Editor's Note: Here are capsule descriptions of a number of artworks that have recently joined LACMA's permanent collections as gifts, promised gifts, or purchases. Detailed entries and studio photography of all the works will follow in the coming months, but until then we want to provide an initial look at the many exciting additions to the museum's collections.

American Art

Monterey Cypress c. 1930 Arthur Mathews

The museum recently received as a promised gift its first painting by Arthur Mathews, the most important California artist active in the early twentieth century and one whose works rarely appear on the art market. Mathews’s landscapes, unlike the meticulously detailed scenes created by earlier artists, were more generalized, and his emphasis on mood and a personal response to nature, rather than nature itself, constituted the first phase of modernism in California. Around 1930, Mathews created his largest group of canvases devoted to a favorite subject: Northern California’s cypress trees set against the shoreline. Monterey Cypress, depicted in Mathews’s characteristic tonal palette of yellow ochers, soft greens, and dusty browns, and filled with golden light, is a magnificent example and the largest from this period.

Emma in the Purple Dress 1919 George Bellows

With the recent gift of George Bellows ’s landmark paintingEmma in the Purple Dress (1919), LACMA now owns three masterpieces by the artist that document his entire range of subject matter: urban genre, portraiture, and landscape. Bellows was the foremost early-twentieth-century practitioner of realism in American art, and he is best identified with the Ashcan School of painting. His most famous work, the iconic Cliff Dwellers (1913), was the first American painting purchased by the museum. For this timeless representation of his wife, Emma, Bellows used an exacting compositional geometry that would distinguish his mature portraits thereafter. The painting, the generous gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz, is currently on view. Go to Collections Online to find out more about Cliff Dwellers.

William Trost Richards ranks as one of the leading members of the second generation of American landscape painters, and LACMA’s acquisition of one of his rare finished drawings, Woodland Interior, adds significantly to the museum’s coverage of American mid-nineteenth-century landscape art. In this large and impressive work, the artist combines the romanticism that was the basis of the Hudson River school aesthetic with the “truth to nature” call of John Ruskin. Indeed, from the granular stony rocks to the almost weightless single blades of grass, Woodland Interior is amazingly varied in its range of graphic techniques for delineating the minutiae of nature.

John Biggers is considered one of the outstanding mid-twentieth-century African American artists, and his Cotton Pickers, for its beauty, grand scale, and subject matter, is a major acquisition for the museum. Biggers believed in using his talent to record the history of the American Negro accurately and compellingly, and he always imbued his figures with a strong, quiet dignity. In this drawing, Biggers presents two couples, young and old, weighted down by life and wearied by the toil of picking cotton. The almost solid white gouache background outlining their silhouette of the figures but provides the viewer with no sense of their environment or history: The cotton pickers become timeless icons of the plight of the American Negro. This drawing forms a fascinating dialogue with Winslow Homer’s Cotton Pickers (1876), also in LACMA’s collection, and the museum intends occasionally to exhibit these two major works together, so that this dialogue between the two eras and artists (one white, one black) can be explored further.

Art of the Middle East

Gamesboard 16th century Turkey

This fabulous Gamesboard, crafted from wood with ivory, ebony, silver, and mosaic-like inlays, exemplifies the preeminence of Ottoman high court art. It can be dated to the reign of Sulayman the Magnificent (1520–1566) on the basis of its decoration, which closely relates not only to other inlaid wood objects but to glazed pottery and tiles, textiles, manuscript illumination, and metalwork of this period. The Gamesboard can be used for three different games. When open, the interior is a backgammon board; when closed, one cover is designed as a chess board and the other for an ancient game known, among other things, as Nine Men’s Morris. The Gamesboard is an important addition to the museum’s significant holdings in Ottoman art, including the wonderful Box (c. 1940) acquired in 2005, which represents a slightly later phase in the development of Ottoman inlaid wood.View the complete record and details of this work in Collections Online.

Contemporary Art

Hollywood 2001 Maurizio Cattelan

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan combines elements of surrealism, performance, and satire in his oeuvre, and he is often referred to as a prankster or provocateur. For the 40th Venice Biennale in 2001, Cattelan erected a larger-than-life replica of the iconic Hollywood sign over the largest city dump in Palermo, Sicily; it was the first time in its history that the Biennale allowed a work to be presented outside Venice.Hollywood engaged the entire city by casting ordinary citizens in the role of film extras. Cattelan has said of this piece: “I tried to overlap two opposite realities, Sicily and Hollywood: after all, images are just projections of desire, and I wanted to shade their boundaries. It might be a parody, but it’s also a tribute…. There is something hypnotic in Hollywood: it’s a sign that immediately speaks about obsessions, failures, and ambitions.” This photograph of Cattelan’s installation joins another work by the artist, Untitled (2001), a semi-operational miniature replica of an elevator acquired by LACMA in 2003.

Band 2005 Richard Serra Photograph by Lorenz Kienzle.

Band may qualify as Richard Serra's magnum opus, representing the fullest expression of the formal vocabulary proffered by his monumental steel arcs and torqued ellipses of the 1980s and 1990s. Band, however, introduces a new quotient of fluidity and sense of freedom, undulating with the apparent ease of a ribbon, flowing back and forth with almost balletic grace. Among the most formally elegant and technically complex works of Serra’s oeuvre, the sculpture took him two-and-a-half years to develop; at twelve feet high and more than seventy feet long, the work is vast even by Serra’s monumental standard. The sculpture is a daunting display, evoking the mechanics of handling some two hundred tons of hot steel and the precision engineering that goes into shaping it, as well as the placing of its component parts, which requires tolerances down to a single millimeter. This acquisition, made possible by Eli and Edythe Broad, is a major addition to LACMA’s holdings. Although the museum has several works on paper by Serra, until now it possessed only a single, early sculpture, Inverted House of Cards (1969).

Mary Corse is best known for her all-white abstract paintings whose reflective surfaces play with the viewers’ perception of light. In the late 1960s, Corse began incorporating glass microspheres (like those used in reflective road signs) into her paintings; the microspheres refracted light and made for a luminous surface on her canvases. Corse produced her first arch painting in the late 1980s. In these monochromatic compositions, forms are defined by subtle distinctions of the reflectivity and refractivity of Corse’s media. Corse generally creates works in a series, exploring particular issues of form and perception.Untitled (1996) is from Corse’s White Arch Inner Band series, in which a rectilinear arch frames a banded interior. The differences among the three bands and the arch itself are extremely nuanced and can be detected only as the viewer moves in relation to the painting.

Decorative Arts and Design

Clock 1906–07 Adolf Loos

With its lack of ornamentation, and clear glass revealing its mechanism, this recently acquiredClock epitomizes the design philosophy of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. Loos rejected innovation for its own sake. He believed in either using traditional vernacular forms for furnishings, or, having produced a “pure” form determined by function, in altering it only slightly over time. Although Loos was active at the same time as the Wiener Werkstätte, the design collaborative that elevated decorative arts to the status of fine arts, his aesthetic was based on abolishing all embellishment in the name of purity, truth, and functionality. Clock, made for the Vienna apartment of factory owner Arthur Friedmann between 1906 and 1907, is the first object to enter LACMA’s collection that represents this contrasting approach to modernism.

European Painting and Sculpture

St. Martina c. 1635–40 Pietro Berrettini (called Pietro da Cortona)

Hidden in a private British collection for 160 years and unknown to scholars of the artist until recently, Pietro Berrettini ’sSt. Martina has never been exhibited or published before. An architect as well as a painter, Berrettini, also called as Pietro da Cortona, was intimately familiar with the subject, having designed the church dedicated to St. Martina in the Roman Forum and executed an altarpiece depicting her martyrdom for the Siena Cathedral, among other works. Cortona, one of the major artists of the Roman baroque period, was a protégé of three popes and official painter for a number of the wealthiest families in Rome; his fresco ceiling in the Grand Salon of the Palazzo Barberini, painted in 1635, remains a major attraction in Rome. Cortona paintings are rarely found in American museums, making this an extremely important addition to LACMA’s collection. St. Martina ranks among the most generous gifts The Ahmanson Foundation has ever made to LACMA. Go to Collections Online for more on St. Martina.

Portrait of Monsieur Gest 1816 Alexandre Dubois-Drahonet

Portrait of Monsieur Gest, by the little-known artist Alexandre Dubois-Drahonet, illustrates the onset of the Romantic revolution: The tempestuous hairstyle and pallid languor of the sitter, which contrast with the bright emerald of his cloak, are traits commonly associated with the Romantic style. The acquisition of this rare and very beautiful portrait gives substantial depth to LACMA’s collection of French nineteenth-century portraits, which also includes works by Jacques-Louis David, Antoine-Jean Gros, and Emile Jean Horace Vernet.

Latin American Art

SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC 2007 Francis Alÿs

Francis Alÿs is among the best known artists who have emerged from Latin America over the last two decades. Trained as an architect, Alÿs turned to the visual arts in the early 1990s to explore issues related to the ways in which history affects our perception of place. This video projection is a key work in Alÿs’s oeuvre, and the third of a group of the artist’s works recently acquired by the museum. SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC… is a reflection on the absurdity of geographical boundaries, in this case the armistice lines established at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War called the Green Line. In 2004, Alÿs walked through Jerusalem, following a fifteen-mile portion of the Green Line. He carried a leaking can of green paint for the duration of the walk, going through a total of fifteen gallons. In 2005, a film of the walk was shown to a group of Israelis and Palestinians, who were invited to react spontaneously to the action; selections from these interviews accompany the film.

Prints and Drawings

Oteiza, an etching by Richard Serra, is only one of a major group of sixty-seven works on paper recently given to the museum by Gemini G.E.L., a Los Angeles–based artists’ workshop and publisher of limited-edition prints. Included in this major gift of contemporary graphic art are works by Vija Celmins, Jasper Johns, Toba Khedoori, Ed Ruscha, Malcolm Morley, Robert Rauschenberg, Cecily Brown, Susan Rothenberg, Jonathan Borofsky, and Frank Gehry, and multiple works by Ellsworth Kelly (twenty-one prints), Richard Serra (fourteen prints), John Baldessari (five prints), and Bruce Nauman (ten prints). All were published by Gemini G.E.L. between 2002 and 2007.

Arthur F. Mathews (United States, 1860–1945), Monterey Cypress, c. 1930, oil on canvas, 42 x 46 in. (106.68 x 116.84 cm), TR.Daly, Nancy Daly Riordan.

George Bellows (United States, Ohio, Columbus, 1882–1925), Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919, oil on panel, 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.28 cm), Gift of Raymond J. and Margaret Horowitz, M.2007.84.

William Trost Richards (United States, 1833–1905), Woodland Interior, c. 1865–66, charcoal on paper, 22 x 17 1/8 in. (55.88 x 43.5 cm), TR.14965, American Art Acquisition Fund.

John Biggers (United States, 1924–2001), Cotton Pickers, 1947, conté crayon and gouache on paperboard, 9 5/8 x 29 3/4 in. (100.65 x 75.57 cm), TR.14966, American Art Deaccession Fund and the Black American Art Acquisition Fund.

Gamesboard, Turkey, 16th century, wood inlaid with ebony and ivory, closed: 18 x 13 1/2 x 2 1/8 in. (45.72 x 34.29 x 2 1/8 cm); open: 18 1/4 x 26 3/4 x 1 in. (46.36 x 67.95 x 2.54 cm), Purchased with funds provided by Camilla Chandler Frost, M.2007.100.

Maurizio Cattelan (Italy, active Milan, b. 1960), Hollywood, 2001, chromogenic print, 69 5/8 x 157 3/4 x 3 1/4 in. (176.85 x 400.69 x 8.26 cm), TR.14943, William James Bell.

Richard Serra (United States, b. 1939), Band, 2005, steel, 153 x 846 x 440 in. (388.62 x 2148.84 x 1117.6 cm), TR.14983, The Broad Contemporary Art Museum Foundation.

Mary Ann Corse (United States, b. 1945), Untitled, from the White Arch Inner Band series, 1996, glass microspheres in acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (243.84 x 243.84 cm), TR.14995, Modern and Contemporary Art Council, New Talent Purchase Award by exchange.

Adolf Loos (Austria, 1870–1933), Clock, 1906–7, brass, bronze, and glass, a) clock: 18 3/4 x 17 1/4 x 10 1/4 in. (47.63 x 43.82 x 26.04 cm); b) pendulum: length: 10 1/8 in. (25.72 cm) (length); 4 1/4 in. (10.8 cm) (diam.), TR.14898a-b, Mark and Debbie Attanasio, Max Palevsky and Jodie Evans.

Pietro Berrettini (called Pietro da Cortona) (Italy, 1596–1669), St. Martina, c. 1635–40, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 30 in. (95.25 x 76.2 cm), Gift of The Ahmanson Foundation, M.2007.100.

Alexandre Dubois-Drahonet (France, 1791–1835), Portrait of Monsieur Gest, 1816, oil on canvas, 24 7/16 x 18 7/8 in. (62 x 48 cm), TR.14990, European Painting Deaccession Fund.

Francis Alÿs (Belgium, active Mexico, Mexico City, b. 1959), SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC, 2007, video projection; oil on canvas; woods, metal, plastic, film reels, film, vellum; map; Mini Macintosh hard drives, monitor; display tables, stools, documents; lamps, various dimensions, TR.14948, Latin American Art Deaccession Fund.

Richard Serra (United States, b. 1939), Oteiza, 2003, one color etching, ed. of 48, 59 1/2 x 47 1/2 in. (151.13 x 120.65 cm), Gemini G.E.L.

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Recent Gifts
and Purchases