Art and culture may be new to Southern California, but in recent years the area has become one of the most sophisticated art centers in the nation, represented not only by the world class exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art but with shows like the J. Paul Getty Museum’s current and quite fantastic offering, “Vision in Motion: The Photographs of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.”
If not quite as well known a modern artist-photographer as Man Ray or Bernice Abbott, Moholy-Nagy was a highly influential resident genius at Germany’s Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s, and, starting in 1937, at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, where Moholy-Nagy founded his School of Design in 1939 and ran until his death in 1946. Born in Hungary in 1895, the pioneering modernist “New Vision” photographer was also a designer and teacher.
Wounded in World War I as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he turned to painting, drawing and writing during his convalescence and came to see art and most particularly modernist art as a civilizing force in the emerging world of the 20th Century. It couldn’t stand up to World War II–Moholy-Nagy fled to Chicago from Germany and the Nazis in 1937–but his art kept the bold new ideas and perceptions of his era alive into a brave new postwar world he unfortunately did not live to see, though he influenced it mightily.
The exhibition at the Getty (17985 Pacific Coast Hwy., Malibu; 310-459-7611) includes some 40 photographic prints of his works between 1923 and 1934. Some are whimsical, the woman sitting next to an exact image of herself in “Double Portrait of Gret Palucca;” some futuristic, the perforated contraptions of “Light-Space Modulator;” some disturbingly surreal, the people prowling the telephone lines above a disembodied cabaret clown in “My Name Is Rabbit, I Know Nothing.” Show closes Oct. 8.
Hopper’s imagination
In New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave.; 212-570-3600) has reached into its unrivalled collection of Edward Hopper works to put on one of the biggest crowd-pleaser exhibitions of the New York tourist summer season, “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination.” “Nighthawks,” “Early Sunday Morning” and dozens of other universally treasured Hopper works are on view. Go early, as lines often form down the street and around the corner. The show closes Oct. 15.
Just a few blocks north of the Whitney, the National Academy of Design (1083 Fifth Ave.; 212-369-4880) is showing a unique and surprising “Contemporary British Architecture: Recent Projects from the Royal Academy of Arts,” through Sept. 17. There are some extraordinary and extraordinarilly beautiful examples of modern building design among the 80 drawings, documents, sketches, paintings and models on view.
Nature show
If you missed the National Academy of Design, Cooper-Hewitt 19th Century American landscape show, “Nature Observed, Nature Interpreted,” it will be at Ft. Worth’s Amon Carter Museum (3501 Camp Bowie Blvd.; 817-738-1933) through Sept. 3. In the pre-aviation, pre-TV, pre-movie 19th Century, fabulous paintings such as these did for travelogues–indeed, did for travel.
The artist-creators of these usually monumental canvases–Frederic Church, Thomas Moran, Thomas Cole–were as much explorers as painters. They trekked to some of the most remote areas of the planet, including the Arctic and the remote jungles of South America and produced spectacular conceptions of what they saw.
Pol portraits
To get you in the mood for next year’s presidential election campaigns, Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art (500 17th St., N.W.; 202-638-1439) is showing “American Politicians: Photographs, 1840-1993). Works by such masters as Matthew Brady, Robert Frank and Garry Winograd present political portrait subjects as diverse as Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. These photos tend to ennoble some real rascals (i.e.: the eloquent but corrupt Daniel Webster) and generally make you fonder of them than the annoying fellows you find on television nowadays. But bear in mind that the old time pols, even Lincoln, were as reviled and ridiculed in their own times as ours are now. This show closes Sept. 4.
The weird and valuable
It probably won’t have the appeal of the National Air and Space Museum, but Washington has added a new museum, devoted to the American patent process and the weird and valuable inventions it fostered. Called, if not too thrillingly, the Patent and Trademark Museum, it has displays about the inventive Thomas A. Edison, among others, and exhibits of patent models from the 1800s. Located at 2121 Crystal Dr., in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Va. (703-305-8341), it’s open to the public 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday
Sacriligious Shakespeare
Lightning has not yet struck Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, so if you’re vacationing in the nation’s capital and are in search of some evening merriment, you might want to risk taking in the zany Reduced Shakespeare Company’s latest madcap send-up, this time a terrifyingly sacrilegious satire on the Bible called “The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged).”
Employing everything from peculiar fig leaves to high-powered squirt guns, and jokes ranging from the ecclesiastical to the scatological to the heavily borrowed (God’s “Top Ten Rejected Commandments”), the show manages to be funnier than the group’s “The Complete History of America (abridged),” which was something of a take off on Ken Burns’ “Civil War,” but not quite so classic and great as their original “The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged),” whose “Romeo and Juliet” was nonpareil.
As the trio notes, the Bible has as much sex and violence as anything ever published, or on television today, and they provide plenty: the violence including decapitations (Salome and John the Baptist) and the sex including mostly Chicago-native, Second City alum and former clown Matt Croke, in drag. Reed Martin, another former clown, and Austin Tichenor, whose wife Dee Ryan performs with Second City, complete the trio.
Not content with trifling with the word of God, the group takes pot shots at Sen. Phil Gram, Sen. Jesse Helms and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, so it’s really amazing they’re still performing. They close at the Kennedy Center (202-416-8000) Aug. 20, run at the Pittsburgh Public Theater from Nov. 21 to Dec. 31, and, among other stops, will be performing in Glen Ellyn, Ill., Feb 3.
