Modern Art

LACMA’s Modern Art collection features primarily European and American art from 1900 to the 1960s, including examples from the museum’s American and Latin American collections. Several galleries are dedicated to the Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection—including concentrations of work by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti—and others are devoted to the museum’s renowned German Expressionist holdings of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. The installation presents Michael McMillen’s immersive environment Central Meridian (The Garage) (1981), along with works by Jay DeFeo, Georgia O’Keefe, Maren Hassinger, Ed Kienholz, Jacob Lawrence, Rene Magritte, Matta, Diego Rivera, Anne Truitt, and others. The Modern Art Galleries have been designed in collaboration with Frank Gehry and Associates, and include new interpretive texts, a series of thematic audio tours, and an installation soundtrack. The galleries regularly introduce new acquisitions–most recently works by Max Ernst, Claire Falkenstein, Meret Oppenheim and Alice Rahon–and recently installed galleries highlight LACMA’s Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual holdings, including a site specific Sol LeWitt wall drawing.

June 13, 2021–Ongoing
BCAM, Level 3
Today's hours: 11 am–6 pm

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Gallery Soundtrack Available

The musical selections in this soundtrack mirror the range of art in LACMA’s Modern Art Galleries. Pairings of specific tracks with individual artworks underscore the interconnection between audio and visual mediums.

When listening inside the exhibition, please be considerate of others and use headphones.

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This installation features work by modernist artists compelled by a Surrealist impulse—the drive to mine the unconscious as the seat of artistic creativity–during and after a period of great political and cultural upheaval. The gallery features artists like André Masson and Wolfgang Paalen, who were compelled to flee the European continent for North America in the 1930s and 40s, carrying with them a Surrealist visual language that would influence artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and Luchita Hurtado. The works on view also underscore how US-based artists expanded and modified Surrealist ideas, merging biomorphic figures and disorienting landscapes with a fascination in archaic forms, Indigenous cultural practices, and Zen philosophies.

November 4, 2024 - June 1, 2025

Unframed Blog Posts

This is the fourth time that I have had the privilege of installing LACMA’s permanent collection of Modern Art.

Our German Expressionist paintings, which entered the collection as early as 1946, had frames that reflected a variety of tastes and trends over the decades, rather than the artist...

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