Arts&Culture - latimes.com

Jimmy Kimmel tweets that he was buyer of nude Bea Arthur painting

By David Ng — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:59:00 PDT

In 2005, comedian Jimmy Kimmel shared a stage with actress Bea Arthur for the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson. Many jokes that evening were made at Arthur's expense, with various comedians lampooning the elderly star's perceived masculine qualities.

The creative process behind Edward Hopper's paintings

By Barbara Isenberg — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:00:00 PDT

'Hopper Drawing,' a new exhibition at the Whitney in New York, not only connects the real to the imagined in the artist's work but also connects paintings to one another.

NEW YORK — As 1938 came to a close, painter Edward Hopper was a man on a mission.

Lee Melville, champion of Los Angeles theater, dies at 74

By Deborah Vankin — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:06:00 PDT

Lee Melville, a fierce champion of theater in Los Angeles, has died. He was 74 years old.

Review: Vibrant and creepy 'Bloom' flowers in Pasadena

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:51:00 PDT

"Bloom," a compact show of eight recent painted sculptures by Christopher Miles, takes its name seriously. The flowering at hand is excitement over the extreme, hybrid nature of contemporary experience. These artistic mutts celebrate incongruity, heterogeneity and multiplicity -- even if irradiated with a certain creepiness, which certainly feels right for our time.

Review: Florian Morlat sculpts an engagingly strange show

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:25:00 PDT

Collages with the material heft of sculptures and sculptures with the two-dimensional articulation of flat drawings characterize Florian Morlat's engagingly strange show at Cherry and Martin. (The show is the first of a two-part exhibition, the second installment opening June 8.) The palette is dominated by the red-black-white seriousness of Constructivist art, with its early 20th century emphasis on theory in service of productive revolution, while the gawky eccentricity of the forms is more in keeping with the tactile seductions of participatory sculpture by the late Franz West.

Review: On the front lines with 'War/Photography' at the Annenberg

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:47:00 PDT

Including the American Revolution, the United States has participated in 12 major wars since the republic was founded. All but two were photographed. (The Mexican-American War of 1846-48 was the first to be documented with cameras, but just a few pictures survive.) The industrialization of war has logically coincided with the rise of machines that produce images.

Richard Koshalek, Smithsonian Hirshhorn head with L.A. ties, quits

By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic — Fri, 24 May 2013 08:42:00 PDT

Another bubble has popped for Richard Koshalek.

World's largest Lego sculpture lands in New York; California's next

By Jamie Wetherbe — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:30:00 PDT

The world’s largest Lego model, an X-wing starfighter, has landed in Times Square with enough cockpit space for Luke Skywalker.

Henri Dutilleux, modernist composer, dies at 97

By David Ng — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:46:00 PDT

Henri Dutilleux, the French composer whose modernist music has received international acclaim and is performed regularly by major orchestras, died Thursday in Paris. He was 97.

Review: Dim view on 'Through a Glass Darkly' at the Raven Playhouse

By Margaret Gray — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:36:00 PDT

Every element of Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 film “Through a Glass Darkly” — the performances, the plot, even the scenery in Faro, Sweden — seems to exist solely to express his singular artistic vision. Anybody can rent it, and the story of a woman vacationing with her family, descending into hereditary insanity, seducing her teenage brother and envisioning God as a giant spider isn’t really one of those perennial crowd-pleasers that cry out for multiple platforms.