Eye for the Sensual at LACMA's Resnick Pavilion

Context: Silk Ficus with Hot-Glued Plastic Lemons

Full disclosure: I'm not a big fan of Mannerism, Rococo, or paintings of the Paris Salon, so my take here on The Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection will be an impression of my own gestalt of the show rather than a nuanced look into 17th to early 20th century European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. One of a trio of exhibitions that opens LACMA's new Resnick Pavilion, the show showcases the private collection of the building's primary benefactors, Lynda and Stewart Resnick.

In Bill Lasarow's review of the new building at the Huffington Post, he offers a great depiction of "going through" the show:

The artifacts of civilization carted over from their Beverly Hills manse is hyperinflated fluff that is laid out in a series of temporary enclosures that feel like a forced march, as back and forth you go. The entire effect is so unremittingly repressive that when it finally spits you back out into the open central space in which the superb "Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico" exhibition holds forth, the spirit is immediately lightened, the mind ready to read lots of labels instructive on the subject of ancient Mexico. The contrast makes a sage of Mr. Piano.

In reality, when the show spits you out, it's into the giftshop, that other pillar of capitalism and art museum solvency.

Claudet's Cupid Playing with a Butterfly, Early 1800's bronze

 When I look at a work of art, it is fundamentally the completion of a link between the artist's intent and me the viewer. In the best art, this dialog and still be heard, savored, and appreciated over the din of the work's patron and commissioner, the history of its provenance, and the multiple contexts where the was bought, stolen, stored, or displayed. Seeing a Greek bronze in a Grecian villa means one thing; another layer of meaning gets added when the work is plundered and finds a place of honor in a Roman Villa. Still more complexity is added when a work is buried and forgotten, then rediscovered and recontextualized at a place like the Villa Borghese. When in Rome, it was difficult to see a sculpture or painting of Leda and the Swan as anything more than a thinly veiled attempt at showing off a nice set of hooters. So what should I think about a 500 year-old bust of a young Roman emperor that decorates a Beverly Hills home, carved a millennia after the fall of the Roman Empire? Work without a strong voice of its own is bound to get drowned out by the tastes and intentions of the collection's amalgamators. 

Far Left and Right:
Cordier's Said Abdullah from the Tribe of Mayac in the Realm of Darfour and African Venus, 1848, 1851, bronze
center is Lehmann's The Sirens Luring Ulysses, 1847,  observed by Diane Calder

With the primacy of Modernism, Salon painters like Henri Lehmann have fallen out of favor and now come across as hackneyed and clichéd. Ninetieth century busts of African tribal leaders may have meant something different in the era when the slave trade was falling out of favor--and the argument put forth may be that Africans can be noble and proud instead of commodities--but 160 years later these busts are also reminiscent of French Colonialism; could a pair of busts consisting of a named man and a woman labeled as an object--African Venus--speak any lounder about the subjugation of women? You wind up getting a lot of other strange juxtapositions that drown out anything approaching the artists' intentions. Consider the pairing of Ingres' Virgin with the Host and Fragonard's erotic Two Girls on a Bed Playing with Their Dogs on display in the Resnick's bedroom amidst their collection of Art Deco furniture.

Widmann's Two Gladiators in Combat, circa 1740's marble

With the 18th century Bohemian take on antiquity (above), I'm reminded of Leonardo Da Vinci's take on other artists' representation of the human form (without a corresponding understanding of anatomy), with bodies that look like "a sack of rocks." The fact that the net in the vanquished gladiator's hand looks like a hunk of tripe doesn't help matters. Knowing that the Resnick collecting  started by buying a work that was misattributed to Antonio Guardi points to the inversion of the museum's traditional process where knowledge and investigation precedes the ability to purchase a work for the collection. Another example comes from their purchase of a large marble portrait of Napoleon, bid on sight unseen, which turned out to be much larger and heavier than expected. With anecdotes like these, the primary signifiers are of affluence and power, and a return to the disposable income and economic disparities not seen since the industrial revolution.

Art Deco Decorative Arts around Maillol's Torso of l'Action Enchainee, 1905-06 bronze

There are a few small works where the voice of the artist still communicates directly with the viewer, but for the most part, it feels good to finally step out of the galleries into the fresh Olmec air.

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