Driving down from Santa Barbara, I did my usual Los Angeles routines, driving up to Hollywood to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful  Barnsdale, or “Hollyhock House,” one of my favorite Wright residences, located on Olive Hill off  Vermont, but not until I had lunch at the nearby Fat Burger.   The Barnsdall house is a beautiful sculptured concrete construction with Hollyhock decorations, which Wright called “California Romanza,” built at the same time Wright was bouncing back and forth to Japan on his Imperial Hotel project.  It was 1916; Wright was leaving his midwestern Prairie House phase and entering his pre-Columbian phase, which would evolve into his “textile block” phase of interwoven and patterned concrete block houses in Pasadena and Hollywood Hills, including the 1923, Millard House in Pasadena, called “La Miniatura,” plus the Storrer, Freeman, and Ennis houses.  The Freeman House is my favorite, made of glass and steel framed windows, and four patterns of concrete blocks, it resembles a living fossil.   This was a great phase for Wright, perhaps his greatest.  The idea of concrete and glass was so modern.   On this trip I swung by the Ennis House, which is being renovated.  It is a massive Mayan temple  overlooking Hollywood.

Los Angles is a great architectural city, like Chicago, with its California modernists:  Frank Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, the Eameses, and Irving Gill, and the mid Century modernists, John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, and the Case Study homes, plus Clifford May and George Washington Smith, and Richard Meier, etc.

Norton Simon

In the afternoon, I drove to Pasadena, one of my favorite cities, with its Greene and Greene Gamble House, an Arts and Crafts gem.  Pasadena is elegant, with its 1930s masonry buildings, aqueduct, scattered Art Deco and Art Moderne buildings, hills and vegetation, and elegant neighborhoods  lined with international style apartment complexes and garden apartments interspersed with mansions along Colorado Boulevard.  There  are a lot of Asians, especially Japanese, everywhere, and a lot of young people, wearing brogues and slacks rather than jeans, stylish.  This reminded me that it is not so important what you do as what you are.  Be stylish.  Have interests and hobbies, and friends, and live elegantly if modestly.

I pulled into the Norton Simon Art Museum, one of my favorite galleries anywhere.  It is like the Santa Barbara Museum, not real large, but exquisite in its collections.  It is like a sister to Santa Barbara’s.  I saw some wonderful pieces at the Simon, including Cezanne’s portrait of peasant in a turquoise vest and yellow hat, with wonderful pastel colors set against a blue background.  The Simon has a wonderful Degas collection, including “Dancers in the Rotunda of the Paris Opera,” 1874, with its vague silhouettes in gray and blue and mauve.  There is one of a star dancer on point, 1878, in pink and turquoise.  And one of a laundress in New Orleans, 1873, mainly whites.  The Degas sculptures include his young dancers and his wonderful horses, all  on pedestals or in glass cases spaced around the hall.

There was a Van Gogh, “The Mulberry Tree,”  1889, in olive; a verdant Rousseau jungle scene, “The Exotic Landscape,”  1910, in greens; a Bonnard, a Juan Gris, a Braque, “Artist and Model,” 1939, in black, gray, and green; a Monet portrait,  “Young Woman In Black,’ 1875, very alive; a Toulouse-Lautrec, “Cirque Fernando Horse Rider;” and Sisley’s ‘Louvreciennes in the Snow,” 1874, with lots of white and olive trees and a brown fence, one of my favorite paintings on display.   Perhaps the premier piece in the gallery was the much touted Diego Rivera mural, “The Flower Vender,” 1941, of a small girl playing in the grass.   There were some other nice sculptures, a Giocometti, “The Tall Figure,” 1960, and Brancusi’s famous gold concave “Bird in Space,”1931.

My other Simon favorites included Berte Morrisot’s  “In a Villa at the Seaside,” 1874, a good companion to her “View from the Trocadero” in Santa Barbara.  There was also a Courbet, “Marine,” 1865, of a yellow boat, clouds, and tidal pools on the shore, all blended together; a Bouduin seascape; a Vuillard, “First Fruits,” all greens; a Rembrandt self-portrait in his 50s plus his “Portrait of a Boy,” 1655, in grays and browns; a Camille Corot, “Thatched Cottage in Normandy, 1872; a Bellini, “Portrait of Joery Flugger,” 1474; and Hans Memling, “Christ’s Blessing,” 1478, on varnished wood.  In the Asia section, there was a Cambodian Angkor sculpture of the Shira, dated 925, and aan exhibit of over one hundred Hiroshige prints from Japan, of a floating world in Edo, the Shimmahi Bridge, and fifty three stations of the Tokaido, dated around 1833.  Many were owned by Frank Lloyd Wright at one point.   I forgot to mention a wondeful still life by Henri Fantin-Latour, of pink and white flowers in a vase with gray background, 1895.  After browsing the bookstore, I drifted into the back courtyard, with its small outdoor cafe and sculpture garden, on my list of favorite places.  I had a Stella Artois, and dreamed of being an artist someday.

I had dinner in Little Tokyo downtown, then drove back up to Santa Barbara, ninety minutes, pulling off 101 at the Cabrillo exit past Montecito, and winding to East Beach and my room at Pacific Crest Inn, my hangout, on Corona del Mar, just a block from the water.   On the way, car window down to the Pacific Ocean on my left, I listened to the radio, Mason Williams  “Classical Gas,” and a song called ‘Rubber Band Man,” which reminded me of Tweaks, my Belarus born white and gray short hair cat and my pal for eleven years who used to retrieve rubber bands that I would shoot across the room.  I was, as I often told her, her “rubber band man.”  She died the previous November.

That evening on the beach in Santa Barbara, I found myself, as always, looking out at a beautiful aquamarine sea surface, flat but sparkling with silver light shingles.  The tide was low, with a long time between swells and their “swoosh” sound.  In the near distance, sailboats were barely rocking at sea, their white sides luminous in the moonlight.  As night settled in, I was all alone on the promenade sidewalk, walking from East. Beach to Stearns Wharf towards the white lights of the pier.  After a while, I turned back and walled barefoot on the edge of the water, my pants rolled up and Topsiders in hand, getting my feet wet as larger waves occasionally come in, reaching the wet sand.  Standing on the sidewalk running along Cabrillo Boulevard, near the Santa Barbara Inn I took a last look at the sea through the tall palms, which were now just silhouettes.  I could see the lights of distant oil platforms and hear the seals honking out on the buoys in the dark. Night is my favorite time on the beach, enjoying the sound of the ocean and the stars above and the lights of houses behind me in the Santa Ynez foothills, and the moon above a hanging over the mountains.

The Getty

Two days later, I was back on 101, heading back to L.A., exiting onto 405 to the Getty Museum in the Santa Monica hills.    The Richard Meier designed complex is beautiful, with the signature glass and concrete from Meier, and slightly rough surfaced Italian tan stone, creating a neoclassical and geometric, but also modernistic, version of Ancient Rome, with touches of rounded or sculpted white concrete to soften the geometry.  The Getty is a large complex of similar buildings you reach with a funicular, the campus carved into terraces at different levels in the San Gabriels, offering wonderful panorama views of the Pacific from the museum cafes.

My favorites in the galleries included Edvard Munch’s “Starry Night,” a work similar to “The Scream,” in this case a large blue canvas spread with paint in rather vague forms including a small white fence running diagonally across the surface, and lake shore denoted by a rounded clump of trees.  Munch provides the best example of expressionism, letting your imagination do the work and using forms to create emotion.  My second favorite painting was Millet’s  “Portrait of Louise Antoinette Febardet,” 1841, the sitter in a black and white dress, with elegant grays, too the  first portrait I have seen by Millet.   They also had one of his peasantry scenes, “Man with a Hoe,” 1860, not as good as “The Gleaners,”  a bit less distinct, but also having great emotional appeal on the dark canvas.   Renoir’s “Le Promenade,” 1870, of a couple walking in the garden, was one of the finest Renoirs anywhere, a  bit bold in brush strokes  and color, but with great definition, greens and blues and shadows.  Monet”s “Sunrise,” 1873, blue with a touch of orange for the emerging morning sun, and with a sailing ketch in the foreground, is a wonderful small “unfinished” piece, and may be the work that labeled the “impressionism” movement. It was either this work or a similar onein the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.   Cezanne’s portrait of Anthony Valabreque, a bearded subject in white shirt, is painted with slabs of gray and black, and really captures the sitter’s character.  There was a Manet, “Rue Mosnier” from his series of thee street scenes, in white mainly, winter, with red flags hanging from the buildings for celebration; two wonderful Dutch classical era Ter Bosch works. The first, “Horse Stable,” is of a Dutch farm with the farmer’s wife in the corner of the stable, looking at their gray mare as it feeds.  You can see the importance of this horse to the family.  It is a hushed scene of great intensity.   The second work, “Girl Milking a Cow,” is another great depiction of animals.  Van Ruisdael’s “Landscape with a Wheat Field,” 1680, shows the special quality of light in Holland in the evening blues and grays.   Pieter de Hooch’s “Woman Preparing Bread and Butter for a Boy,” is an interior scene, with half door, a wooden partition with filagree, and red tile floor.  Like Vermeer, de Hooch uses more color and light to illuminate than the other Dutch masters, whose canvasses are dark browns and blacks.  Rembrandt’s “Old Man in Military Costume,” in grays and blacks, reminded me of the Chicago Art Institute’s Rembrandt of a soldier with gray metal neck plate.  There were some Hals and a Cuyp Dutch seascape, “View of the Maas at Dortrecht,” 1645, with the flat gray water like a mirror.

From the Italian Renaissance, there was Victor Carpacco’s “Hunting on the Lagoon,” 1490, set in the Venetian marshes, of men and women on boats hunting cormorants.  What a beautiful painting: the teal colored water, the black and red costumes, with simple, almost one dimensional figures and bright colors, all reminded me of Utrillo.   There was a Raphael Circle painting,”Portrait of a Man in Red,” 1483, showing Renaissance individualism.  Pontarino’s “Portrait of Halberdier,” showed a young Florentine nobleman dressed in a tan quilted jacket and red pants, and holding a rifle.   From the Flemish Renaissance, there was a Van der Weyden workshop piece, “Portrait of Isabel of Portugal,” with red cloak and a lace veil coming down over her face from a twin peaked hat like the one in Van Eyck’s wonderful young woman in white.

Other paintings which attracted my attention included Henri Rousseau’s “Celebration of Independence,” 1892, rather one -dimensional, of a crowd scene  in primary  colors;  and two Camille Corot’s, “Houses Near Orleans,” 1830, with lots of tans and distinctive rounded roofs and another one, even better, of a dark forested hillside, 1885, with a notation quoting impressionist leader Monet saying Corot was the father of us all.   There was a Van Gogh “Irises,” in green and yellow with the thick brush strokes; John Singer Sargent portrait of a woman in white, this time of Countess Aldringe; and a Turner nautical scene of British and Dutch ships working together, a bit more impressionistic than usual.

From the decorative arts building, there were French secretaries, tall desks, circa 1780, with sandal wood and ebony inlaid over oak, and with fold out drawers.  There was a Regency paneled room, 1670-1720 era, in turquoise and green, and a Roccoco, neo-classical room taken from Maison Hosten in Paris, 1795.   There was an exhibit of Frederich Evans’ photographs of British cathedrals and one of a cross section of a Nautilus sea shell, 1903, predating Westons’s similar photo.   There were some fabulous new discoveries for me beyond Carpacco:  Caspar David Frederich’s “Walk at Dusk,” from the German Romantic period, dated 1830, an almost eerie dark lavender backgrounded painting of a priest passing through a church courtyard at night under a waxing moon; and Ferdinand Khnopff, “Portrait of Jeanne Kefer,” 1885, of a young child wearing a brown coat and salmon colored bonnet and standing in front of a pastel-green and white framed door  on a gray tiled porch.

Getty Antiquities Museum

On a separate visit, I drove down from Santa Barbara, driving through Malibu Canyon to the Getty Villa, the antiquities part of the Getty Museum, a replica of a Roman summer house, based on the “House of Deer” which was uncovered near Herculenium, near Vesuvius, and reproduced by J. Paul Getty.  Roman houses were about fresoes, gardens, and walls full of art in various forms.  The Getty villa  included an ampitheater and Triclinium, or middle room, half indoors and half outdoors, connecting interior and exterior, and coral colored marble floor laid our in a kaleidosope pattern.  There were Greek, Etruscan,  and Roman statues scattered about the garden, and the museum took care to explain Etruscan (900-50 BCE), a culture based in Arezzo, Tuscany, its art  characterized by intricate patterning, including on classical statuary, delicate lines etched on marble robes and bronze figures.

My favorite  items at the Villa Museum included  a small polished piece of agate, an amulet used to recover from the flu, Roman, dated 200 AD; very light tan colored teracotta black-figure pottery, including  Greek oil jar and especially a wine cup depicting a fish monger chopping a tuna.. 525 BCE; Roman gold rings, set with a cameo etched from a red Carnelian gem stone; a Greek kouros, a marble statue of a young man approaching with outstretched and one leg forward, dated 520 BCE; a bronze Greek helmet, with holes for eyes only, dated 400 BCE; saucer shaped wine cups with markings in red and coral, dated 500 BCE; a flat, small bronze disc with an ibex bird on top, archaic Greek, dated 700 BCE; some wall fragments, mosaics, or plaster friezes with red and gray pigment scenes, my favorite of a woman and reclining leopard, and another of a peacock dated 75AD; Cycladic female figures, simple, translucent figurines with folded arms, dated 2700 BCE; a huge Etruscan storage jar, rust colored terracotta; marble busts of Augustus and Lydia; and a large hydra, or water jar, black and fluted, with gold trim, dated 340 BCE.  (2011)