Brian Henson pays tribute to his dad Jim's bawdier side in "Puppet Up! Uncensored" ... A new history of "The Twilight Zone" ... A restaurant where you'll be served by our robot overlords ... We talk with the dancing homeless Crenshaw Cowboy by his spaceship ... And rescuing The Formosa Cafe, a piece of Hollywood history. (Photo: Cypress Park. John Rabe)
Henson's 'Puppet Up! Uncensored' in the spirit of Muppet Show's bawdy backstage banter
In a "heart felt" interview, Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Brian Henson about "Puppet Up! Uncensored," a half-improv/half-Muppet classics performance Saturday, June 17 on the Charlie Chaplin Soundstage at the Jim Henson Company studio lot.
"The funniest stuff - easily, always - was what the puppets were saying before they called 'Action!' and after they called 'Cut!' And you can imagine that Gonzo and Kermit and Miss Piggy are pretty adult in their sense of humor. My father had a very naughty, irreverent sense of humor."
I don't blame you if you're a little shocked that any show at The Jim Henson Company needs to be labeled "Uncensored." But remember that Jim Henson's first success was not "Sesame Street," but "Sam and Friends." It wasn't dirty, but it was aimed at adults.
"Puppet Up! Uncensored" is a mix of improv sketches and classic bits that live only on kinescopes. Brian Henson, Jim's son, says, "I started this about ten years ago as an experiment, and I wanted to develop a new tone of comedy for puppets, like what my dad had done with The Muppet Show in the mid-1970s. And it had gotten to a point where the writers couldn't figure out what was funny with puppets. The puppeteers were getting too script bound. And it was starting to feel stale. So my wife actually suggested that I get in touch with The Groundlings (improv group)."
What was intended to inspire the writers and performers actually became the new performance style. Members of the audience shout out prompts, and the puppeteers take it from there. "We weren't trying to be shock comedy, and we certainly aren't. But what we found when we were improvising and in these workshops is that the improvising between puppets was really delicious and fast and funny, and it was best when it was uncensored. And also because we're asking for audience suggestions and if the audience is really enjoying the show, the person who yells the loudest, it's probably gonna be an inappropriate suggestion for children."
Like this scene, that features a Nicaraguan reproductive expert and her translator talking about "where babies come from:"
This Puppet Up! video is pretty safe for work
Henson, 53, began controlling marionettes in his father's films in 1981 and quickly proved a formidable performer. He went on to work in animatronics and as a director on many children's films and television series, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dinosaurs, The Witches, and The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Listen to the interview in the audio player for much more, including details of "The Happytime Murders," an R-rated thriller he'll start filming this summer, starring Melissa McCarthy. In the movie, puppets are the hated minority in Los Angeles. "When they bleed, they fluff," he says. "They go, 'Is it felt or flesh?' And you DO NOT call puppets a 'sock.'"
'May I recommend the WD-40?' -- Robots serve Korean BBQ at new restaurant in Montclair
“It’s almost like you are getting your own personal robot to your table. The intent is to be leading edge in technology and improve the guest experience.” -- Gen Korean VP Michael Yates
Korean barbecue is a hands-on experience. The server takes your order, and minutes later your food is brought to your table where you cook it on the grill.
And so it is at most Gen Korean BBQ Houses in Southern California. Hands-on. Except the hands at one of its new locations -- in Montclair -- belong to robots.
The Montclair Gen BBQ House had a soft opening last week, with new robotic technology. Gen Korean VP Michael Yates gave us a demonstration at this location, where eight robots service 36 of the 97 tables.
Here is how it works: A human server takes your order on a tablet. The message is sent to the back of the restaurant, where the robots are docked. A human chef adds the order to the robot tray, then pushes a button on a tablet, sending the food-laden robot to your table, on tracks in the floor.
It sounds like a long process, but within a couple minutes – sometimes it's even less than that– you unload the food from the tray, and you're ready to start grilling. The robots stay at designated tables approximately 40 seconds, enough time to grab the food ... and take a selfie or two.
“We also have a restaurant under construction currently in Fremont, California that will embrace the same robotic system,” Yates says. Montclair "is the first location [with robots], but I wouldn’t consider it a test because we are up and running. There was a lot of extensive planning. We are one of the first that is using robotics in casual dining.”
Gen BBQ offers fixed-price buffet style dining, with everything you’d expect from Korean barbecue, like marinated sweet and savory beef to pork loin and ox intestine.
Yates says the robots are meant to simplify the buffet experience and keep the food flowing as fast as possible. The robot tray can hold up to eight plates. Because there is a limited number of robot serviced tables, they are first come, first-served. Even if their table is not directly served by one of the robots, patrons will see the robots zooming throughout the restaurant.
The Montclair Gen Korean BBQ House grand opening is this Saturday.
To hear the robots in action, make sure to click the audio link above.
Idle Hour, Highland Park Bowl owners to restore, reopen fabled Formosa Cafe
"You're sitting in those red banquette booths and getting sloshed because everyone from Frank Sinatra's to Orson Welles' to Marilyn's fanny has warmed that exact leatherette and sipped from those exact highball glasses with the red maraschino cherry, and therein lies the magic." -- Crime writer Denise Hamilton on Off-Ramp, 1-11-2017
In January, crime novelist Denise Hamilton helped us lament the downfall and closure of The Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Blvd, a watering hole for generations of Hollywood stars and wannabes, and a location for "La La Land" and "LA Confidential."
I said back then there was talk that Bobby Green and his 1933 Group were hoping to secure a lease on the place, and this week LA Magazine's Chris Nichols got the scoop:
The ancient Chinese restaurant, known for its famous clientele and appearances in films including L.A. Confidential, will be restored by the 1933 Group and will reopen next summer. Owners Bobby Green, Dimitri Komarov, and Dima Liberman have signed a long-term lease with the owners of the West Hollywood Gateway shopping center, which owns the restaurant property.
The restaurant was opened by prizefighter Jimmy Bernstein and run by Lem Quon for generations. Quon’s grandson Vince continued the tradition in recent years. He eventually brought in an outside operator who remodeled the interior without permission, causing uproar among fans. “We’re gonna put it all back,” said 1933’s Bobby Green. “Vince has everything in storage: All the autographed photos, all the Elvis decanters, the lucky Buddha. He’s got everything.”
-- LA Magazine
I think we can say this is fairly unalloyed good news. The group's two latest projects, The Idle Hour ...
... and The Highland Park Bowl, treated neglected historic spaces with respect, and have been extremely popular.
Green says in architectural terms, the Idle Hour - one of the last surviving examples of programmatic architecture - may be just as significant as the Formosa, but in terms of Hollywood history, "Talk to the average person, and definitely the Formosa would be the most historic. This little bar is almost in a sense the Hollywood museum Hollywood always wanted but never really got."
Green told me by phone that the Formosa is not in bad shape. "I wouldn't call it gutted. The bones are still good. The ghosts are still living in it."
After a million-dollar renovation, Green hopes to have it re-opened by spring or summer of 2018. He plans to update the famous Formosa cocktails for the modern drinks palate, and will serve Chinese food ... although he points out it often served regular American fare, "so as far as sticking with history, really we could go anywhere."
Green gave me a lot more detail in our interview; listen to the whole thing in the audio player.
Hidden History: Is this a mile marker in Pasadena? Or a tombstone?
Robert Petersen is the host of the podcast The Hidden History of Los Angeles, and he shares his discoveries with KPCC's Off-Ramp.
I’m standing near the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Holliston Street in Pasadena, in front of a McDonald’s. In front of me is a 3-foot tall concrete tablet that looks like a tombstone. On the face of the concrete tablet is the number 11 with a circle around it, the numbers 220 and 200, and the letters “F” and “B.” That’s it. What is this thing?
Even though it looks out of place, this is probably the oldest thing on the corner, and it's actually a long-lost ancestor of the GPS system in your phone -- a great-great grandfather of Google maps, Waze, even the Thomas Guide.
Near the turn of the last century, during the 1890s, people traveling outside of urban areas faced a difficult challenge: finding places. There weren’t addresses as we know them today. A newspaper editorial from 1892 put it like this:
“If you are a stranger in Hog Hollow and ask the way to Colonel Liberty Lumm’s place, it doesn’t greatly help you to be told to “go a mile, but maybe its nigher two to the old Seth Pratt farm. Seth’s dead, but his darters run the farm. Turn to your right till you come to Pogne’s Woods. Take a short cut thru the medders tell you come back to the highway … Take the first road to the east after you pass where the old Indian burying ground used to be, and Colonel Lumm’s is the first white house beyond the haunted house north of the David pasture
In comes Albert Little Bancroft and his “Ten-Block System for Numbering Country Houses.”
Born in Ohio, the brother of California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, Albert Bancroft moved to California in 1858 and bought a farm in Contra Costa County, about 27 miles northeast of San Francisco. He split his time between the farm and his Victorian mansion in San Francisco. Living at the farm made him aware of the lack of addresses in rural areas. In 1890, Bancroft read a newspaper editorial criticizing a proposal to number rural houses just like city homes. The editor argued that, while naming roads and putting up directional signs were good ideas, the eventual construction of new buildings between those already numbered in succession would ruin the proposed system.
As a new rural dweller, Bancroft took it upon himself to find a solution and what he came up with was the “Ten-Block System for Numbering Country Houses.” The plan was as follows: Addresses were assigned to the land, rather than to existing structures. Each mile of road would be divided into ten imaginary blocks of 528 feet. Two numbers would be assigned to each block, an odd number on the left side, and even on the right. Each structure on a non-urban block would have its own address depending on the location of its entrance on the road. A home built afterwards would receive the block number assigned to the land on which it was built.
Bancroft tried the system in Contra Costa County, then moved to LA and spent years cajoling members of a citizens commission to adopt his plan, and it ended up adopting many of Bancroft’s proposals.
The commission named and measured roads, acquired right of way agreements and land needed for road expansion and realignment, and erected concrete milestones, which identified the name of the road and the distance from the county courthouse, which was the starting point for the numbering system. By 1908, the commission had completed its work on six major thoroughfares, including Foothill Boulevard.
In 1907, the LA Times remarked on the progress of the block system:
“Concrete milestones have been placed on six of the main roads of Los Angeles County, which run from the Courthouse to the county line. The system is to be continued until every major road in the county is properly marked. This means much for autoists …The work is being pressed forward as rapidly as possible.”
After all Bancroft’s work, and a good start, LA County created a new highway commission, and it dumped Bancroft’s plan. All we have left of Bancroft’s System is this 111–year-old concrete tablet sitting in front of a McDonald's in Pasadena.
And those markings on the tablet? The number 11 with a circle around it tells us that we are 11 miles from the old county courthouse – today the site of the Foltz Criminal Court Building in downtown L.A. The “F” and the “B?” They tell us that we are on the old Foothill Boulevard Route. And the 220 and 200 tell us the block numbers.
It’s ironic that people often assume that this concrete tablet is a tombstone because, in a way, it is. It is the grave marker for Bancroft’s Ten Block System for Numbering Country Houses – the great-great grandfather of that navigation system in your pocket.
The corner of Colorado and Holliston in Pasadena is another place where you can find the hidden history of Los Angeles.
How 'The Twilight Zone' taught one critic everything he needed to know about life
For Kent, Ohio television critic Mark Dawidziak, "The Twilight Zone" is literally a way of life. When his daughter Becky developed an interest in Rod Serling's work before high school, they started a nightly ritual of two episodes, which always concluded the same way: with dad saying, "Let that be a lesson to you."
"Hmm," he eventually thought, "Maybe there's a book in that?"
Dawidziak's new hardcover, "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone," is the result of his lifelong obsession with the program, reinvigorated and reassessed by watching the anthology over again with his daughter. The book features 50 lessons Dawidziak gleaned from the show, as well as guest lessons from various writers and celebrities, and a foreword by Serling's daughter, Anne. Mark and Becky Dawidziak chatted with us from WKSU in Kent about a few of the series' toughest teaching moments.
Before you accuse me...
In season two's "The Howling Man" (1960), H.M. Wynant plays David Ellington, a starving, post-WW1 traveler in Europe who begs to be taken into a monastery in the midst of a storm. Inside, he's tersely received by a group of monks who appear to be from another time, led by Brother Jerome (John Carradine). They do not want to allow Ellington to take shelter in "the hermitage," but when Ellington tries to leave, he hears a howling from the depths of the monastery and then collapses from exhaustion.
When he wakes up and hears the howling again, Ellington discovers a man who claims to be wrongly imprisoned in the castle dungeon, yet all that is keeping his cell locked is a thin wooden staff. Baffled as to why the prisoner has not pried the staff off himself, Ellington allows himself to be coerced into removing it. In doing so, he releases the devil, and the wars and weapons of the Atomic Age.
"My take on this," the elder Dawidziak says, "is that you shouldn't go messing around with other people's demons, until you've taken care of your own inner demon." Ellington's inner demon, he says, is hubris. Ellington believes he knows better than the monks, because as Becky says, "they look like wild men, and the devil looks like this harmless, innocent guy." Ellington becomes the devil's advocate, as it were, assuming Brother Jerome is wrong. Mark cites it as a biblical lesson: "remove the 'beam,' from your own eye, before you talk about the speck in your neighbor's eye."
The climax of "The Howling Man"
When no one else believes in you, believe in yourself
1963's classic thriller "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" features an unnerving performance by William Shatner as Bob Wilson, who appears to have a fear of flying. "Portrait of a frightened man," intones Serling in his narration; Wilson suffered a breakdown the last time he tried to board a plane.
This time, Wilson is holding his breath, trying to be brave as his wife offers moral support. After the plane gets in the air, Wilson starts to see a mysterious creature fiddling with the wing through his window. Maybe a bad seating choice?
Not according to Mark Dawidziak. Though Wilson is never able to show his wife, the stewardess, or anyone else the gremlin in action, his conviction in his own sanity is what saves everyone on the plane, the author says.
Wilson, after having his mental stability questioned by his wife, and being given a sedative by the flight staff, hatches a plan to kill the creature that only he can see, by stealing the air marshal's pistol and firing out the emergency exit door. Of course, this kind of disruption is grounds for an emergency landing, and while Wilson is carted away in a straitjacket, the camera pans toward the wing and a ripped open panel on it.
Never forget the little people
(This lesson isn't included in the audio! To hear Mark and Becky give their alternate takeaways from the infamous broken glasses episode, "Time Enough at Last," click on the audio player)
"Knowing where you're from, and going back to your hometown, is a real big theme in Rod Serling's work... 'Ring-A-Ding Girl' has that feeling of never forgetting where you're from, and never forgetting the people who got you there; the fact that we are all standing on somebody else's shoulders. Everybody likes to think they're self-made people, but none of us are." -Mark Dawidziak
A little later in season five after Bob Wilson's incident in the air, there was the story of starlet Bunny Blake. Blake is an enormously popular actor, says Dawidziak, whose trademarks are her fanciful rings. While shooting on location in Rome, Blake receives a gift from her hometown fan club: a very large ring. When she looks into it, she sees her loved ones in it, pleading for her to come home.
Blake decides to come home to Howardsville, Virginia, and put on a show at her old high school. But it's scheduled for the same day as the town's Founders' Day picnic, enraging her loved ones. The whole town loyally attends her show, and because of this they avoid being killed by a plane that crashed into the picnic fairgrounds. Somehow, despite being present in the town in the days before, Bunny's body is found dead in the ruins of the aircraft, and her sister finds her prophetic ring, cracked and burnt.
Off-Ramp Archives: Mark Dawidziak and Paul Bauer's biography of hobo author Jim Tully
On the show's moral core
Mark Dawidziak says that throughout Serling's entire television career, "His themes don't change. He is always writing about the evils of prejudice and bigotry. He's always writing about his concerns for people of age, and what we do with people that we've used up."
The reason he chose to stage these messages in fantasy, Dawidziak says, is both simple and contextual. "What he was finding at the end of the fifties is the fact that the medium has grown up," the critic says. Serling was running into opposition from standards and practices employees over the perceived distaste sponsors and particular viewing markets would have to Serling's stories. He "retreated into the 'Twilight Zone,'" says Dawidziak, where he found out that, "if you dress this up in the cloak of fantasy, and you put it in spaceships with aliens and other planets, you can say the exact same thing you were saying in a straight drama, and no one is gonna lift an eyebrow."
When Serling launched "The Twilight Zone," the show was entirely produced by his own Cayuga Productions, Inc. (named for his summer home, Cayuga Lake). Dawidziak says that "The Twilight Zone," and writing in general, were the ways in which Serling exorcised his traumas from fighting in the Pacific Theater of WW2.
Order "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone: A Fifth-Dimension Guide to Life"
Review: Marisa Merz at the Hammer
Off-Ramp arts correspondent Marc Haefele reviews "Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space" at the Hammer Museum in Westwood through August 20.
In Marisa Merz’ Turin apartment, you couldn’t the tell the art studio from the living space. And at 91, she is still producing art there ... art that often reflects its domestic origin but also is so singular and assertive it seems to tap you on your shoulder and tell you to turn around and look at it.
Merz became active in Italy over 50 year ago as the only woman in the '60's avant garde movement called Arte Povera (Art from Poverty). Now she is the only member still active. Arte Povera fashioned humble or humble-originating art in a challenge to American-originated, commerce-saturated Pop Art. The movement protested the affluence, shallow prosperity, and materialistic insensitivity of the post-La Dolce Vita Italy. She brought forth creations that are assertive without ostentation or pretension, yet which pique your sense of wonder.
Although she eschewed the term “feminist,” Merz was part of a forceful woman-empowerment surge in 1960s Italy. The '60's brought Italian translations of feminist literature by Simon de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, as well as writings by domestic activists like Gabriella Parca. They also brought a modern divorce law and a substantial crescendo of emergent female talent -- like Merz’s -- into the world of arts and letters.
The show at the Hammer is her first American retrospective (it debuted at New York’s Metropolitan Museum Breuer Annex earlier this year). It was organized by Ian Alteveer, curator in the Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Connie Butler, chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
You are greeted by a fountain as you enter the exhibit. A white carved fiddle in a tiny pond under tiny arcs of water, it delights in its simplicity. But then your attention is overwhelmed by the contrastingly massive “Living Sculptures” dangling from the gallery ceiling.
Merz’s aluminum humanoid constructions are like old suits of armor hanging in an attic of Camelot or like giant mutant metallic jellyfish, formed in domesticity by scissors. One of her favorite shapes is a triangle, suggesting her family unit, which included her late husband Mario (d. 2003) and her daughter Beatrice. Her home is her workshop and inspiration, and it shows.
Today, her daughter speaks of how it felt, living in an atelier-home, whose domestic notes included knitting needles, yarn, and thumbtacks incorporated in wall decor. Merz seems to have broken the traditional confinement of her domestic existence by inserting into it her artist’s studio and gallery. The transformation is heightened by reified common objects. A simple chair with an abundance of nails driven into its seat is clearly not meant for sitting. It is to be looked at. So is a similarly altered table.
She uses everything from bubble wrap to nails to gold foil in her work. Due to exigencies of age, however, she has given up making her bountiful, fragile, unfired clay teste (heads) for large paintings on Japanese paper. At 91, she uses special foot-stool-stepladder contrivance to work at the top of her largest paintings, whose medium is largely canned spray paint. Many of the portraits are almost expressionist female figures in vivid reds and yellows In contrast, she also makes tiny, perfect shoes -- like those Italians call “scarpetti”-- for herself and her daughter. There are many small drawings of heads, nearly all female, in a conventional small portrait format.
There many teste here, each one singular. Teste are often painted, they seem to peer at you from their plinths like stylized heads of sea serpents. A group of them (slightly resembling hand puppets) are displayed on a broad, square waxen base: the wax field must be recast every time the group is displayed, this is said to be an onerous process. But each showing will differ slightly.
Merz does not give dates or names to most of her pieces, which are often reworked, again and again. Her present is her past and future. Even in the exhibition catalog, the pages are not numbered. Every encounter is timeless.
She has become fascinated with plain copper wire, which she obtains on large wooden spools. This wire is electricity’s favorite path, but she weaves it into shapes and fabrics, face masks, and dishes. There is a suggestion of crocheting, of confinement. And of transcendence of domesticity into something, well, hard-wired.
“The Sky is a Great Space” fills the Hammer gallery from floor to ceiling. It draws you in and sneaks up… Look back over your shoulder: there is the unexpected, staring down at you.
Off-Ramp Recommends: Expanding your Pride guide
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This weekend, streets will be closed, public transit will be essential, and West Hollywood will be packed for Pride LA celebrations. As you may have heard, the 46-year long tradition of a Pride Parade throughout WeHo will be replaced with a Resist March, focusing on civil liberties for the LGBT community. However, there will still be a festival filled with DJs, food, community advocacy groups, and vendors. But after the performances, speeches, and march, head out on your own for some less-trafficked Pride spots.
Two years ago, Off-Ramp reported on the burgeoning gay bar scene in Downtown LA. Since these bars opened, they have given LA a new destination for LGBT bar hopping. A 15-minute metro ride lets party-goers take their jubilation away from the crowds.
Here’s the rough sketch of a potential DTLA, DIY Pride crawl:
-Redline, named for LA's original transit system, is a smaller bar that will fill up quick, so best to start your evening here. Located at 131 E 6th St, Los Angeles, CA 90014.
-Cocktail connoisseurs may want to drop by Bar Mattachine, known for their mixology program and chic ambiance. Located at 221 W 7th St, Los Angeles, CA 90014.
-Precinct is a self-proclaimed "Rock 'n' Roll gay bar" with a huge dancefloor. Located at 357 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
-Ending with New Jalisco is never a bad call. This latin bar is an institution in the neighborhood and always has strong drinks and loud music. Located at 245 S Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
But beyond the bars and music, June has given Los Angeles an amazing array of LGBTQIA art exhibits.
Throughout the month you can catch an art installation curated by the One City, One Pride Festival "Go West: 40 Days of LGBTQ Art.”According to the festival's site, "One City One Pride is organized by the city of West Hollywood's cultural affairs and arts commission, with help from both the City’s Lesbian & Gay Advisory Board and Transgender Advisory Board. The festival spends 40 days emphasizing LGBT artists across mediums with multiple visual installations as well as protest sign-making workshops and documentary screenings.
So take part in Southern California’s largest Pride event and then mix in your own celebrations too!
REVIEW: The woman who brought modern art to Los Angeles, Galka Scheyer
Off-Ramp arts and culture correspondent Marc Haefele reviews “Maven of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in California,” at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena through September 25, 2017.
The jackdaw is one of the smartest birds around. In folklore, she is very acquisitive, picking up bright, beautiful, shiny things with which to line her nest. She is, in short, your basic avian art collector. In 1915, painter Alexei Jawlensky nick-named aspiring young artist Emilie Esther Scheyer “Galka,” Russian for “jackdaw.” This was the name she wore for the rest of her life. Like her namesake, she was brilliant and spent her life surrounding herself with beautiful things—as well as the people who made them.
The Norton-Simon’s current show, “Maven of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in California,” includes about 100 works from some 500 in her personal collection. They range from pieces by Lyonel Feininger to Edward Weston, but the heart of the show is the assemblage of pictures by the quartet she called “The Blue Four,” of whom Jawlensky was the first: then came Feininger, Paul Klee, and Vasily Kandinsky.
Galka gave up her own artistic ambitions to present, promote and sell their work. In 1924, she came to California as a prophet of the Blue Four avant garde, first in San Francisco, whose taste she found to be too conservative, then in Los Angeles, where she remained for the rest of her life. She lectured on, promoted, and publicized modern art as she socialized with celebrities like Joseph von Sternberg, John Cage, and Richard Neutra, who designed her house/gallery in Hollywood Hills. There she extended her collection to include another 44 painters and photographers. By the time of her 1946 death, she had acquired the best collection of modern art in the West—including Picasso, Nolde, Moholy-Nagy, Franz Marc, and Diego Rivera. By bringing so much great modern work to Los Angeles so early, she is credited with helping to make it the international art center it is today.
After her death, her collection went to the institution that is now the Norton Simon, which keeps most of it in storage. But every decade or so it treats us to a display (such as this one) of Galka’s artistic riches.
This Norton Simon show focuses on work by her personal Four Horsemen of Modernity. For over 20 years, she promoted, lectured, networked, taught and gardened naked in the sun outside the Hollywood Hills Neutra house she paid for on the installment plan. And she even managed to sell some paintings, while complaining (loudly; she was famous for her boisterous personality) how the Southland’s resistance to modern great art compelled her to live from hand to mouth in Depression Los Angeles. But she stayed her course because to her, disseminating the modern art that spoke directly of human feelings was virtually her religious destiny.
The Feininger works are generally small woodcuts and water colors—showing his engaging geometries along with his sparse yet perfect color choices, particularly in the seascapes. There are 16 works of Alexei von Jawlensky, possibly the largest number to be seen this side of Europe. Jawlensky’s work lies on the boundary between Expressionism and Abstract art, but it also often evokes ancient Slavic icons. Klee and Kandinsky are now two of the most acclaimed of modern painters, and Scheyer acquired some of the best examples of their work. Few are familiar; all of them are very fine indeed.
MORE ART: Marc reviews PMCA's show on Kleitsch, who painted early Laguna
The “non-Blue” works here vary considerably in terms of interest and importance. They include Picassos, a Diego Rivera, and subtle work from Edward Weston, Franz Marc, Lazlo Moholy Nagy, and Emil Nolde, whose affectionate profile of Galka is the show’s key image.
It is a well mounted and appealing show. But it leaves one hungering for more. Why can’t the Norton Simon find a venue where, if only once, Galka’s entire collection could be shown to the public? Although it may no longer be the best collection of modern art in the West, it is still a very fine one, assembled not just out of sheer acquisitiveness -- like most private collections -- but of love itself. It’s been in Pasadena for over 60 years. We now deserve to see it in full.