With the New York Times calling it “a major milestone for the cultural life of the country,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new $724 million building casts a big shadow. I don’t mean only metaphorically.
At 347,500 square feet, the amoeba-shaped David Geffen Galleries not only fills much of the LACMA campus on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard but, elevated off the ground on piers, spans Wilshire to extend to the south side of the street.
A museum that doubles as an overpass? Only in L.A., right? As I approached on foot Sunday, people lined up on the Wilshire sidewalk to get inside the museum were also under it.
Before the building opens to the public on May 4, LACMA members can visit during a preview period. That began last Sunday.
I’m a member. And it seemed worth going on the first day, if only for bragging rights.
So I trekked out there from Claremont via transit: Metrolink, D Line subway, bus and, after a civilized breakfast at Republique, on foot for the last mile, purely for the exercise. (A subway stop across from the museum opens May 8.)
I was there as art lover, but I brought a notebook just in case.
LACMA’s permanent collection has been in storage since 2020. That’s when the three 1960s buildings that displayed it were demolished to make way for a replacement structure by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.
New exhibits have rotated through the two remaining buildings, the Resnick Pavilion and BCAM. There’s been art to see. But a lot less of it. We visitors could, however, watch as the enormous Zumthor building went up.
It’s finally here. After checking in, I entered the broad new plaza and walked around and under the exterior, marveling. Anyone who’s seen 2021’s Riverside Main Library, an equally futuristic building elevated on piers, will recognize the Geffen as a distant cousin.
Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO, was chatting with members passing by and cheerfully posing for selfies when asked.
I headed to the Geffen Galleries entry. There are elevators, but as a fan of stairs, I took the exterior stairway.
The building and concept are unusual, which is why it’s all the buzz in the art world, and probably also among Wilshire motorists.
It’s all concrete and glass, the exterior walls undulating gracefully rather than forming a neat box.
First impressions: It’s beautiful. It’s different. It’s vast, with 110,000 square feet of gallery space. It’s so big, it’s wearying and bewildering to navigate. Also, it’s hard to find the restrooms even with the map.
Because the museum is all on one floor, you go in thinking you can see it all, but you really can’t. I know I didn’t. I can only say I got a sense of it.
Does the architecture — the concrete walls, the windows — overpower the art? On this first visit it did. The experience was overwhelming. I drifted past the art more than I examined it. I felt like a mall walker doing laps, only without an Auntie Anne’s.
But that’s not criticism, or it’s not intended to be. This is the new LACMA. It will slowly become familiar. As visitors we will develop our own strategies for what to see, how to break up the visit into manageable chunks and how to find our favorite pieces.
I was wearing my T-shirt from The Cheech, by the way. Gotta represent the Inland Empire.
And in a delightful surprise, a Carlos Almaraz painting, “Crash in Phthalo Green,” was soon encountered. It’s part of a strangely beautiful series by Almaraz depicting distant views of freeway crashes, several of which I’ve seen at, yes, The Cheech.
I took a selfie.
Also with a local connection are a ceramic sculpture by John Mason, a onetime Pomona College art instructor, and two paintings by Alfredo Ramos Martinez, muralist at Scripps College.
Near the end of my visit, I found a reconstituted gallery, named “Labor and Leisure in the American Metropolis,” that again holds many of my favorite LACMA artworks.
These are early 20th-century paintings by George Bellows, Paul Cadmus and Thomas Hart Benton, among others. And by Millard Sheets, the Pomona-born artist.
His painting “Angel’s Flight” is a touchstone for me. I sought it out on every LACMA visit and have been sorry not to see it since 2019. Good to have it back.
Exiting the museum in need of lunch, I tried LACMA’s Erewhon Cafe, getting a prepackaged Thai tofu salad and green juice while bypassing the $20 smoothies people rave about.
Govan was at a nearby table with a dozen people. He finished eating before I did, but I found him nearby. We had a nice chat. Out came my notebook.
I brought up the concerns by some that the building wasn’t quite as big as the trio it was replacing. After walking through it, I said, it seemed plenty big.
“It’s three football fields long,” Govan agreed. He said he wanted the museum to be all on one level and that among the beneficiaries would be moms with strollers.
I noted two things I liked. One is the more prominent location for the 1965 Alexander Calder mobile, now outside the new cafe and refurbished. Govan said most visitors had never noticed it.
The other is how LACMA’s once-distantly located Pavilion for Japanese Art now feels folded into the campus by its proximity to the Geffen Galleries.
“It was important to Peter to do that,” Govan said. “So many people are saying, ‘What is this building?’ It’s been here since 1986.”
LACMA came into being in 1965, when its William Pereira-designed campus debuted. From photos, it was lovely at the start.
But the water features had to be filled in when oil from the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits seeped up. A 1980s attempt to tie the disparate buildings together by erecting a fortress-like wall along Wilshire was widely deemed a disaster.
My first visit was in 1995 for a retrospective of 19th century Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte. The big wall was impressive. Then I stepped past it into the welcome courtyard, only to find the museum was really a number of buildings grafted together awkwardly by an overhead superstructure, all behind a false front.
This was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?
“It was unnavigable,” said Govan, who arrived in 2006. “When I was hired, I went to the Barnes and Noble at The Grove and looked in L.A. guidebooks to see what they had to say about LACMA.” He chuckled. “It was not pretty.”
Future guidebooks, I suspect, will say the opposite.
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, a schedule easy to navigate. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.