I walked a bit further this morning, exploring the hinterland on the edge of the Historic District, where the streets flatten out and one can look up towards the mountains in the north, wondering how it was that postwar America allowed the grandiosity of their historic downtown neighbourhoods to decay so absolutely:-

I was pleased to have a chance before dinner to go upstairs on the celestial escalator to see the top floor collections, beautifully displayed in sections according to artist.

This is the escalator:-

First, I saw the room of works by John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha:-

Then, Sigmar Polke:-

Joseph Beuys:-

And Jenny Saville:-

I came to LA for the opening of the Jasper Johns exhibition at the Broad Museum.   They have made much more of the flag paintings:  not least across the street frontage of the Diller and Scofidio façade:-

But also in the first room, which includes Flag (1955):-

And the Three Flags from the Whitney (1958):-

After the Chemosphere, we called in at the Garcia House, not quite as futuristic as the Chemosphere, but still impressively inventive in the way that it is made to perch on the edge of the hillside on thin struts and the freedom of its entrance staircase and the view out onto the San Fernando valley and down to the city beyond.

The entrance staircase:-

The guest bedroom:-

The living room:-

The bathroom:-

And the taps:-

It was a great treat to see John Lautner’s masterpiece, The Chemosphere, at least from a distance, and admire the innocence of its 1960s utopian futurism:-

We spent the day in the Santa Monica mountains above Sunset Boulevard, looking at private collections:  impressed by the internationalism of Los Angeles collectors and the extent to which they owned work by British artists – not just Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, but also Sean Scully, Julian Opie and Cecily Brown:-

I took an early morning stroll round the glories of the still deeply neglected streets of downtown LA, with their grand 1920s building turned into dime stores and thrift shops and the magnificent terracotta decoration and classical ornament intermingled with art deco shop signs:-

I took a photograph of the 1965 Ahmanson Building at LACMA, named after Howard Ahmanson Sr. and designed in 1965 by William Pereira in preference to Mies van der Rohe and soon to be demolished as part of the new building project by Peter Zumthor:-

There’s something impressively buccaneer about an institution willing (and able to afford) to sweep aside its existing buildings and build a brand new one, particularly as the 60s building, modelled on the Lincoln Center, looks so fine.

I called in at the Los Angeles County Museum in order to see the exhibition of Design in California and Mexico 1915-1985, which shows the long-standing and deep interconnections between Californian and Mexican culture, beginning with the Spanish Colonial Style, much of which was actually based on copying buildings in Mexico. See, for example, the attached photograph of a street in Mexico by Lutah Maria Riggs and her subsequent architectural design for a house in Santa Barbara, described (wrongly) as ‘A Bit of Andalusia’:-

I particularly loved the clips of Reyner Banham Loves LA which shows him fully bearded (and unexpectedly driving) eulogising the neo-colonial style.

There’s a massive and beautifully produced catalogue.

The long flight out to Los Angeles gave me a chance to catch up on some reading, including a set of interviews with (mostly) current museum directors, Eleven Museums Eleven Directors, compiled by Michael Shapiro as he was standing down as Director of the High Museum in Atlanta.   There is a generational aspect to it.   Several were at Williams College – Shapiro himself, Glenn Lowry, Michael Govan – and several in nearly the same class at Harvard – Shapiro, Lowry, Gary Tinterow and Max Anderson.   What comes across are the needs to be much more attentive to audience, as articulated by Kay Feldman in Minneapolis, and new, multicultural identities, as voiced cogently by Thelma Golden, as the next generation takes over.