Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a piece made up of 202 cast-iron street lamps gathered from around L.A. and restored to working order, has become one of the city’s indelible landmarks over the past decade—and it’s inevitably what most visitors will identity LACMA with. But you’re selling yourself short if you don’t venture beyond the photo-friendly installation; LACMA’s collections boast modernist masterpieces, large-scale contemporary works (including Richard Serra’s massive swirling sculpture and Burden’s buzzing, hypnotic tangle of toy cars in Metropolis II), traditional Japanese screens and by far L.A.’s most consistently terrific special exhibitions.
While LACMA’s encyclopedic collections have long been the most impressive in the city, the 20-acre complex of buildings in which they’ve been housed has been quite the reverse. Which makes the opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, a single-building replacement for the now-leveled eastern half of the campus, all the more exciting—both for local visitors and the larger art world. The massive Peter Zumthor–designed concrete structure crosses Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge, and inside, boasts over 2,500 works on display from the permanent collection. Rather than organizing the art by time period, the galleries’ non-hierarchical approach encourages wandering through the cavernous space and making your own artistic discoveries. On your way into the galleries, you’ll see sculptures by Rodin, Tony Smith’s massive Smoke and, across the street, Jeff Koons’s greenery-covered Split-Rocker.
Outside the buzzy David Geffen Galleries, the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and Resnick Pavilion still stand (the museum’s much-loved modern collection specifically has been moved into the bright, spacious third-floor galleries in BCAM). As for the museum’s holdings, you’ll see contemporary titans like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and local artist Ed Ruscha; familiar modernists like Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse, Klee and Kandinsky; Impressionist and post-Impressionist pieces by the likes of Cezanne, Monet, Cassatt and Degas; as well as a world-renowned collection of Islamic art, plenty of pieces from Africa and, in the (temporarily closed) Pavilion for Japanese Art, all manner of delightful pieces from the Far East.
