The New LACMA: Learn to Love It Because It’s Happening

A California museum building designed by Peter Zumthor will be elegant, but will the Old Masters languish in storage?  

T he biggest cultural news in Los Angeles, aside from high culture’s deep freeze during the COVID crisis, is the demolition of the old Los Angeles County Museum of Art buildings and the construction of a new museum now estimated to cost $650 million. I wrote about this project in 2019, endorsing it with a raft of reservations and doing so in variance with the Los Angeles art establishment, which liked the project until it decided to hate it.

Now that four old museum buildings have been demolished and the new LACMA is a construction site, there’s no going back. With a queasy stomach, I still think it’s the right thing to do. The new LACMA is a single-story, serpentine building stretching from the edge of the La Brea Tar Pits, a 40,000-year-old oozing oil swamp packed with fossils, to the other side of Wilshire Boulevard.

Michael Govan, LACMA’s director for the past 15 years, is the visionary and museum entrepreneur who conceived the new LACMA. He’s the persuasive salesman who pushed what started as a $450 million project from the LACMA board and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. LACMA, you see, is a government-owned art museum, though over the years a big chunk of its operations belongs to a nonprofit.

The new LACMA is certainly both radical and counterintuitive. It’s radical in that the museum is physically and philosophically transformed. Radical, too, is its ambition. Los Angeles is not a city known for arts philanthropy. Though the county gave $125 million via a revenue bond, Govan found the rest, getting, for instance, $150 million from David Geffen.

Peter Zumthor is the architect. That’s one of the counterintuitive storylines. He’s a 78-year-old Swiss man who won the Pritzker Prize in 2009 for his distinguished career. Initially, he was a carpenter, then he went into architecture. Much of his career has focused on renovating chapels and small historic buildings in Germany and Switzerland. He designed the spa at Therme Vals in Switzerland, turning an unknown hot spring into a luxury resort with the look and feel of a monastery. I’d call him a Swiss Modernist.

He’s designed only two museums, both small ones in Europe. I’ve visited Kolumba, the diocesan museum in Cologne, which is the most serene museum I’ve seen and something Donald Judd might have created if he were an architect. Kolumba, named after the old cathedral bombed during World War II, weaves among Roman, medieval, and baroque remnants excavated over the years, establishing that history is a layered thing. It’s intimate, with high-quality finishes such as cherry floors, textured concrete, many types of stone, and glass. It’s slow architecture, anti-vanity, and anti-flash. It’s the anti-Bilbao.

It’s the antithesis to the white box, too. Rather, it’s organic, as if it’s not a built environment but one that’s grown, like an orchid. One of Kolumba’s curators said the staff wanted “a museum of reflection.” That might seem, she said, an anachronism “in an era of velocity and simultaneity, leisure industries, and museums turned into temples for the consumption of education and entertainment.” That era would, it seems to me, describe Los Angeles.

LACMA has been debating plans for a new campus for 30 years. It’s been an exhausting, destabilizing journey. There are times to just pull the trigger, and this is one of them. Govan maneuvered the project through LACMA’s board, the county’s politics, and a cadre of high-profile donors, mostly from the realms of entertainment and new money.

Southern California’s art establishment is small — it’s not a high-culture town — and asleep at the switch during much of the new LACMA’s conception. After so many false starts in LACMA’s quest to build a new campus, no one who knew anything paid attention to what Govan was doing. When a handful of renegades said, “Hey, wait a minute . . . this thing’s a carbuncle concrete squiggle,” Govan and the board did some serious squelching. Costs were soaring, and, critics discovered, the new LACMA actually has less gallery space than the old museum. The impetus for a massive expansion of LACMA was, well, to expand, not contract. Soon, exposés aplenty emerged. Now, it’s safe to say that opinion is fiercely split but, alas, this movie’s shot and in the can.

Zumthor has been working on this project for ten years. People are wrong to say it’ll be either his masterpiece or a disaster. It’ll be a lovely, distinguished building. Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics in 2028. The new LACMA is a jewel in the crown topping the city’s preparations. A new subway stop will open soon, steps from the museum. Judging from my one ride on the LA subway, I know that nannies, cleaning ladies, minimum-wage workers, and movie-industry flunkies will enjoy the proximity. The new LACMA is built for a future L.A., not the L.A. living in the cultural shadow of the Northeast and 1960s country-club thinking.

Zumthor has never built in the United States before, which isn’t a problem since there’s a corps of local architects and engineers on the case. Everything is custom-made, so nothing will be easy to fix, but that’s the case with boutique museums. The new LACMA is smaller than the old. This is astonishing but consistent with Govan’s vision. Govan conceived the Wilshire location as a flagship LACMA, with satellite, neighborhood museums throughout the county that will have focused displays of the collection.

Govan picked Zumthor without a search, so he’s the target for future blame and repercussions. I’ve always thought the project’s biggest pitfalls were financial, not aesthetic or even philosophical. If the priestly Zumthor’s building is as discreet, even hushed, as predicted, the new LACMA will be a heartening novelty.

Insofar as the building’s look, it’s likely to be both elegant and distinctive. People will love having it in Los Angeles. Govan’s experience and good taste, though they’re not dispositive, are important things to consider. Will the branch museums ever happen? Not in my lifetime. I suspect that parts of LACMA’s permanent collection will gravitate on long-term loan to other museums in Los Angeles County.

Much wailing exists over Govan’s abandonment of the concept of an encyclopedic museum in which, as at the Met or the MFA in Boston, a single building shows the glories of 5,000 years of humanity, organized chronologically by specialist departments. That’s the old LACMA. It’s also an Old World, New England, and New York vision of a big-city, civic museum. In Los Angeles, it’s an invasive species.

The Wilshire location will show the big hits, I hope — and there’s my queasiness. Will even that happen? Overall, the arrangement of art there will change often. Things will be more interdisciplinary and thematic. Curators won’t display art by schools, and probably not by era. After MoMA’s redo, now close to two years old, the director, Glenn Lowry, said the museum would rotate art from the permanent collection. Expect things to look different with each visit, he said. Govan will do the same and more.

I think the new LACMA, limited for the time being to the Zumthor building, will mount one thematic and aesthetic buffet after another. Over 15 years, Govan has created a like-minded curatorial staff. The place is primed for his vision to be the one that rules. He’s already combining departments. European painting and sculpture and American painting are, for instance, one department now. This makes no sense.

I don’t think Angelenos value encyclopedias of any kind. Long attention spans aren’t the norm. Pretty in Pink is historical. The Quattrocento and Quasimodo? “So hard to keep those straight,” is the locals’ mindset. It’s Dark Ages stuff. Los Angeles isn’t an egghead place, and no one expects the local civic museum to do Nobel-caliber scholarship. It’s got an hors d’oeuvres mentality, not one suited to eight-course dinners. Movies run around two hours, sitcoms 22 minutes, and screenplays more often than not adapt novels with an axe, not a scalpel. Museums in Southern California compete with the best weather in the world and hundreds of miles of sandy beaches on which buff surfers and present-day Gidgets cavort.

Yes, LACMA got going as a collecting enterprise only 60 or so years ago. The Met and the MFA are 150. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art aren’t far behind. Is it possible for LACMA ever to become a place that does justice to 5,000 years of human creativity? Govan says it’s too late. The best material from so many eras and cultures is already taken.

The new LACMA will not only annihilate schools and timelines. It abolishes hierarchies. There won’t be galleries for Islamic art or textiles or porcelain or silver, to cite four niche media often stuck in cobweb country since media are going to be mixed. The Zumthor building is one story and will have multiple entrances. It’s expansive and, given the superlative production values and Zumthor’s renowned austerity, will look weighty and permanent.

Govan is after “an egalitarian experience,” with no segregation among collections, no grand staircase, and a single floor making for better mobility. I think all of these things are peripheral. Last fall, LACMA released renderings of the interior spaces. I didn’t see anything I thought was aesthetically exceptional. There are acres of glass. I’m sure lots of the architects and engineers working on the project as well as Zumthor know that Californian and Swiss light couldn’t differ more.

The new LACMA’s tab is around $650 million, and the museum claims to have raised the money. The project doesn’t include staff offices or space for its conservation lab. That’s estimated to cost $75 million more, to be raised later. At $650 million, the museum building’s construction is already a big jump from initial estimates, which were $450 million. I expect the cost will escalate further.

It’s a government building, though, and the County’s pride and joy, so no one cares too much. If LACMA’s beggared when it opens, through debt or underestimated operating costs, the museum will live with this and, anyway, most museum expansions leave the place broke.

The old LACMA campus wasn’t memorable or distinguished, but the buildings were nice, not as flimsy as stage sets or Wonder Bread boring, as critics said. If anything from the 1960s could be called “quaint,” these qualified. I abhor waste and believe that museums, like all charities, should prize economic efficiency — consistent, of course with their showcase status. This means high-quality finishes, flair, and a frill here and there.

Were these old buildings salvageable? Govan said they were unworthy of a world-class city and, besides, LACMA seems to have stopped maintaining them after Govan became director. Decay, when willed from on high, is a death sentence. Los Angeles is a throwaway place anyway. These buildings, after all, were over 50 years old.

I’m queasy about the new LACMA because of my visit on Saturday. Not I: Throwing Voices was the big exhibition on view. It closed this past weekend. It was a 200-object show drawn almost entirely from the museum’s permanent collection, with objects dating from 1500 b.c. to today. It starts with Edgar Bergen and ventriloquism. “Ventriloquism relies on the confusion between sight and hearing, puppeteer and puppet, silence and speech.” A surprising start, and I like surprises.

It’s an assault on the encyclopedic museum and timely, given LACMA’s transformation. There’s a Tina Modotti photograph called “Rene d’Harnoncourt Puppet,” from 1929. D’Harnoncourt, then an art dealer living in Mexico and a friend of Modotti’s, is shown as a marionette taking a bow beside religious art in a wall as a stage curtain seems about to draw close. Twenty years later, d’Harnoncourt was the director of the Museum of Modern Art. The show argues that he was, in his incarnation as director of a heavy-hitting museum, a puppet master. As a culture celebrity and authority, he told art proles what to say and think, guiding the art intelligentsia along the way.

Big, encyclopedic museums, like what LACMA once was and isn’t anymore, use a handful of objects to define entire cultures and populations. Controlling and manipulative, they take the air out of free thought and crush a multitude of dissenting voices. Art not in the canon or the storyline – and often that’s some very good art — is pushed to the side.

I enjoyed looking at so many different things, from Jean Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, from about 1739, to John Baldessari’s Beethoven’s Trumpet, from 2007, a huge ear trumpet-and-ear interactive sculpture. When the visitor speaks into the trumpet, the object plays Beethoven’s Opus 131. LACMA, artist Meric Algun Ringborg, and the Los Angeles public library collaborate on Library of Unborrowed Books, an installation of 1,000 lonely books. These are library books that have never been borrowed. It’s art about the voice that’s never heard. Another artist, Raven Chacaun, started with a collection of whistles in LACMA’s collection. They were restored by the museum’s conservation department and played by a concert flautist. Ancient Greek pots showed maenads and dancing warriors inspired by voices and music said to have been made by the Oracle of Delphi.

An assembly of photographs of women ventriloquists by the brilliant Laurie Simmons is alone worth a visit. In thinking about ventriloquists, I remembered how creepy and peculiar they seemed to me when I was as child. I never wanted a little Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd puppet, and I never wanted to put words in other people’s mouths. I’m curious about what people think and say. Simmons often uses ventriloquists in her photography and did manage to find, in the late ’80s, an archive of photographs of women ventriloquists. Her montage is a large, glam photograph of her as a ventriloquist with a male dummy accompanied by 30 or so promo photographs of women ventriloquists who performed in nightclubs.

There were six Goya etchings from his Caprichos portfolio. Goya’s Caprichos are often cryptic, sometimes based on riddles, and often evoke magic, disguises, and role-playing. Subjects are often what they pretend not to be. People in authority, like priests and aristocrats, are charlatans. Prostitutes pretend to fund their johns handsomely. Ventriloquists fake it, and so do people in authority. They prescribe received wisdom that may or may not be wrongheaded. They make art-history canons. They make propaganda.

I enjoyed the exhibition. It’s an impressionistic show, an idea or visual treat here or there. It certainly mines the permanent collection. Those whistles have probably never seen sunshine in their decades of museum captivity. Linearity? Nope. Coherence? A bare amount. I watched the short video on the show on LACMA’s website. There are an infinite number of inside, secret jokes. Not I isn’t Dada. It’s a stringcourse of images and ideas. They make sense in only the most general and subjective ways.

This is what we’ll see in the new LACMA. This philosophy and the decrease in gallery space the Zumthor building will present are among the reasons the Ahmanson Foundation cut LACMA off. Since 1965, the foundation, one of the biggest art philanthropies in Los Angeles, has spent $130 million in Old Master painting purchases for LACMA. It did so expecting a serious, traditional role for Old Masters that includes art history driven by schools of painting — French, Spanish, and Dutch, for example — and style-focused arrangements like Mannerism, Rococo, Romanticism, and the like.

Only a small chunk of the permanent collection is on view. The entire third floor of LACMA’s Broad building is devoted to Modernist painting, and half of that to LACMA’s very good collection of German prewar art. I saw some very good things. In a way, my visit proves Govan’s point.

At the old LACMA, I would have visited by favorites, sticking with pre-1900 American painting, an impressive haul, and American decorative arts, which were compellingly arranged. I would have ignored the German Modernists. So, in a taste of the new LACMA, I saw new things. The Orator, by Magnus Zeller, startled me with its manic demagogue reducing a gullible crowd to rapture. Max Beckmann’s Brown Bar, from 1944, is well-condensed angst. A low-lit works-on-paper gallery is showing small things by Klee and Kandinsky and work by Germans from the Bauhaus era. After German Expressionist angst, it was bracing to see austerity and rigor.

One gallery is filled with 18 Picasso paintings, telling me nothing I didn’t know already. Picasso had great strengths but was often derailed. His portrait of Sebastià Junyer Vidal from 1903 is the only imposing thing in the room. Some of the late things in the room are what I call dementia Picassos. These are paintings done when his powers in big formats were spent and, aside from his untempered libido, his animating force existed in small works on paper, especially in prints. Even his 347 Series, from 1968, and his 156 Series, from 1971, reprise earlier prints, with a new spark, indeed, but much in the vein of revisiting old memories. If I wanted to see Picasso in focus, I’d rather not see it done via LACMA’s collection. I was even more dispirited by LACMA’s crappy Matisses.

Stored and unseen are the old American things. LACMA has a superb Sargent full-length double portrait, Portrait of Mrs. Edward Davis and her son Livingston. Sanford Gifford’s Autumn in the Catskills, from 1880, a late Hudson River School triumph is there, as are Homer’s Cotton Pickers and Eakins’s The Wrestlers.

Among LACMA’s best Old Masters, none on view, are Georges de la Tour’s Magdalen with the Burning Flame, from the late 1630s, two nice Rembrandts, including Raising of Lazarus, a handsome Titian portrait, and a bevy of Baroque Italian saints that could have been posed by Cecil B. DeMille. Everything’s in the vault. I bet in the new LACMA, most will stay there, unless, like Chardin ‘s Soap Bubbles, they make a cameo for some pop thematic point. I still don’t know why it was in the ventriloquism show, though.

If I wanted to see old stuff, I guess I needed to go to the La Brea Tar Pits.