Est. 1992
Mat Gleason 
When asked, I tell people, mostly visitors to LA, that the Norton Simon Museum has by far the best collection in Southern California if not the West Coast. But I now must qualify this. If you just want to see twentieth century art, there is nothing that rivals the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation. Located in … Read more
Truth be told, Charlie Finch was an obscenely cruel man, psychopathic with his verbal abuse and gratified most when humiliating people. But nobody that I know of benefitted from their relationship with Charlie more than I. Charlie was introduced to me by a mutual friend in the summer of 1992 and he wrote for the … Read more
There is something beyond language in the feeling one gets when a childhood encounter with art is repeated later in life. It is a combination of familiarity and time travel, the reincarnation of what was loosening the grip of the continuum that brought us to our present; loosened if only for a moment. It isn’t … Read more
New York painter Walter Robinson has been exhibiting since the early 1980s. There is a whole mythology of the East Village Scene™ among New York Baby Boomers that took place in the late seventies and early eighties. While it did give us Haring, Scharff and most importantly Basquiat, the proof it was little more than … Read more
Pablo Picasso, Creator/Destroyer as the title of one of his many biographies observed. Pablo Picasso, selfish prick or genius… or both? If any artist of the twentieth century “contained multitudes” in the way Walt Whitman observed about actualizing the many lenses of human potential, it was Picasso. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has … Read more
Of all the legacies the art market and its institutions have collaborated to spawn and cultivate, the most self-congratulatory of them all by far is that of Barbara Kruger. The fog of memory clouds our collective recollection concerning her signature style – scaled hectoring – is it a relic of the eighties? Or do we … Read more
Santa Monica Auctions features lots like a dynamic Allison Saar sketch and a signed Francis Bacon litho, allowing collectors to stick to the big names and the great results they produced to make those names so big.
When I stopped doing Coagula Art Journal in print in 2009 I promised three people I would publish books of their contributions to the publication. First was what turned out to be two volumes of Gerald Locklin’s poetry – BOOK ONE in 2011 and BOOK TWO in 2014. Cartoonist Jim Caron was next up with … Read more
Film Director Roberto Oregel sent me a link to the trailer for his documentary on Los Angeles painter Alfredo De Batuc. Mexican-born ADB was already a local legend when he was struck with Guillame-Barre Syndrome. This caused him the loss of the use of his hands. For years he went without making any art… but … Read more
We went to see the poppies. We stopped by the museum. There were some shows there we wanted to see but we had made the drive to Lancaster to see the poppies. They only bloom for like five weeks. The shows were up for seven or eight weeks but it was getting close to their … Read more