Vancouver art gallery wrap

A trio of galleries visited today, the first two with my aunt Nancy and the third on my own.

LeSoleil Fine Art Gallery

Representing a large and diverse set of contemporary artists, and also offering for sale several small Renoir sketches and paintings, a Dufy and even a Picasso (for a cool CAD $1.3m) along with a handful of other recognised masters. Of the contemporaries, I liked Johanan Herson's colourful and deliberately somewhat softly naive paintings, and Cecilia Aisin-Gioro's works - the accompanying material makes much of her being the grandniece of the last Chinese Emperor.

Challi-Rosso Art Gallery

A range of prints, drawings etc for sale by Dali, Miro, Matisse, Chagall, Picasso, Kandinsky, Lichtenstein and maybe one or two more. Interesting to see these less developed - ie non-painted, and accordingly much cheaper - works by them. Included two of Dali's Alice in Wonderland pieces; also responsible for a striking Dali bronze statue in the street elsewhere.

Vancouver Art Gallery

Happily, my one day downtown was the first day of an exhibition of Guo Pei's designs, "Couture Beyond". It spanned her entire couture runway career - "Samsara" (2006), "An Amazing Journey in a Childhood Dream" (2008), "1002 Nights" (2009), her ongoing Chinese bridal attire collection, "Legend of the Dragon" (2012), "Garden of the Soul" (2015) and "Legend" (2017 - the one which introduced me to her at the NGV).

This was my favourite - stunning (the headpiece is made from porcelain, and the whole pattern references the same)

"Anna Wong: Traveller on Two Roads" (Burnaby Art Gallery, Vancouver)

Vancouver-born artist (1930-2013) who worked in paint, pen, print and textile; my favourites were the semi-mixed media prints from the 1980s based on photos taken by Wong while visiting China after it opened to the West.

(w/ my aunt Nancy)

LA museum wrap

Art was the main reason for stopping over in LA for a couple of days so it was a pleasant surprise none of the three big museums I've visited were over-crowded, albeit maybe in part because large areas of two - LACMA and MoCA - were closed for installation.

The Broad

The temporary exhibition, "A Journey That Wasn't", was about representations of time and included a few standout pieces from artists I didn't know, alongside some I did (a Ron Mueck, some Andreas Gursky F1 pitstop photos, a few from Gregory Crewdson's Cinecitta series):

Sharon Lockhart - "Pine Flat Portrait Studio" series (from 2005)

Marlene Dumas - "Wall Weeping" (2009) (painting inspired by a photo of Palestinians being searched by Israeli soldiers, with the soldiers cropped out)

Neo Rauch - "The Store" (2005) (I also liked the other of his own display, "Treasure Trove")

The general collection display contained plenty of large and colourful pieces, including - ubiquitously, here and elsewhere, Jeff Koons (in the background of his "Tulips" below is a Takashi Murakami, itself splashy enough to hold its own in the central room).

Robert Therrien - "Under the Table" (1994)

The highlight was discovering Mark Tansey, a Californian painter whose careful, meaning-saturated images grabbed me.

"Four Forbidden Senses" (1982) ... the 'missing' one is sight 

"Achilles and the Tortoise" (1986) ... one of the philosophers, scientists and mathematicians depicted is Xeno, of the paradox

Also:

Jenny Saville - "Strategy" (1994), which arrived with a shock, this image that's so familiar and in fact iconic to me from The Holy Bible, and so much larger and more imposing in the flesh, so to speak

Anselm Kiefer - "Deutschlands Geisteshelden" (1973)

It was interesting to see a Lichtenstein sculpture ... I liked it more than I usually do his prints ("Goldfish Bowl", 1977)

I liked the roomful of Ellsworth Kellys too.

LACMA

A fairly miscellaneous visit. A few that caught my attention, all in an abstract expressionist vein:

Joan Mitchell - "East Ninth Street" (1956)

Willem de Kooning - "Montauk Highway" (1958)

Sam Francis - "Toward Disappearance" (1957)

MoCA

This wasn't the first time I've encountered one, but a room full of Rothkos - seven in all - still felt like magic.

Apart from that, a not overly large selection from the museum's permanent collection, though thoughtfully arranged to illuminate each other in each room:

Joan Miro - "Personnages dans la Nuit" (1950)

Max Ernst - "Capricorn" (1948-63); large, amusing, bemusing

Arshile Gorky - "Betrothal I" (1947)

Giacometti - "Tall Figures" II & III (1960), as moving as his pieces always are

John Chamberlain's "Red Beatts" (1988), my first encounter - as far as I can remember - with the idea of abstract expressionist sculpture; in the background, Franz Kline's "Black Iris" (1961)

And Helen Levitt's photographs of children playing in New York in the 1940s.

The Great Battle

Korean blockbuster (watched in Koreatown LA). So-so but in the many movie sieges I've seen there's never previously been one in which the aggressors try to overcome the high walls by building a gigantic mound of dirt right outside.

The Candidate

1972, Robert Redford, idealistic community lawyer runs for office, runs into the political machine. Ticks over very smoothly without ever rising to great heights - perhaps because its tone stays so even throughout rather than ever tipping into outright anger.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

I know there was a backlash and all but for me Three Billboards lived up to the hype, especially in the way that it stares you in the face with all its many emotions and the unabashedly heavy hand with its plotting - and, also, the performances, from all three of the principals (McDormand, Harrelson - how does he manage to always be so likeable? - Rockwell).

Incredibles 2

Good fun. Feminism appreciated!

Jennifer Down - Our Magic Hour

I felt like reading this again, and it went down so easily. If anything I felt it in my chest even more this time round.

(first read)

Muriel's Wedding

What a great movie, especially in its heavier elements and how it treats gender. About time I watched it.

Crazy Rich Asians

Fun and good in the ways it promised to be, and with more depth than I'd expected.

(w/ R)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug & The Battle of the Five Armies

(last time: Smaug, Five Armies)

Searching

Quite twisty and with some nicely fitting together plotting and foreshadowing around the mystery of what happened to 16 year old Margot Kim (although I could tell the film wasn't going to go too dark, which made some of the possibilities it raised fairly easy to discount). The telling of the whole story through screens of various kinds (mostly internet-based) worked well. Neat that the main cast was Asian without a big thing being made out of it too.

(w/ Rob and Laura)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

(last time)

Lovesong (Abi Morgan, Red Stitch)

I liked the device of having the lovers played - often on stage at the same or overlapping times - in their old age by one pair of actors and in their younger growing together and apart by another, and I appreciated the quietness and lack of showiness to the writing. It's a nice play, reasonably well staged (but with varying performances), but didn't have any special spark to it for me.

(w/ R)

Ocean's 8

The fun here is mostly in the performance - Cate Blanchett of course, but even more so the different slynesses of Anne Hathaway and Awkwafina (not to mention Helena Bonham Carter).

Short story wrap-up

By way of a punctuation mark in my explorations of a few collections:

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

I can't think of another word than 'genius'. Davis has hit upon and refined a style so much her own and so elegantly muscular. I can't read too much of her at any one time, but I can't imagine tiring of her either.

Clarice Lispector - Complete Stories

I've really only dipped into these and they are fabulously strange. Deep waters.

Alice Munro - Runaway

I've read the title story - which is pretty much perfect - and the three after it, which are all about Juliet: "Chance",  "Soon" and "Silence". I admire these more than love them; they're deep and fine; they shed light on life.

(a gift from Sarah M & Ben)

Alistair MacLeod - Island

Quite definitively not the types of stories I'm drawn to (too slow, too rural, too much description of the weather and landscape), yet each that I've read, slowly, winds its way to being very affecting: "In the Fall" (about a horse, and also endurance), "The Boat" (father and son and the sea), "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" (my favourite I think - man returns to visit the parents of his dead former lover, and finds his son) and "The Road to Rankin's Point" (in which death hangs over a mountain road and the house at its end).

(the second time someone's given this to me - this time Hayley, previously and more than a decade ago Ruth)

Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

As it happens I'm also four stories into this, but by contrast to the Munro and the MacLeod, Moore is a breeze to read (which I already knew from Self-Help). Funny and sad, and in the patterns of her narrator-protagonists' thinking I can see her influence on more than one of my latter-day favourites, most notably Rivka Galchen.

Grease

Good things about at long last watching this movie: 1. young Stockard Channing, 2. learning where the name 'Kenickie' comes from, 3. the songs obviously.

Alex Prager - Silver Lake Drive

Career-to-date retrospective monograph, both photos and video stills. So great.

David Eddings - The Elenium

Time reveals the many flaws in this trilogy; I thought I was going to stop after the first one, The Diamond Throne, but found a couple of days later that it was still occupying some mental real estate so re-read the other two as well.

"Japonisme: Japan and the Birth of Modern Art" (NGV)

Not really the exhibition's fault that I'd hoped it would be much more heavily about the way Japanese art influenced western art (as in paintings) than it actually was; the tilt was more heavily towards decorative design and objects. Quite a bit of Streeton. At least I saw one enjoyable woodblock of Oniwakamaru subduing a monstrous carp (mid 19th C, Utagawa Hiroshige) ... to be honest there were probably other good bits, but I wasn't in the zone.