Best Of 2022: The Biggest Art Stories Mattered More Than Soup Thrown On A Van Gogh

© LA Times Illustration by Alexis Smith, Elisabeth Louise Viguet-Lebrun and Judith Leyster (left to right) (illustrated by Mel Siri/For The Times, photo by San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art Courier, Botanical Garden Museum of Art)

The COVID-19 pandemic is not over, but museum and gallery exhibitions have resumed their work. Instead of doing the usual list of top 10 exhibitions, I'm sharing these 10 art stories that caught my eye this year.

Gender waves

Institutional efforts to promote gender equality in art museum exhibitions continue to bear fruit. In addition to group exhibitions at the Pomona Museum of American Ceramic Art ("Progress: Women in California Clay") and the Orange County Museum of Art ("13 Women"), the year was marked by solo retrospectives of renowned artists. . . Especially Nikki de Saint Phalle and Alexis Smith at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Christina Fernandez at the California Riverside Museum of Photography, Tala Madani at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Fern Jacobs Craft in America, Linda Bessemer at Carolyn Campagna. Clifford. Modern Art. museum, Rebecca Morris Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Leslie Saar at Craft Contemporary, Barbara Krueger at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Andrea Bowers at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Imogen Cunningham and Utah Barth at the J. Paul Getty Museum. . come on girl

change of sex

Last year the Getty Museum added to its collection an important self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1627), and this year the Huntington Museum of Art acquired a large portrait of the aristocrat Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (c. 1784). Shuffling the art museum's old master [sic] collection in pursuit of gender equality has also led the Carrier Museum of Art in New Hampshire to acquire a wonderful and extremely rare oak panel painting by Dutch artist Judith Leyster. The Oddly Eccentric Laughing Man Hiding a Bunch of Grapes in His Giant Hat is one of fewer than 20 works attributed to him. (About 8 by 10 inches, the picture is reminiscent of Rembrandt's Throne, an oil study of emotion and character.) Shooter: For 22 years, Lester's painting has been in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. . The work was a gift from the famous television comedian Red Skelton, but was sold at Sotheby's in 1977. (LACMA fetched $5,750. The amount paid by Carrier was not disclosed, but a small painting sold for about a quarter at an auction in Belgium in April.) million dollars.) Ua.

Gap in the museum

With a $10 million gift, the California State University Long Beach Museum of Art changed its name to recognize the artist donor, Carolyn Campagna Kliefeld, and then created a dedicated (and named) gallery within the museum for permanently exposed the group. photos that he did not advertise properly, which he distributed. In essence, for a pile of shipping containers, a public school sold an individual a rich but perennial artistic legacy.

The Empty Museum II

The Orange County Museum of Art has sped up its reopening by showing Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Maine's building ahead of its completion. (It's not expected to be ready until the New Year.) Apparently the decision to open was made for its 60th anniversary, not because the museum looked bad. It is better for OCMA to wait until spring to take care of staff and art. Large indoor air conditioning systems take time to stabilize.

Biggest Hollywood

Gallery areas such as Downtown and West Adams have expanded, and after several months of the pandemic, gallery hours have been extended during the summer. However, what we'll call Big Hollywood seems to be becoming the center of the Los Angeles gallery scene. Regen Projects launched the area in 2012 when it moved into a stunning new building designed by Michael Maltzan on Santa Monica Boulevard, west of Highland Avenue. The current flow includes New York galleries, including Sean Kelly, Marian Goodman, Lisson and others. and David Zwirner.

Hollywood less so

© (Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times) Emile Raynaud's first "optical theater" for projecting animation is seen in a 1972 reconstruction. (Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)

LACMA Film City. Paris 1850-1907" was the strangest exhibition of the year, based on the absurd claim that cinema is "the greatest art form of the 20th century". Harnessing a powerful domestic industry has been a challenge since 2015, when The High Museum of Art in Atlanta commissioned the Coca-Cola Co to organize an exhibition dedicated to the centennial of the Coca-Cola bottle.

banning the book

Where have all the museum exhibition catalogs gone? A long-awaited Alexis Smith retrospective has opened at the San Diego Museum of Modern Art, but there's no catalog. Photos by Uta Barth opened at Getty without catalog. Rebecca Morris at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles – no. California Biennial 2022 at the Orange County Museum of Art. ok, you got it. Many will see a catalog released next year that will be delayed due to the inclusion of installation photos, new orders, or some other reason. But it is not enough. They are museums, not commercial galleries, and catalogs are not promotional items. The scholarship must arrive at the time of the exhibition.

school days

California requires the arts to be taught in public schools, but a lack of funding has eliminated that requirement in four out of five states. Not any more. Election Day's Proposition 28, California's K-12 arts and music education funding initiative, transfers nearly $1 billion annually from the state's general fund to arts education in public schools. (That's less than 1% of the state's general fund budget.) Obstacles now. State K-12 programs must certify 15,000 dance, media, music, theater and visual arts teachers. This is a lot of money, which according to the teachers will be needed. Yes, up to 15,000 accredited teachers.

He takes you to the village

Organizing a large exhibition of Vincent van Gogh paintings for a small museum is impossible because the loans will not be repaid, the insurance costs are huge and what else is there to know about one of the world's most beloved artists? Impossible, that is, until it happened, which it did in February, when the mesmerizing painting Through the Eyes of Vincent opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Van Gogh and his sources. His twenty paintings were joined by 75 works by 62 other artists, which had a significant impact on Van Gogh's extraordinary work. Artists talking to artists through their art, it's amazing.

Do you just give up oil painting?

Brave UK climate activists Just Stop Oil spray bright orange paint from fire extinguishers on the facades of the London offices of MI5, the Home Office, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and at the Bank of England a bright color of danger illumined every institution. Protesters believe they are aggressively contributing to the collapse of the planet. The protestors' commitment was sincere, their goals appropriate, an appropriate reflection of official climate vandalism, and their willingness to face the consequences of eventual arrest appropriate. Sadly, other activists are pouring soup and mashed potatoes over oil paintings by famous artists in European museums, a dirty publicity stunt that sadly ignores a serious issue that concerns us all.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

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