LACMA & the Klimts: Can the museum do it?

Admin: As is often the case after I miss a couple days of blogging due to travel, I'm bursting with stuff I wanna post. If I haven't replied to an email you sent late last week, possibly best to re-send it. For reasons unclear to me I've received 1,100 emails in the last four days. Later this morning: More on the selection of Nancy Spector's Felix Gonzalez-Torres proposal for Venice 2007.

Last week I wrote that LATer Christopher Knight seemed to be preparing a public plea to LACMA's trustees to purchase the five Klimts currently on view at the museum. On Friday, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, Knight wrote exactly that:

This is a powerful test for LACMA. The museum has embarked on a $145-million expansion plan and hired a new director — Michael Govan, who began work just this week — expressly to become the only encyclopedic museum in the nation with a major program in Modern and contemporary art. Almost preternaturally, the Klimts arrived as if made to order for achieving the goal. We are about to discover the depth of LACMA's sincerity and ambition.

Knight also positions one of the Klimts as an equivalent to Picasso's Les Dems in terms of both art history and as a "destination work" that people will visit the museum just to see. LACMA seems to already know this: Its keeping its website for the mini-show chock full of content. (That said, someone needs to explain to LACMA the difference between a 'review' and a 'news story' and a 'feature story.' Two of the three clips presented as 'reviews' aren't.)

The Klimts-LACMA affair has the potential to become a dramatic public saga. Art exhibitions are what museums do in public, acquisitions generally happen in private. Will LA keep the Klimts, or will Ronald Lauder, MoMA or even the Met somehow win them away? (And what about the National Gallery? Nah. When was their last big, splashy Duccio-level acquisition? The NGA no longer acquires with verve. Its last splashy get was this, in 1998.) Will the Govan era at LACMA begin with a triumph or with a fizzle? Will the Getty be involved? This is going to be fun to watch...