Art review: 'John Baldessari: Pure Beauty' @ LACMA | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times

Culture Monster

All the Arts, All the Time

« Previous Post | Culture Monster Home | Next Post »

Art review: 'John Baldessari: Pure Beauty' @ LACMA

June 27, 2010 | 4:00 pm

As an artist, John Baldessari has worked in the gap between paintings and camera images for the last 45 years. Visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's big retrospective of his marvelous rummaging around in that fissure and two things come into focus.

First, the gap is a strange and often very funny place to be.

And second, when Baldessari identified and began to map its largely uncharted terrain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, partly inspired by the work of Ed Ruscha, he helped pry open an unexpectedly vast territory now comfortably occupied by countless artists internationally. Baldessari, who was born in San Diego and works mostly in L.A., is arguably America's most influential Conceptual artist.

On one side of the chasm is painting, a rich and fantastically flexible medium with which artists have concocted pictures since time immemorial. Baldessari, now 79, started out as a painter. But his work did not begin to mature until he began to examine just what that meant in contemporary terms.

Art review: 'John Baldessari: Pure Beauty' @ LACMA | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times