ART: LACMA: Hockney Portraits, Teotihuacan, Young Il Ahn, and the Coronation Carpet

There’s a trove of things going on at LACMA. The Hockney show “82 Portraits and 1 Still Life” is fascinating and distinctively colorful. The artist did this series of portraits over a couple of years, inviting a variety of people to sit for him, ranging from big names in the art world to the artist’s dentist, his housekeeper, and her daughter, subjects ranging in age from 8 to 80s. Each subject sat in the same chair in the same setting for three days for Hockey to capture what he playfully called a “20-hour exposure”. The result makes you really appreciate the portraits, what is unique about each, and how personality is expressed in the face, the hands, the way each one sits in the chair. The colors are all Hockney’s signature vibrant colors.

Then walk across from BCAM to the Resnick Pavilion and step back 500 years to see a palatial Persian carpet from the early 1500s when Persian carpets really started to become a national industry. This particular carpet features a central medallion in red, a field of cream richly decorated with trees, vine, and animals, corner scenes on red, and an ornate deep blue border. This particular carpet is called the Coronation Carpet, as it was used in front of the throne at the coronation of King Edward VII of Britain.

Then step into the next series of rooms and back another 100 years or more to see “City and Cosmos: The Arts of Teotihuacan”. This fascinating exhibition presents a large collection of artifacts from the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan, which flourished in the first few centuries CE, a thriving cosmopolitan city of 125,000 people at its height. The city was divided into districts dedicated to different gods and with different types of crafts. The exhibit is similarly arranged, to show the different artifacts in proximity which part of the city they were found in. I was quite taken with the expressive statues and masks, ceramics and stoneware, and the murals, many of which are surprisingly vivid even today. Their colors were mixed into plaster in way that allowed the colors to endure, and apparently the city was brightly colored with a lot of murals.

Over in the Hammer Building, I flashed back to the present time, with a showing of Korean-American abstract artist Young Il Ahn. His “Water” series plays on a theme of “unexpected light”, with a very large panels of what appear to be monochrome colors from a distance, but on approaching, appear to crack, and an underlying color of unexpected light breaks through. The hidden colors have such a luminous quality that the paintings almost appear to be backlit, and it is surprising to see the previously unseen colors emerge as you get closer. It reminded me of being on Hawaii and seeing a lava flow at dusk, dark volcanic rock with an eerie orange light glowing through the cracks from below.

And of course I had to visit all my perennial favorites: Chris Burden’s “Metropolis” (the most amazing track for Matchbox cars ever) and “Urban Light” (the most Instagramable collection of lampposts) , Tony Smith’s “Smoke”, Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” (the giant boulder suspended overhead), and the Cantor Sculpture Garden full of Rodin and Bourdelle sculptures.