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Museum Director in Ukraine Paints Over a Mural She Doesn’t Like

Made in Space

Courtesy the artists, Gavin Brown's enterprise, and Venus Over Manhattan

Works by, from left, Marcia Hafif, Rebecca Morris, Hannah Greely and Eric Orr in “Made in Space” at Gavin Brown’s.

 By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: August 1, 2013

If much of the work in this sprawling, energetic two-gallery group show looks fresh and unfamiliar — and as if it might not come from New York — there’s a reason. Everything on view was made in and around Los Angeles, fairly recently and often by artists who are either young, unknown in these parts or both. The show’s title, “Made in Space,” connotes the City of Angels, where, the thinking goes, studio space is cheaper and more plentiful and the general horizontal openness gives everyone more time and privacy to develop.

Certainly the work there often seems looser, brighter and generally more at ease with itself compared with what is found in New York. There’s a greater tolerance for painting of all kinds, even full-on or diluted, and less of a mania for minimal austerity.

“Made in Space” was first seen in Los Angeles at Night Gallery, which is overseen by Davida Nemeroff, a young photographer-dealer formerly of New York whose large color close-ups of horses are represented here. The show is probably less a snapshot of the Los Angeles scene than of the ecumenical tastes of its organizers: Laura Owens, an established painter who decided against including her own work in the show, and Peter Harkawik, a younger sort-of painter who favors decals on clear vinyl at Gavin Brown (and who has his New York solo debut at Knowmoregames, a gallery in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, through Aug. 30).

The younger set gets solid backup at both galleries from older artists like Rebecca Morris and David Korty (both especially impressive), Derek Boshier, Jim Isermann, Jorge Pardo, Allen Ruppersberg and Peter Shire, a well-known ceramist-sculpture and founding member of the design group Memphis, whose Memphis-y bench-sculpture brightens the entrance at Gavin Brown.

But it is mostly works by artists in their 30s with little or no New York exposure that steal the show. These include Leah Glenn’s small, quirky paintings; Patrick Jackson’s handsome bucket-size ceramic cups; John Seal’s stylistically varied paintings (as well as Aaron Wrinkle’s); and a charcoal rubbing on canvas by Joshua Callaghan of a Ford Focus. The efforts of Vanessa Conte, Lucas Blalock, Gabrielle Ferrer, John Mannis and Max Maslansky also reward attention. Still, the show’s surprises are not all from the young. Marcia Hafif, the New York abstract painter who now divides her time between the coasts, is the oldest artist here, and she weighs in with an anomalous work: a wall-size handwritten text about women, aging and sexuality that makes its presence felt.

The Bass Museum of Art's Fiat Urban Surf Party will host a free night of music, drinks and culture including a silent disco party provided by Silent Frisco.

By Ricardo Mor | rmor90@gmail.com7/30/2013

The Beats After Sunset party, held on the first Friday of every month at the Bass Museum of Art, is always a great time for young art lovers to enjoy a night of music, drinks and culture. The museum is taking their event to the next level with the Fiat Urban Surf Party edition of Beats After Sunset this Friday, August 2, from 8 to 11 p.m. 

For the party, the museum will their regular outdoor dance party in addition to an indoor Silent Frisco party, which will be a dance party inside the museum where guests can listen to dance music using wireless headphones. The result is a dance party for those who are listening with headphones while those who opt out can enjoy a refuge from the thumping music (but we highly recommend joining in on the fun). The effect is super cool and a rare chance for Miamians to experience the silent dance party craze firsthand, which is all the rage in Los Angeles and San Francisco.Whether you choose to do the silent dance party inside or the booming outdoor party, DJ Antanas Jurksaitis from Rockit Sauce & DJ Seamaster will be behind the turntables providing the beats.

In addition, locals can sip on Reyka premium small-batch vodka from Iceland and Rex-Goliath Wine during the party while you check out the museum’s collection of art as well as the latest Fiat car which will be parked inside the museum. Adding to the fun is an afterparty at Rokbar, where all attendees of the party will get complimentary cocktails from 11-12 pm. Best of all, all of this is free. You’d be a fool to miss this event.

JULIE V. IOVINE

The Museum of Modern Art/Richard Pare

The Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55)

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes

Museum of Modern Art

Through Sept. 23

New York

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret changed his name to the curt and commanding Le Corbusier, an invented nom de plume in 1920, but that hasn't made it any easier to understand the famed Swiss architect or his work: more than 75 buildings in a dozen countries; master plans reimagining capital cities (mostly by proposing to erase their centers) from Paris to Rio to Algiers; more than 40 books, including "Towards a New Architecture" and "The Radiant City"; and hundreds of essays establishing him as one of the most influential voices in 20th-century culture.

Fondation Le Corbusier/ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris

'Blue Mountains' (1910)

A modernist pioneer in architecture, planning, criticism and painting, Le Corbusier was so heralded and reviled throughout his career that when his memorial was held in the courtyard of the Louvre in 1965, the novelist André Malraux, then minister of culture, was compelled to note how the architect was "for so long, so continuously insulted."

Le Corbusier is a rich and complicated subject for a monographic exhibition. And "Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" at the Museum of Modern Art succeeds at maintaining a sense of awe about the fearless architect once photographed in the nude baring a long zig-zagging scar from a shark attack. But the show—MoMA's first retrospective on Corbu—is also hamstrung by a theme that, by harping on "a vision profoundly rooted in nature and landscape," tries too hard to establish a too-narrow focus for the technology-obsessed master. Corbu's aesthetic emphasized the purely rational wedded to the perfectly proportioned. He embraced innovation and technology as ethical imperatives and seemed to have not the slightest ambivalence about radical change. Corbu's legacy includes open interiors with panoramic strip windows, space conceived in modular units, skinny steel columns and urban plans that would have imposed brutal uniformity on the land.

Drawing extensively from MoMA's own collections, from the Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris, and from private collections near and far, the exhibition is curated by Corbu biographer and authority Jean-Louis Cohen and by MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll. It includes personal and professional riches, from childhood sketches and notebooks to models, renderings and plans from practically every project devised and place visited over six decades. Among the delights are midcareer oil paintings, home movies and the 20-foot scrolls of design doodles that the architect liked to whip up on his world lecture tours. With 320 objects, it is the most Corbusier material ever to be displayed in one place, and a rare chance to immerse oneself in the evolving creative output of a genius.

The exhibition opens compellingly with watercolors that young Jeanneret painted of the Jura Mountains and forests near his childhood home in rural Switzerland, in an effort to establish his landscape-loving bona fides. It then roams through two rooms of diary entries and notebook sketches of his youthful travels through Western Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Greece. For the uninitiated this segment of the show is especially rewarding and accessible, as the brilliantly articulate student soaks up the world and starts to formulate his ideas. Read how he describes the Acropolis in Athens as "a giant tragic carcass in the dying light above all this red earth" and the Parthenon as "a sovereign cube facing the sea." The image of the Aegean on the horizon interrupted by the thrusting temple thereafter held tremendous elemental meaning for Corbu, who reworked that combination of long horizontal and vertical in almost everything he did, from his United Nations slab rising from a platform to the hill-crowning chapel in Ronchamp, even striving for that same mighty scale.

The exhibition moves broadly, both geographically and chronologically, through the architect's professional career, interspersing realized and rejected work with paintings that dabble in Cubism, Fauvism and other popular styles from the 1920s. Dioramas of rooms he designed, complete with furnishings, including a handsomely burled desk for his mother, enliven the march of projects as they become more specialized and opaque, not to mention problematic.

Today we can appreciate but no longer embrace Corbu's vantage point in 1925 when he proposed his Plan Voisin calling for the demolition of all but a few key monuments in the center of Paris in order to make way for his super slab towers. From grim experience with Robert Moses and through the eyes of Jane Jacobs, we are appalled by the lack of sensitivity to context. But clearly he thrilled to the promise of a future full of air and light, and an escape from still-lingering 19th-century fustiness. It's a godsend that similar plans for other cities never happened, although the prints of elevated "inhabited freeways" that he envisioned snaking from mountain to sea in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo still look pretty sensational.

In later years, Corbu faced growing disillusionment over projects unrewarded or compromised. He fought with famous futility to control the design of New York's United Nations Headquarters completed by Wallace K. Harrison, sniped that Manhattan's skyscrapers weren't big enough and that the city was a "fairy catastrophe" on his first visit in 1935. But in his final 20 years he realized some of his most potently evocative and sculptural work, including the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh (1951-65) for the new Indian state of Punjab, the stacked Unité d'Habitation apartment house in Marseille, France, (1946-52) and the Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55) in eastern France.

There's a lot jammed in, and a single rewarding visit could be spent studying only his early and late villas, thoroughly documented with sketches, plans, models and images, including sumptuous recent photographs by Richard Pare commissioned for this show (but hung too high to really be savored).

If the effort to prove that Le Corbusier was as committed to landscape as he was to his abstract convictions seems sometimes strained, the show—and the extraordinarily learned and lush catalog—is brilliantly effective at providing a compelling portrait of a difficult man who in the words of Mr. Cohen "shouldered epic endeavors to transform the world."

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

A visitor to the Detroit Institute of Arts can see some of the world’s greatest artworks. “The Wedding Dance,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s lusty rendering of a peasant’s celebration from the 1560s, is there. So is a self-portrait by a wary and anxious-looking Vincent van Gogh. There are treasures by Matisse, Rivera, Picasso and Calder, to name only a few in Detroit’s vast collection.

But plan a trip soon — this year, or maybe next. With debts hovering near $18 billion, Detroit has filed for bankruptcy protection, and the institute’s impressive collection of more than 60,000 works, worth at least $2 billion, is being eyed hungrily by the city’s many creditors. Christie’s auction house has sent two of its people to view the museum’s most valuable pieces.

The urge to sell — essentially to hock the family silver to pay the bills — is understandable. But selling the city’s art could be incredibly shortsighted; the long-term value of maintaining this valuable institution and its collection could easily outweigh any immediate gains. Quite apart from the damage it would do to morale, selling this trove would also be a violation of the public trust for the nearly 600,000 annual visitors, including 50,000 schoolchildren. And residents of three counties who agreed to a property tax increase to help finance the museum would almost certainly demand a rollback in the future.

This art should not be sold to some private investor who might hide it in the den or, worse, a Swiss warehouse. As Thomas Campbell, the chief executive and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said, public art must be “a permanent, rather than a liquid, community asset.”

It is not clear yet whether Detroit’s officials will ultimately try to sell the collection. Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, has issued a strong opinion that the art can be sold only to acquire more art, not to retire public debt. But Bill Nowling, a spokesman for the city’s emergency manager overseeing the bankruptcy proceedings, said this week that although there are no specific plans to sell the art, all options “remain on the table.”

Selling the people’s art will not restore a battered city. It will only send more of its true assets elsewhere.

Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77

Museum Associates/LACMA

“The 2000 Sculpture” (1992), by Walter De Maria, an example of his groupings of ordered elements using precise measurements. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 26, 2013

Walter De Maria, a reclusive American sculptor whose multifaceted achievement and sly Dadaist humor helped give rise to earthworks, Conceptual Art and Minimal art, on an often monumental scale, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 77 and lived in New York.

Mr. De Maria went to California two months ago to celebrate his mother’s 100th birthday and had a stroke there a few days later. He had remained there for treatment. Elizabeth Childress, the director of his studio, said that he died in his sleep, perhaps of a second stroke.

In a career of more than 50 years Mr. De Maria made drawings of all-but-invisible landscapes, gamelike interactive wood sculptures and a record of himself accompanying the sound of crickets on the drums.

Mr. De Maria himself was a sometime percussionist who played in jazz and rock groups in New York in the 1960s, including one that evolved into Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. Yet as an artist in later years he avoided the limelight, rarely giving interviews or letting himself be photographed.

He was best known for large-scale outdoor works that often involved simple if rather extravagant ideas or gestures: a SoHo loft filled with two feet of earth, for example, or a solid brass rod two inches in diameter and one kilometer long driven into the ground in Kassel, Germany, so that only its smooth top was visible (a work consistent with an artist who once noted that “the invisible is real”).

In other works Mr. De Maria favored shiny metals and pristine floor-hugging geometric forms that were often repeated in great numbers. Early in his career, he earned the unwavering admiration of a German art dealer, Heiner Friedrich, who went on to become the founding director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Dia was dedicated to enabling a handful of mostly Minimalist artists realize ambitious, permanent, pilgrimage-like projects, and Mr. De Maria became one of its leading beneficiaries. The foundation financed four of his best known site-specific pieces and continues to maintain them.

The most famous is “The Lightning Field,” which opened in 1977 in western New Mexico after several years of trial-and-error construction. The work is a grid of 400 stainless steel poles averaging 20 ½ feet in height and spaced 220 feet apart covering an area 1 kilometer by 1 mile.

The possibility that lightning would strike the poles was rarely fulfilled, but the piece could look glorious at dawn or sunset, and its hard-won perfection — all the points of the poles were at the same level — brought a striking sense of order to the desert.

Another work that opened in 1977 was Mr. De Maria’s “New York Earth Room,” also a Dia project, which consists of a 3,600-square-foot loft at 141 Wooster Street in SoHo filled with 22 inches of dark loamy earth (specially treated so that nothing is supposed to grow in it). The piece, which recreates one the artist first executed in Munich in 1968, exudes a slightly moist, muffling atmosphere and affords a sight so surreally, deliriously startling as to be simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.

The Dia Foundation also made possible “The Vertical Earth Kilometer,” another 1977 work, in Kassel, and its 1979 companion piece, “The Broken Kilometer,” which consists of 500 two-meter rods of brass arranged in perfect rows on the floor of a ground-level space at 393 West Broadway in SoHo, where it remains on permanent view.

It gave rise to numerous other gallery-sized floor pieces, including “The 2000 Sculpture” (1992), which inaugurated the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall.

Walter Joseph De Maria was born on Oct. 1, 1935, in Albany, Calif., near Berkeley. His parents were the proprietors of a local restaurant and known for being extremely outgoing. Their son was shy, however, and studied music — first piano, then percussion. He also took to sports and cars, of which he made drawings.

By 16 Walter had joined a musicians’ union. From 1953 to 1959 he attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying history and painting, the latter under the painter David Park, who was also a musician and had a jazz group in which Mr. De Maria occasionally performed.

During these years Mr. De Maria was part of San Francisco’s developing avant-garde scene, participating in “Happenings” and theatrical performances and turning increasingly to three-dimensional works. His friends included the composer La Monte Young (later to become another Dia beneficiary) and the dancer Simone Forti, whose task-oriented choreography made him interested in interactive sculpture. Mr. De Maria moved to New York in 1960 and immersed himself in the downtown scene. He participated in Happenings with Robert Whitman (who was then married to Ms. Forti) and briefly ran a gallery on Great Jones Street with him, exhibiting Minimalist sculptures made of wood.

The sculptures were often Dadaist in intent. A piece called “Ball Drop” consisted of a tall columnar structure with a small hole at the top and bottom and a small wood ball. The viewer could drop the ball in the top hole and retrieve it from the bottom.

During this time Mr. De Maria performed with jazz musicians, including the trumpeter Don Cherry, and joined a band called the Primitives. It would evolve into the Velvet Underground.

He had his first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery in 1965, at the Paula Johnson Gallery on the Upper East Side. (Its owner soon became better known as the New York dealer Paula Cooper.) Shortly thereafter he began making stainless steel pieces, including a tall, thin cage structure called “Cage” (after the composer John Cage), that was included in “Primary Structures,” a landmark survey of Minimal-ish work at the Jewish Museum in 1966.

Another early steel piece was “Bed of Spikes,” a bed of nails exaggerated to the sinister scale of railroad spikes; in many ways it was a precursor to “The Lightning Field.”

Mr. De Maria began making drawings and proposals for earthworks in 1960, starting with “Art Yard,” a Happening-like urban event that would involve steam shovels digging a large hole. His first executed earthwork was “Mile Long Drawing” (1968): parallel lines of chalk 12 feet apart that extended across the parched Mojave Desert, accenting its flatness.

Mr. De Maria also participated in a landmark survey of Post-Minimal art, “When Attitude Becomes Form,” at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. He was represented by a black telephone placed in the middle of a gallery beside a small sign that read: “If this telephone rings, you may answer it. Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.”

The piece is on view this summer in a recreation of the Bern exhibition at the Prada Foundation in Venice.

Mr. De Maria’s early marriage to Susannah Wilson ended in divorce. He is survived by his mother, Christina, and his brother, Terry.

At Home in Two Places

Carol Bove Sculpture Shows at the High Line and MoMA

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

“Celeste,” by Carol Bove on the High Line. More Photos »

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: July 25, 2013

The stretch of the High Line from 30th to 34th Street, still semiwild and closed to the public except by appointment, is a challenging place to exhibit art. Anything installed there risks being overwhelmed by the beauty of the site itself, with its sweeping arc toward the Hudson and its picturesque weeds sprouting up between splintered rail ties.

The light-filled gallery on the Museum of Modern Art’s fourth floor, just outside the rooms that house the permanent collection of painting and sculpture, presents a different set of obstacles for the contemporary artist. There are the Pollocks and Calders at one end, the commanding view of the sculpture garden at the other. Viewers streaming single-file off the narrow bridge from the escalators don’t have much time to stop and look before they’re pushed along into the collection galleries.

The sculptor Carol Bove is now showing in both of these places at once, and managing beautifully. It helps that she is a master of nuance and understatement, and an exquisite calibrator of contextual relationships. It isn’t lost on her that her shows arrive at a moment when both sites, MoMA and the High Line, are transitioning from 20th-century relics — both dating from the 1930s — into 21st-century civic landmarks.

With these exhibitions Ms. Bove is also branching out from the scholarly eclecticism of her earlier artworks, which incorporated found objects like books and crystals, into a more elemental kind of abstract sculpture that at times evokes Richard Serra, Franz West and Mark di Suvero. It takes a certain kind of courage for a post-Post-Minimalist artist, born in 1971, to make such clearly articulated forms.

The High Line show, titled “Caterpillar” and organized by the High Line art curator and director Cecilia Alemani, savors this last opportunity to see the elevated railway in its undeveloped state. (It remains on view until May, when construction begins on this final section of the park.) The show has seven sculptures, distributed relatively evenly along the C-shaped length of track.

Two are looping, hollow noodles of white powder-coated steel, from a series called “Glyphs.” They have been given playful, anthropomorphic titles, “Prudence” and “Celeste,” but these squiggly creatures call less attention to themselves than to their postindustrial surroundings of gravel and rusted iron. Viewed on approach, their coils coalesce into a kind of tunnel; from the side, they look more like a stretched-out Slinky.

Three other sculptures, Tetris-like arrangements of steel I-beams, are well camouflaged by comparison. They evoke the frames of nearby buildings under construction, as well as the titanic outdoor works of Mr. Di Suvero, but seem to have more in common with the dilapidated skeleton of the High Line. The steel is rusted, and crisscrossing components that look like they should be joined together for structural purposes often aren’t; pieces wobble, unexpectedly, when the breeze picks up.

Ms. Bove, who lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, knows how precarious solid-looking infrastructure can turn out to be. Another of the show’s sculptures, a low bronze platform titled “Monel,” bears traces of damage from Hurricane Sandy: a creeping discoloration at the edge. These marks add character and contingency to what is otherwise a harbinger of the Hudson Yards development; the piece has been laid across a portion of the High Line’s tracks, anticipating the covering-over of the rail yards below.

A similar platform links the seven sculptures in Ms. Bove’s show at MoMA, which is titled “The Equinox” and was organized by the curator Laura Hoptman with an assistant, Margaret Ewing. It includes a glyph and a piece made with I-beams, but unlike “Caterpillar” it’s installed as an ensemble. It also features materials much less sturdy than steel; one sculpture takes the form of a shimmering, silver-beaded curtain and another consists of parts of a used mattress salvaged from the trash.

Altogether “The Equinox” has a very different mood from the High Line show, mystical and more in keeping with Ms. Bove’s earlier sculptures. An intricate open grid of brass supported by painted fiberboard is titled “Terma,” after the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism; “ Triguna,” which incorporates a peacock feather, a shell and a hunk of found metal makes reference to the Indian ayurvedic tradition. Even the I-beam sculpture is titled “Chesed,” a term from the kabbalah.

Everything here might also be taken as sly commentary on the religion of modernism. The mattress piece, for instance — “Disgusting Mattress,” Ms. Bove has titled it — gestures to Rauschenberg’s “Bed” assemblage and Calder’s wire sculptures with its gray stuffing and flyaway springs. And the whole grouping of sculptures, on the white platform, seems to miniaturize the sculpture garden below. (Ms. Bove has spoken about the importance of this view from the gallery’s large, east-facing glass wall.)

Ms. Bove is very good at working with, or against, the personality of a given site as the situation demands. (Sometimes, though, you wish that more of her personality, strongly influenced by her Bay Area upbringing, would come through.)

On the High Line she renews our appreciation of a truly unusual public space that’s become, at its southern segments, an overtrafficked urban fetish. And at MoMA she refuses to be intimidated by the collection or sanitized by the building that contains it. Certainly, the architects and urban planners in charge of Hudson Yards and MoMA’s expansion could learn a thing or two from her.

Ineffable Emptiness, From Dawn to Dusk

Robert Irwin’s Light-and-Space Work Returns to the Whitney

Robert Irwin Photograph, Warren Silverman, 1977

Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York has returned to the Whitney’s fourth floor.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 25, 2013

New York has seen its share of art spectacles this summer. The Museum of Modern Art has its Rain Room, where the computerized stop-and-go downpours have attracted mobs. The Park Avenue Armory is filled with Paul McCarthy’s sensurround onslaught of sexual and psychological chaos. At the Guggenheim, lines of people wait to see the immense digital light show that James Turrell has inserted into the soaring rotunda.

And then there’s Robert Irwin’s installation at the Whitney Museum. This eye-filling yet barely-there low-tech mirage makes all the others seem overwrought.

“Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York” is an installation piece that has not been exhibited since its debut in 1977 and probably will not be seen again for years. A levitating concoction composed of a white semitransparent polyester scrim, a black attenuated aluminum beam and a black line painted on the wall, it has the scale of a spectacle; it takes up the museum’s entire fourth floor. But it is devoid of the sensational ostentation, heavy-duty physicality or technical complexity typical of the genre. It involves very little in the way of materials, and what’s here is decidedly analog.

The means with which Mr. Irwin has transformed the Whitney’s fourth floor are so simple — and the illusion so easily deconstructed — that you might even call his effort the anti-Turrell. (Mr. Irwin can certainly do complicated, but he saves it for unusual situations, like the intricate, constantly evolving Central Garden he designed for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.) Like Mr. Turrell, Mr. Irwin was part of the Light and Space movement that sprang up in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. These artists’ lack of interest in making visual objects led them to start creating situations that gave the viewer a new awareness of visual perception itself. They created, as was often said, the experience of “seeing yourself see.”

None of these artists did more with less than Mr. Irwin. Where most Light and Space artists made a practice of adding walls or cutting holes in them and using special artificial lighting, Mr. Irwin has rarely relied on anything more than a bit of scrim, tape, wire or paint combined with natural light, although he sometimes used the artificial lighting already in place. Still, most of his classic pieces from the 1970s and the 1980s qualify as Light and Space unplugged.

The Whitney piece, as is usual with Mr. Irwin’s scrim works, is extrapolated from a careful consideration of the details of the architecture. Here the main detail is Marcel Breuer’s enormous, emblematic Cyclops window, a trapezoidal bay affair that pivots slightly out from the building’s boxy and otherwise featureless facade.

The scrim abuts the left edge of the window and runs the length of the 117-foot gallery, descending from the ceiling to a height 5 feet 6 inches above the floor. There it is anchored and stretched into a smooth white plane by the aluminum beam, a three-inch-thick, seemingly seamless element (it actually breaks down into 11 pieces) that spans the length of the gallery. Then there’s the black line — also three inches wide and, like the beam, at a height of 5 feet 6 inches above the floor — painted completely around the gallery.

The piece is in some ways a work of measurement both accurate and inaccurate. The scrim-beam makes the space feel bigger than it actually is. The drama of its emptiness is the first thing you experience stepping off the elevator. The effect is of an indoor abstracted landscape, with the scrim functioning as sky and the beam and line providing shifting horizons.

At the same time, the scrim measures the light exactly. Its whiteness meticulously registers its fading and dimming from the window to the back wall. These measurements change every second of every day, corresponding to the time and weather.

Experiencing the work is a process of continuous mulling, of separating visual fact from fiction. You repeatedly take Mr. Irwin’s installation apart and put it back together again, parsing the individual elements — including the window — and then seeing the different ways they combine and affect one another as you move around the space. One thing that quickly becomes obvious is that the dark metal frame around the window seems to be an essential inspiration for the beam and black line. The trapezoidal angles of this aperture also play against the right angles of everything else, just as its transparency contrasts with the fluctuating milkiness of the scrim.

As you leave the elevator, the beam is dominant, but you don’t necessarily know exactly where it is. At first it reads as a deep, dark slot cut into the opposite wall, shadowed by the seemingly thinner, paler painted line. As you move toward it, the beam’s suspension in space near the central axis of the gallery emerges. Then you start sorting out the scrim: the way it diffuses light, making it a granular, tangible atmosphere while also constantly changing from transparent to opaque as you cross under it, walk along it, or view it from a distance. At times it might as well be a plaster wall.

At the juncture of scrim, beam and window, the painted line takes off like a relay racer, zipping around the walls, interrupted only by the elevator foyer and the door to a gallery in the opposite corner. It asserts the horizontal plane of the gallery against the almost guillotinelike vertical of the scrim. It also functions as a kind of ship’s railing by which you can right yourself if things get too disorienting, yet its distant-horizon effect adds to the illusionistic expansion of space.

Mr. Irwin made his first public scrim piece in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art at the invitation of a prescient curator, Jennifer Licht. (I was her secretary at the time.) In a tiny skylighted gallery usually reserved for the Modern’s Brancusis, he stretched a horizontal scrim across half the skylight and added a thin strand of wire running parallel to its edge, again contrasting precision and diffusion. Seven years later at the Whitney, Mr. Irwin accomplished what is surely one of the masterpieces of Light and Space, or Minimalism in general, and he gave it to the museum on the condition that it could only be exhibited in the space that inspired it. And now the Whitney has brought it out of storage for the first time: a last look before handing its Marcel Breuer building over to its new tenant, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and reopening downtown in new quarters in 2015. It will probably not be seen again until the Met’s lease is up and the Whitney has the wherewithal to take back its historic building.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has had to deal with a variety of challenges, including financial ones.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: July 25, 2013

When Jeffrey Deitch was named in 2010 to lead the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, many in the city’s art world expressed guarded optimism that he could turn around a museum that had come close to foundering only two years earlier.

But others urged Mr. Deitch, a veteran New York art dealer, to run from the job, which they saw as next to impossible, a tangle of long-festering internal problems compounded by the museum’s unenviable basics: two locations blocks apart, one of them with no onsite parking in a downtown neighborhood that remains a tough sell for tourists and residents alike.

In retrospect, Mr. Deitch may wish he had listened to the second group. On Wednesday, the museum announced his resignation three years into a five-year contract, after a tenure that included a few well-attended, critically praised exhibitions but that was marked by staff defections, budget problems and accusations that Mr. Deitch had neither the ability nor the desire to run a large public institution.

Mr. Deitch has not publicly spoken about stepping down and declined to comment when reached by phone Thursday.

Since the decision, few people have been willing to speak on the record about what happened at the museum, which has one of the finest collections of postwar art in the country. Privately, his supporters say that he took the job with several disadvantages, among them the inability — partly because of the museum’s financial situation — to bring in people he knew to help him. And relations between Mr. Deitch and Paul Schimmel, the museum’s chief curator, were tense from the beginning. (Mr. Schimmel left under pressure last year.)

In 2008, the museum was saved from going under or merging with another institution by the billionaire collector Eli Broad, who is building a museum to house his own collection opposite the Museum of Contemporary Art’s location on Grand Street. Charles Young, the chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Los Angeles, was brought in by Mr. Broad as chief executive of the contemporary museum and quickly stabilized it.

But Mr. Broad also engineered the selection of Mr. Deitch, and some trustees and financial supporters of the museum felt that the choice had been forced on them, leading to a downturn in giving, according to a former museum official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues involved.

The former official added, however, that Mr. Deitch bore much of the responsibility for financial problems — and for staff problems — that worsened under his leadership.

“He was going to do whatever he wanted,” the former official said. “He would add things, cancel things, change exhibition schedules, would hold parties that would end up being only break-even. He had no concept or need for those kind of events to help the museum financially.”

Of a large public institution in which consensus and communication are important, the former official added: “He had no ability or interest in functioning in that kind of environment. At the end of the day, I think Jeffrey was incredibly unhappy at MOCA.”

Mr. Deitch’s supporters counter that he recruited several wealthy new members to the board, including Ari Emanuel, the high-powered talent agent; Maurice Marciano, a founder of the Guess clothing company; and Laurence Graff, a London-born billionaire and diamond merchant. In all, 16 new trustees joined during Mr. Deitch’s years.

“I found him to be an inspiring person to work with,” said Rebecca Bronfein Raphael, an associate director of development at the museum in 2010 and 2011 who had previously worked for Mr. Deitch at his New York gallery. “He instills a lot of trust and confidence in the people that he works with.”

Ms. Raphael, who now works for the online art site Artsy, added, “Artists are his No. 1 passion.” In the realm of fund-raising, she said, “I think it took some time to find a groove, but I think that was just a general symptom of being a new person, working in a new city.”

Mr. Deitch’s curatorial staff is now reduced to two full-time members, and there is great uncertainty about the exhibition schedule over the next year. “He has absolutely no interest in any other exhibitions” than those he originated or organized himself, said one current museum staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The staff is completely in the dark and has been since Jeffrey arrived.”

The Los Angeles artist John Baldessari, who resigned from the board last year and criticized Mr. Deitch as trying to move the museum too much in a pop culture direction, said: “Jeffrey wasn’t disingenuous. He did what he does, and that’s what the museum wanted.”

“But I think the real problem is the museum board,” Mr. Baldessari added. “It’s a really nonfunctional board. They need to have a clear vision for this museum as an important place and a place where people feel the need to go, and I think right now it’s a troubled and a flawed vision.”