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 selection of works explores the spaces of leisure culture that emerged during the rise of urban-centered, industrial society in western Europe. These modernist renderings of dance halls, variety shows, the opera, and the ballet--including works by Edgar Degas, Jacques Lipchitz, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner--suggest the complex nature of observing, participating in, and interpreting the modern world at the onset of the twentieth century.

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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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