Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964–1966

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Through June 5

Historians tend to pigeonhole artists by whatever style made them famous, said Sarah E. Fensom in Art & Antiques. That’s a real shame: For artists like Vija Celmins, the brash efforts of youth are equally intriguing. So kudos to LACMA for devoting an entire show to the Latvian artist’s formative years in 1960s Los Angeles, before she made her name with “incredibly detailed paintings and drawings of gray ocean waves, delicate spiderwebs, and glittering night skies.” The early works show a preoccupation with the violent imagery that was being splashed across TV screens and newspapers: race riots, Vietnam casualties, plane crashes. They’re rendered in a “detached, voyeuristic” style, and the effect can be eerie. In Gun With Hand #1 (1964), “a liminal haze of smoke hangs suspended before the painting’s taupe background,” indicating that the gun has just been fired. “Yet its inert quality suspends any impressions of the violence that may have resulted.”

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That unsentimental approach was a repudiation of abstract expressionism and all its melodramatic baggage, said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. In 1965, following the Watts rebellion in her adopted hometown, Celmins painted a black-and-white rendition of the August 20 cover of Time, with its banner-style headline and trio of news photographs. Rather than resorting to emotional exaggeration, she steps out of the way, letting the images speak for themselves. “Celmins is painting mass media’s hyped-up representation of a horribly violent event, but she is doing so in a manner that elevates contemplative dispassion.” The result is a “taut pictorial tension,” an aesthetic breakthrough that stayed with her even as her attentions turned to less overtly sensational imagery.