How museums became known as whispery places full of soft stringed instruments and slowly ticking clocks is a question best left to those who watch the changing forces of popular opinion, but that's a generalization that definitely does not apply to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art these days.
It's been a busy week of big news on the Miracle Mile, led in large part by LACMA announcing on Nov. 6 its "largest gift of art" in its history, a bequest from philanthropist A. Jerrold Perenchio.
Forty-seven artworks will now find a forever home at the museum, including a water-lilies painting by Claude Monet, a Pablo Picasso drawing, and "the first painting by Edouard Manet to enter the LACMA collection," a work called "M. Gauthier-Lathuille fils" from 1879.
The pieces have "rarely been seen in public," says the museum, which will mark its 50th anniversary in 2015.
But there's no laurel-resting 'round LACMA, as the institution makes another newsy leap forward, this one involving its campus. The museum's prospective design for an amorphous new building from the future -- complete with a bridge over Wilshire Boulevard -- was given a go-ahead by the LA County Board of Supervisors this week via unanimous vote.
The architecturally ambitious overhaul scotches a number of existing buildings on the campus while bringing in a structure that mimics the neighboring tar pits in soft, fluid shape. (The LA Times says the board gave the go-ahead on $7.5 million to start.)
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Adding to 47 artworks and architectural approval? Metro joined Mayor Garcetti and other civic officials on Friday, Nov. 7 in front of the museum to officially breaking ground on the Metro Purple Line extension, which is expected to see completion, complete with a station at Wilshire and Fairfax, in 2023.
Big x 3.
No cobwebs or soft murmurs at the county art museum; rather, muscular momentum is what it is all about along the historic, art-plentiful, Metro-ready Miracle Mile.
Image: "Au Cafe Concert: La Chanson du Chien," 1875, by Edgar Degas, courtesy of LACMA
