Today, I want to take you on a trip from Palm Springs to Montecito, with a stop in West Hollywood. Yes, I know, it's been raining cats and dogs. But nothing will rain on our parade if we take art as our guide. Last time I visited Palm Springs Art Museum -- two years ago -- they had an excellent exhibition of early works by "Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966."
I returned there a week ago to see another exhibition equally full of surprises, "A Passionate Eye: The Weiner Family Collection." There are roughly 60 sculptures and paintings by major 20th century artists, including multiple sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Marino Marini, and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as individual knockouts by Amedeo Modigliani, Isamu Noguchi, Aristide Maillol, and Giacomo Manzù.
According to the museum press release, "The Weiner Family Collection, with its singular emphasis on great sculpture, is one of the most important collections of modern art ever assembled in the Southwest." For more than four decades, museum visitors could see parts of this collection either as gifts to the museum or as long-term loans. As a result, this collection has become a fundamental part of Palm Springs Art Museum's identity. This exhibition, along with its scholarly catalog and video, introduces visitors to Ted Weiner, "a self-made oil magnate who discovered modern art midway through life and, with very little formal education, became a highly knowledgeable collector."
This past Sunday, I dropped by MOCA Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood to see the exhibition by influential Venezuelan artist, Magdalena Fernández. My esteemed colleague Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, in her report a few weeks ago, gave an excellent review of this exhibition. Sunday was its last day, and I was happy to have caught Fernández's six highly theatrical videos. But my favorite was a site-specific light installation in the staircase, a rather challenging and difficult space to work with. Hat's off to the artist and to the exhibition's curator, Alma Ruiz, for a job well done.
Reporting all these years on the art and culture in Southern California, I was not expecting to discover the existence of an art museum in Montecito that I'd never heard of before. But here we go.
I got an email a couple of days ago about Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art regarding its upcoming exhibition, "Barbizon, Realism, and Impressionism in France," which consists of two-dozen paintings by such Masters as Eugène Boudin and Berthe Morisot, Gustave Courbet, Thèodore Rousseau, and Henry Matisse, among others. Take a look on our website at a few of these paintings, and I bet you will salivate as much as I am in anticipation of this exhibition, which opens on January 14th.
To learn about Edward's Fine Art of Art Collecting Classes, please visit his website. You can also read The New York Times article about his classes here, or an Artillery Magazine article about Edward and his classes here.
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Edward Goldman is an art critic and the host of Art Talk, a program on art and culture for NPR affiliate KCRW 89.9 FM. To listen to the complete show and hear Edward's charming Russian accent, click here.