Catherine Wagley reviews the group show “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States” on view now at LACMA.

  “All the ghosts are assembling for the party.” That’s what Claire Danes says in the movie The Hours, when her mother, played by Meryl Streep, throws a dinner that brings artists and intellectuals bubbling up from the not-so-distant past.  It’s also how art in Los Angeles feels right now. Pacific Standard Time (PST), a [...]

Late last night, a friend and I decided to find a restaurant we’d seen once, over a year ago, when walking through Virgil Village to Silver Lake. We remembered the place as being hedged in, strangely, even comically, hidden from the freeway above and from the main road in front of it. When we found [...]

Roy Stryker, the man who ran the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and sent some of the best-known 20th century photographers out on their first assignments, “didn’t give a damn about a picture at the time it was made.” According to aerial photographer Charles Rotkin, he began archiving before the photos had [...]

“I don’t know why my pictures come out looking so good,” photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once told his brother. “I just don’t get it.” He had that innate knack for beauty, an artist’s touch in the most classical sense. This made his “obscenity”—those S&M images from the X Portfolio and the fetishized African-American bodies from The [...]

Tonight, I am sitting in a red booth at Formosa Café in Hollywood, the Cantonese restaurant Frank Sinatra reportedly frequented when heartsick over Ava Gardner. Lana Turner came here too, and danced with gangster beaus in the bar’s center aisle. My friend L. and I have both just finished a hectic work day, and we [...]

Eli Broad, Los Angeles’s most aggressive philanthropist, nearly always wears solid, primary colored ties. Last Thursday, he wore a red one to unveil the plan for his new museum on Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. It stood out nicely against the projected images of the honeycomb-like building that will be situated beside Gehry’s Disney Concert [...]

I woke up Wednesday morning to news of fracas at the opera. The La Scala opera house in Milan had just hosted its annual gala, the sort of event heads of state and millionaires attend (box seats went for 2,000 euros each). The gala happens every year, and every year, protesters line up outside to [...]

When I first encountered the warm voluptuousness of Mary Cassatt’s paintings, it annoyed me. Then I realized the artist had never married, living much of her life frequenting Paris salons, arguing about the merits of Velasquez, and putting Edgar Degas in his place. (One biography, in an effort to dispel rumors that Cassatt had been [...]

A few weeks ago, when a friend was planning a visit to New York City, he asked me which art to see. I found myself prefacing less-emphatic recommendations with, “it might not change your life.”  That’s just something people say, of course, but I was serious. I really wanted my suggestions to have life-changing potential [...]

A hair was stuck in the main camera when Liza Minnelli first filmed Liza with a “Z” (1972), a supposedly live special for NBC. Minnelli and crew refilmed, using paid extras for audience members. Biographer Scott Schechter tells this story in The Liza Minnelli Scrapbook, and critic Bruce Hainley retells it in “Just Say Yes,” [...]

Last weekend, I stopped at a red light and rolled forward into the intersection to turn right. I didn’t see the pedestrian who was about to cross, and came frighteningly close to hitting him. His body clenched in what I assumed to be anger before he walked around the back of my car. My windows [...]