LACMA

Ahmanson, Plaza Level: Artworks on view

Begun in 1946 and augmented in 1980 by establishment of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, this collection includes a rich selection of paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and illustrated books. The Rifkind Center holds seven thousand works on paper and a library of more than four thousand volumes, including superior impressions of woodcuts and lithographs by Kirchner, Heckel, Emil Nolde, and Kandinsky, as well as rare periodicals and portfolios by Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, and Max Pechstein.

Erich Heckel

New in the Reading Room: 7 German Art Catalogues

April 16, 2010

There are those of us in the book world—you know who you are—who feel an uncanny affinity with Thomas Mann’s observation, “Only the exhaustive is truly interesting.” Attracted to endless encyclopedias, massive catalogues, and arcane compendia of all types, we’re perverse enough to gladly trade a free round-trip ticket to Paris for a week’s lodging in Borges’s Library of Babel. One LACMA publication could be placed on any list of exhaustive works: German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, a two-volume behemoth published in 1989.

Avatars of the Gods

April 26, 2010

Exhibition curator Timothy Benson brings us some other striking interpretations of the Niebelunlied, including illustrations by Carl Otto Czeschka and the woodcuts of Franz Grohs, never before exhibited at LACMA. In a charming little book (LACMA’s copy once belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm II), Czeschka shows a young girl, Kriemhild, dreaming that her brothers, the eagles, will kill her lover, the falcon. Kriemhild is a major player in the original saga (whom Wagner would re-cast as Gutrune, just a nice girl looking for a husband).