LACMA’s Bold New Wing Can’t Quite Escape Its Own Contradictions

Talk of a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art goes back at least 25 years, when Rem Koolhaas OMA presented a plan that proposed a full razing of William Pereira’s 1965 campus and replacing it with a single tent-like structure. That never happened, but Pritzker Award-winning architect Peter Zumthor’s idea for an inkspot, or black rose as it was also called, did. Controversy swirled from the start, with critics lambasting the price tag, estimated at $724 million, including $125 million of public money, for a plan the LA Times compared to a small city airport. Never mind that at 110,000 square feet, it was approximately 10,000 feet smaller than the original building, leading the same paper to dub it “the incredible shrinking museum.”

Love it or not, the new David Geffen Galleries, an elevated single-story structure that sprawls like an amoeba across Wilshire Boulevard, is a generally well-received addition to the city’s landscape and a must-see for art lovers. Sepulchral spaces varying in size give way to panoramic views of the city through textile designer Reiko Sudo’s metallic curtains, which protect the artwork from harmful rays but often admit reflective glare. Home to the permanent collection, roughly 155,000 objects spanning 6,000 years, of which about 2 to 3 percent is on display, the floor plan and organizational layout represent a stark departure from what most museumgoers are accustomed to.

The mini-catalog accompanying the new wing is called “Wander,” and that’s precisely what visitors are meant to do. You might move from a gallery housing Japanese netsuke carvings into one containing textiles from the Andes, or from an aerial photo of an ocean by Andreas Gursky to ancient Indian art from Mathura. It’s a radical notion some might find refreshing and others jarring.

“Diversity is one element of how you make the historical collection relative to the living culture,” LACMA CEO Michael Govan tells Observer. “We’re comfortable with the productive chaos of diversity, and we acknowledge the power of no hierarchies, and we promote that it’s the strength of L.A., that it’s diverse.” There are 80 small presentations across the galleries, and “there’s no one path through the museum, no one story of our history. There are no hierarchies. That is key.”

Although the floor plan of the new building is meant to place different cultures on equal footing, foot traffic through any space tends to establish its own pattern. When I was there, most lingered around the central galleries or drifted west toward the view of Beverly Hills where Matisse’s mosaic, La Gerbe, is given a seat of prominence. Those who ventured east tended to stay on the western side of the structure, taking in the campus outside and Wilshire Boulevard below. Here hangs a newly acquired triptych, Three Studies of Lucien Freud by Francis Bacon, which has already emerged as the star of the new wing.

“The idea is to create meaningful context through this idea of migration and interconnectedness, the inverse of the nineteenth century model of categories and separation and organization of time and space by a Cartesian grid. Peter (Zumthor) tried to design a museum that was pretty evenhanded,” Govan says, explaining the flow of the space in doublespeak. “I myself go in different directions. And I think if one direction gets too privileged, we’ll probably change the art, and give a better draw to balance it. Democracy is a weird thing; it’s all things equal. This is subjectively diverse.”

What’s not subjectively diverse is the public art fronting the museum. Chris Burden’s Urban Light retains its old place separating the courtyard from the street, while a new addition a block east and across Wilshire Boulevard is Jeff Koons’s Split-Rocker. Tony Smith’s Smoke has barely moved from its old position, but is now outside by the staircase leading up to the new gallery. The new sculpture garden fronting the building features bronzes by Auguste Rodin, and in the fountain by the courtyard is one of the museum’s first commissions, Alexander Calder’s Three Quintains (Hello Girls), which has been lovingly restored. Behind the Resnick Pavilion, Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass still stands where it was installed in 2012. The museum architects include Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Bruce Goff, whose Japanese Pavilion is highlighted as never before. The buildings that comprise the campus are named for Resnick, Geffen and Broad. Every artist, donor and architect named here is a white man, including Michael Govan.

To be fair, Yoshitomo Nara’s Miss Forest has occupied a space adjacent to Urban Light since 2020, and since 2012 Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads has greeted visitors by the elevator to the parking garage. New additions to the campus include Mariana Castillo Deball’s Feathered Changes in the courtyard under the new wing, as well as Pedro Reyes’ monolithic face, Tlali, across from the elevators on the ground level.

LACMA in the 21st century has long differentiated itself from East Coast and European museums by deemphasizing the Western canon and casting its gaze to the Americas, the Far East and Oceanic peoples. But Western art routinely draws top prices at auction, which often influences which artworks major museums choose to acquire for their permanent collection. In this way, the public is educated on which art is most vital and subsequently seeks it out. Generally, Impressionism and Renaissance art remain a big draw, especially for the majority of museumgoers who happen to be over 60. Gen X prefers 20th-century art, including works by practitioners like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein, while Millennials have a hankering for street art.

Unfortunately, LACMA’s egalitarian gesture is, in practice, aspirational only. To achieve such goals would require a shift in institutional collecting as well as art market prices that favor Western artists, both of which are beyond LACMA’s control. While change is occurring in the art world, it is at an incremental rate that will take decades to effect. The concepts embodied by the new Geffen wing, practicable or not, are part of that shift and ought to be considered a bold move in the right direction.

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