LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will present three major and diverse exhibitions to debut its new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. The Resnick Pavilion will open to the public in October 2010 with Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection; Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700–1915; and Olmec: Masterworks of Ancient Mexico. The inaugural exhibitions will highlight the diversity of the museum’s encyclopedic collection and programming, as well as the flexibility of the Renzo Pianodesigned pavilion. The new 45,000 square foot building—the cornerstone of Phase II of LACMA’s ongoing Transformation—will be the largest purposebuilt, naturally lit museum space in the world. The opening exhibitions will showcase this vast new space with an equally expansive selection of art, ranging from exquisitely detailed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European dress, to monumental, twenty-ton ancient Olmec heads, to some of the finest works by renowned painters and sculptors of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth–century Europe.
Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection
Eye for the Sensual features approximately 125 European paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts from the remarkable collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick. Since the early 1980s, the Resnicks have collected in many areas ranging from European to American to contemporary art. The exhibition will highlight their interest in European painting and sculpture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century along with a selection of Art Deco furniture, sculpture, and decorative arts from their collection. Among the works presented will be Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-
Lebrun’s iconic portrait of Queen Marie-Antoinette; Jacob Jordaens’s vigorous Revel of Bacchus and Silenus, executed by the artist while still in his twenties; and sculptures by artists such as Clodion and Jean-Antoine Houdon. The exhibition is curated by J. Patrice Marandel, LACMA’s Robert H. Ahmanson Chief Curator of European Art, and Bernard Jazzar, Curator of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Collection.
Olmec: Masterworks of Ancient Mexico
Olmec is the first West Coast presentation of massive works and smallscale sculptures produced by Mexico’s earliest civilization, which began around 1400 BC and was centered in the Gulf Coast states of Veracruz and Tabasco. Olmec architects and artists produced the earliest monumental structures and sculptures on the North American continent, including enormous basalt portrait heads of their rulers, which can weigh up to twenty-four tons. Small-scale jadeite objects, which embody the symbolism of sacred and secular authority among the Olmec, attest to the longdistance exchange of rare resources that existed as early as 1000 BC, and
Olmec artists were unsurpassed in their ability to work this extremely hard stone with elementary tools of chert, water, and sand. The opening of Olmec will coincide with Los Angeles celebrations of the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence and the centennial of the Mexican revolution. The exhibition is co-organized by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, LACMA, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and is curated at LACMA by Virginia Fields, senior curator of Arts of the Ancient Americas.
Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700–1915
Celebrating LACMA’s recent acquisition of a major collection of European men’s, women’s, and children’s garments and accessories, Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 will present a large selection to the public for the first time. The exhibition will tell the story of fashion’s aesthetic and technical development from the Age of Enlightenment to World War I. Fashioning Fashion will examine the sweeping changes that occurred in fashionable dress spanning a period of over 200 years, with a fascinating look at the details of luxurious textiles,
exacting tailoring techniques, and lush trimmings. Highlights will include an eighteenth-century man’s vest intricately embroidered with powerful symbolic messages relevant to the French Revolution; an evening mantle with silk embroidery, glass beads, and ostrich feathers designed by French couturier Émile Pingat (active 1860-96); and spectacular three-piece suits and gowns worn at the royal courts of Europe. Fashioning Fashion is curated by Sharon S. Takeda, department head and senior curator, and Kaye D. Spilker, curator, Costume and Textiles at LACMA.
The installation for Eye for the Sensual and Fashioning Fashion will be designed by world-famous stage designers Studio Pier Luigi Pizzi-Massimo Pizzi Gasparon. Recognized as one of the leading designers of opera productions in the world, Pier Luigi Pizzi has worked for all of the great opera stages including the Teatro La Fenice, Venice and the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. Pier Luigi Pizzi has designed many exhibition installations, such as the 2009 Florence Biennale as well as Seicento: La Pittura Italiana Nei Musei di Francia, the major show of seventeenth century Italian paintings in French museums, at the Grand Palais in 1992. The presentation for Eye for the Sensual and Fashioning Fashion will be the designers' first project in Los Angeles.
