A Day at the Broad

Excellent!
That was pretty much my universal response as I entered each gallery of Renzo’s house of art worship. Devoted galleries allow the viewer to become completely immersed in the work of each artist. And they did a superb job of matching the scale of the gallery to the scale of the artist’sbody of work.

The huge gallery space provided for Jeff Koons reifies the commercial didactic that is the intention of this artist (one has to love the security guard who is always present guarding his Rabbit).

And then there is Cindy Sherman (an artist whose work is dearer to my sense of aesthetic expression) who was provided with another large gallery where one becomes completing encased within her self-other portraits.

What makes this exhibition so successful is that seminal works are included for every artist shown. And in most cases there are multiple important pieces for each artist. There are too many names to mention, but a few of my highlights were: Damien Hirst’s butterfly wing stained-glass paintings (they look like paintings), Jasper Johns Flag (nice to see it up close and personal), Chris Burden’s oversized LAPD uniforms (possibly my favorite), Leon Golub’s large scale figurative works (again, surrounding you in a single gallery), and of course Serra’s Band (don’t ask why, just walk through them and submit to the aesthetic).

Only one standout disappointment was the display of Burden’s lampposts. I would have preferred if these had been integrated into a transitional colonnade that everyone would have to traverse while commuting between the old and the new museums: clustered together like an art object did not seem to fit with the social didactic that we have come expect from Burden. I hope that he would have preferred to have had these integrated these into the museum in a more subversive fashion.

Anyway, this exhibition nicely links many of the most significant American modernists with some of the more critically acclaimed contemporary artists of our times.

This is a blockbuster show in my book.

--ART