All around you are treasured objects made of precious materials: porcelain, silver, fine textiles and furniture, all of it from the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of the artists and craftspeople who made these remain anonymous, their names lost to history. They were commissioned by the wealthy elite of France and England who sought to decorate town homes and country estates in sumptuous style.The museum has a rich collection of European decorative arts.

The museum has two main galleries that introduce modern European art: this one, emphasizing French art from the early 20th century, and gallery 207, nearby, featuring German Expressionism. Here you’ll find work by some of the best-known modern European artists, including Picasso and Matisse.

This vivid blue gallery houses the museum’s collection of French art from the Rococo period, roughly 1700 to 1750. The blue background color was chosen deliberately; documents from this time indicate that wealthy French aristocrats favored colors like this one. If you visited our galleries of earlier European art, you might notice that this gallery includes relatively few religious subjects.

This gallery presents work by a number of artists, mostly European, representing the avant-garde of the 1920s and beyond. They are associated with several different artistic movements: Surrealism, Dada, and De Stijl. What they have in common is a shared sensibility: subversion or total rejection of the bourgeois culture that some believed led Europe into the horrors of World War I.

Chris Burden’s Metropolis II is an intense, kinetic sculpture—Burden has called it a “performative sculpture”—modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour.
According to Burden, “The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active 21st century city."

This sculpture embraces the paradox of being a massive volume that is also extremely light. The work is made with unsophisticated commercial materials, yet it looks fragile and intimate; there is a stark contrast between the material and the delicacy of the finished piece. You might think of it as a drawing in space: line is the predominant element. The title, Columna, refers to a basic building element—a column—suggesting the artist’s interest in architecture and space.

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum was built by Italian architect Renzo Piano. He says part of what he enjoyed about the project was the central location of the site.
“It’s in the middle of the city, it's unpretentious, it’s open, it’s generous. You don’t have to travel far away to go there. You fall in LACMA easily – it’s part of the grid of the city.

Here you will see a rotating collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics. Drawing from the rich tradition of Japanese ceramics, contemporary Japanese artists are reinterpreting ancient traditions, bringing new visions to old forms, and pushing technical, aesthetic and conceptual boundaries.
To hear LACMA curator Hollis Goodall talk about this dynamic and growing collection, press the play button below.

The East Wing of the Pavilion of Japanese Art was specially designed to display Japanese painting, including both scrolls and folding screens. 
A hanging scroll is a painting done on paper or silk, backed with thick paper and surrounded by silk borders.  At the bottom is a wooden dowel that allows the scroll to be easily rolled up and stored in a box. Here, scrolls are hung in niches to mimic the recessed alcove, or tokonoma, found in traditional Japanese homes.

This gallery highlights LACMA’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints produced from the 17th century through the 20th century.