Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was always going to be a highlight of this trip; my going to New Mexico was in large part to make pilgrimage to the sites of O'Keeffe's most iconic landscapes and visit the museum itself. On display was a representative selection of her paintings, with a few sketches, photos and other bits of material, arranged more thematically than chronologically, though in a way that the developments in her focuses over time were clearly apparent. I'd seen some of the pieces on display before, including several quite recently at the Heide exhibition (*) to which they travelled, while others were new to me - in a lot of cases, I hadn't even seen prints of them before, which was a delight. There's not much to say, really - this was blissful.

By theme:

Abstract Nature: 'Bella Donna', 1939; 'Green Lines and Pink', 1919

Becoming Georgia O'Keeffe: 'No. 22 - Special' (1916-17)

The Black Place (150 miles west of Ghost Ranch): 'Black Place III', 1944

At Lake George, New York:  'Autumn Trees - The Maple', 1924

My New Yorks: 'Untitled (City Night)', 1970s

O'Keeffe's Abiquiu garden: Todd Webb - 'Georgia O'Keeffe in Abiquiu Garden in Front of Corn', n.d.

O'Keeffe's New Mexico: 'Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie's II', 1930; 'Horse's Skull with White Rose', 1931'; 'Black Cross with Red Sky', 1929

The Wideness and Wonder of the World: 'Clouds 5 / Yellow Horizon and Clouds', 1963/1964

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe

Enjoyable selection. I liked the short videos I saw, Holly Wilson's sculpture-installations, and the examples of Native artists engaging with 20th century action and abstract art movements, often drawing in elements from their own cultural traditions to good effect.

Patrick Swazo Hinds - "Pueblo Motif"

SITE Santa Fe

Two exhibitions on at this contemporary art space. "Casa tomada" had some interesting pieces but I didn't really glom onto it as a whole; separately, Jacob Hashimoto's pieces were cool, especially the centrepiece installation "The Dark Isn't the Thing to Worry About".

Free State of Jones

Earnest but kind of procedural, and never entirely reckons with the way it's a white man (McConaughey) at the centre of a story about race and the Civil War.

First Man

On the one hand, I thought First Man was good. It made me feel the sheer amount of metal and stress (and engineering) involved with space travel, it dramatised the human element (I especially liked the character of Janet, Neil Armstrong's wife) and it wasn't thoughtlessly jingoistic or triumphalist about the whole endeavour. On the other hand, it felt long at times, maybe because it didn't obviously follow the usual formula for an 'achievement' based film like this (or did so in a less familiar way). Actually, the last film that left me feeling this way was Dunkirk.

Disenchantment season 1

Enjoyable and colourful, if somewhat predictable. Luci is a great character.

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

A fairly cursory look through.

Daniel Peebles - "Carlson Family" (2017)

Alfred Stieglitz - "Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait" (1918)

Ansel Adams - "Moonrise, Hernandez" (1941)

Willard Nash - "Landscape (Santa Fe)" (1930)

Megan Abbott - Give Me Your Hand

As Meg Wolitzer's back cover blurb says, this novel mines themes of ambition, competition, excellence and friendship, and the long, undeterrable reach of memory - Kit and Diane, tied together by what we think is a single dark secret but turns out, by the time the twists of the final pages are done, to be several. Maybe a tiny bit formulaic, but very suitable holiday reading.

Albuquerque Museum

A good one, mixing art with historical and informative exhibits, with a relative focus on Albuquerque while providing an introduction to northern New Mexico as a whole.

Peter Hurd - "A Shower in a Dry Year" (1969)

Felipe Archuleta - "Coyote" (1977)

Fritz Scholder - "Portrait in a White Suit" (1983), Native American iconography; it's figurative but its gestural strokes made me think of abstract expressionism

Bruce Lowney - "Approaching Storm" (1981)

Georgia O'Keeffe - "Gray Cross with Blue" (1929), first O'Keeffe of this New Mexico visit!

Paul Suttman - "Braque Visited by the Conquering Venus Armed with the Apples of Discord" (1991), in foreground

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)