Event One: Expressionism at LACMA

Over the weekend, my mother came into town and we went to LACMA to view the exhibit Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky. As a trained painter, I find expressionism to be one of the most electric, exciting and inspiring styles of painting so it was an exhibit I'd been looking forward to all year. It did not disappoint.

There were a few notable works from Van Gogh & Kandinsky (obviously), some from Matisse & Cezanne, and a few from a painter new to me, Paul Signac. I was especially happy to see a lithograph from Toulouse-Lautrec, one of my favorite artists, and I would have liked to see pieces from Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, but as he's Austrian, his work wasn't included. I'll just have to keep my eyes open for the next Expressionism exhibit in SoCal.

While we were there, we also stopped by the Metropolis II exhibit, which I found to be of particular interest given the Two Cultures blog topic the first week. An enormous city with streets for thousands of matchbox cars to 'drive' on, they rise on a pulley and descend with gravity, similar to marble exhibits I experienced in the center of the mall near where I grew up - a friend suggested these could have been by George Rhoads. Add in electrified trains, and the entire exhibit seemed to me to be a great blend of art & science, requiring significant engineering skill to accomplish (not to mention some sort of huge warehouse to construct it in -- where do these artists find so much space in the city??). Conceived by artist Chris Burden, who also created the mass of light poles in front of LACMA, the complex structure took four years to complete and I found it exciting and joyful, as did the small sea of children who surrounded it with excitement.

We also saw Alexander Calder's mobiles, which are really the perfect embodiment of art & math/engineering. Coincidentally, my son was also studying Calder in his preschool class last month (how LA is that??).

Overall, I think this is a fantastic time of year to visit LACMA, with lots of applicable exhibits for our course, as well as some simply beautiful classic artwork from history.