The newly opened David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art defiantly reorient the traditional display of art collections in ways astonishing and perplexing, as though the city bubbled up through the tar pits to reveal its many varied nationalities, cultures, and ancestors in ways never before seen. For viewers willing to embrace a fresh and diverse, rather than linear, interpretation of art history, it’s a banquet of visual riches. The emphasis is on global connections over time. Many will quibble. I say, “Get your tickets now.”
Prior to completion, critics in newspapers and social media expressed both despair and excitement about LACMA’s forthcoming new building, a curvaceous gray concrete-and-glass structure by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor with 110,000 square feet of gallery space and a $724 million price tag. It is a monumental addition to the Hancock Park neighborhood, swooping along Wilshire Boulevard to resurrect the glory of the Miracle Mile, as it was called in the 1950s.
What about the inside, the collections? How to show selections from 155,000 works—paintings, sculptures, weavings, furniture, and textiles made globally over six millennia?
With the new Geffen Galleries, LACMA is the first museum building conceptualized from the ground up with the 21st-century idea that paintings from the Renaissance should be shown in proximity to textiles or ceramics made during a similar period in Asia or Africa. That furniture could be exhibited with paintings and photographs from the same period. These intersections were suggested by the museum’s 45 curators—the majority of whom are women.
Scholarship on the presentation of art in museums has changed radically in the past 50 years. As LACMA’s CEO and director, Michael Govan, tells me, “there was a hierarchy of rank of what was important from a very Eurocentric perspective. Today, we have a more subtle, diverse, complex sensibility.”
Govan, dressed in a pale gray suit and striped tie, walked me through the museum that is indisputably his vision in collaboration with the architects. “The idea is that we’re in L.A. and we are L.A. The whole point is for us to be experimental,” Govan says.
Govan insisted on a single-level structure that is 900 feet long and hovering 30 feet above Wilshire Boulevard, and that it be entered by exaggerated stone staircases on either end. In a nod to the history of LACMA, Alexander Calder’s primary-hued stabile Three Quintains (Hello Girls), commissioned for the original 1965 William Pereira–designed campus, is displayed in a reflecting pool near the café.
The main entrance is dominated by a 2023 sculpture, The Futility of Conquest (Cavalcade), of three terra-cotta-colored headless and entwined horses by L.A. artist Liz Glynn. The figures, based on a Parthenon frieze, stand near the area devoted to Greek and Roman sculpture, including pieces donated by William Randolph Hearst to the museum’s original Exposition Park location.
Works from Egypt demonstrate the ways ancient cultures were mutually influenced after 2000 BCE through trade and traveling artisans. In the heart of this display area, there appears to be a white sphinx, until you look closely to see that it is holding a cell phone between its paws. Made by L.A. artist Lauren Halsey, the piece connects the urges and interests of artists over time.
From the Mediterranean Sea galleries, featuring work by Andreas Gursky, it’s a short walk to those connected to the Pacific Ocean. But Govan suggests we “wander,” also the name of the museum’s new guidebook, which similarly suggests experiencing the galleries without predetermined plans. As we wander through the broad, uncluttered exhibition space, with gray concrete floors and walls, daylight filters through silvery light-blocking curtains, which are themselves a commissioned work of art by Reiko Sudo.
We come to Central America, specifically the region of Colima, Mexico, where an alert earthenware dog from 200 BCE is located near a 1925 painting of a woman carrying calla lilies by Diego Rivera, who collected such pre-Columbian art.
On the Atlantic side, we come to a collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings given to the museum by LACMA’s founding board president, Edward Carter. Displayed in one of the dark and intimate galleries, an Adriaen Coorte painting of strawberries in a blue-and-white porcelain bowl hangs adjacent to a case with a Ming bowl from the same period. Govan says, “Geographies, trade, and migration is an overarching theme that pulls a lot of history together. It’s a way to look at a lot of things. It’s not a chronology. Dutch trade does connect you to Asia. Literally.”
Those trade routes eventually brought the museum’s Buddhist statuary from India, as well as Tibetan furniture, cases of rare porcelain, and ink-painted screens. A darkened gallery bears a single elaborately embroidered robe from the Qing dynasty.
Some 50,000 works have come to LACMA since Govan became director, in 2006. One significant gift, based on completion of the Zumthor-designed building, was the collection of entertainment entrepreneur A. Jerold “Jerry” Perenchio, which included paintings by Claude Monet and Edgar Degas as well as the surrealist painter René Magritte. Nearby hangs Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 Tarascon Stagecoach, part of a recent donation by Henry and Rose Pearlman.
Govan has long maintained that the building is a loss leader for such valuable donations. Elaine Wynn, Las Vegas casino tycoon, donated funds for the building as well as her 1969 Francis Bacon triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a contemporary masterpiece valued at $142 million. Stewart and Lynda Resnick donated Jeff Koons’s 2023 Split Rocker, a monumental topiary toy covered in more than 45,000 flowering plants located on the south side of Wilshire, near the theater and restaurant spaces that will soon open.
Govan points out that when he joined LACMA, he discovered that it did not have the acquisitions budget of other major museums. He says with a laugh, “My spin quickly became, Isn’t it so much better? It means everything is a gift.”
Octavia’s Gaze, a 27-foot-long photograph by L.A. artist Todd Gray commissioned for the building, shows the futuristic fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who lived in Pasadena, looking back across the centuries to the ways Black artists and histories have been told. Adjacent, there stands a stunning 19th-century Nigerian forest spirit figure, striped in vertical layers of black and white, with a monkey posed on its head.
Govan starts looking at his watch. The museum is about to have its debut. He concludes, “I don’t think anything here is, like, new new.” He pauses before adding, “Except the whole thing.”•
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, the author of Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s and Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, has written numerous books and articles on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on California and the West. They can be found at hunterdrohojowska-philp.com.
