive intensity in a variety of genres, materials, and scales. Collectors and critics immediately recognized Claudel’s talent, but today her art remains little known outside France.
Other works within the studios.
And further sculptures were to be found outside, down by the carpark.
The Getty also has a restaurant with wonderful views and delicious food. All in all a fantastic day.
Los Angeles
We arrived in LA to be met at the airport by my cousin Simone and her husband Marvin. We stayed with them in their home and we were made so welcome. They have a beautiful garden full of colourful flowers and also orange trees. It was wonderful to be able to eat oranges which we had picked that morning.
