LOS ANGELES — Crystals, it appears, are in all places. From purchasing malls to airports, I’ve seen crystals offered in tiny bits and mega items, on bracelets and as standalone objects. New York Metropolis’s Mayor Eric Adams as soon as said that crystals give town “particular vitality,” and Texas State College Professor Joseph P. Laycock has linked their recognition to metaphysical religion. Whether or not non secular or aesthetic, our fashionable fascination with crystals makes clear that these stones have extra energy than their bodily properties. They give the impression of being good, and for some individuals additionally they really feel good to be round.
Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork explores the usage of stone primarily in Western artwork. The works on view are largely from the museum’s collections, alongside some from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Assortment on mortgage to the V&A.
The exhibition is organized round just a few core themes, as in Fooling the Eye, which incorporates trompe l’oeil works reminiscent of a desk with a nonetheless life that appears like a portray however is in truth made completely of stones, marble, coral, and rock crystal. In Stone for Stone, works made from stone depict stone, which makes for an particularly apt metaphor of St. Peter, whose identify derives from the Greek petra, or stone. Leonard Bramer’s “The Liberation of Saint Peter” is an oil portray that makes use of slate to seize the essence of the stone partitions of a jail that may have held the Biblical determine.
And as anybody who’s visited a rock desert or collected crystals may acknowledge, typically stones themselves have their very own painterly qualities. A marble slab from Yunnan, China, is introduced as is, reduce into the form of a circle to assist spotlight its pure whites and grays, which appear like a cloud or operating stream. An untitled panorama designed by Richard Blow, manufactured by Monitici Workshop in Florence, is an instance of a pietra paesina, or panorama stone. Blow organized albarese limestone right into a stone mosaic to create the sense of a panorama.
One vital theme obvious within the present is the non secular high quality of stone. An in depth watercolor panel from the doorway to the Taj Mahal is embellished with beautiful floral designs. Because the exhibition textual content notes, the “fidelity of the stone flowers [situated closer toward the Taj Mahal’s interior] in comparison with the ephemeral ones exterior related them with the backyard of paradise, particularly given the memorial operate of the constructing.”
On the opposite finish of the gallery, a white marble bust of Christ attributed to Giovanni Battista Della Porta is embellished with blue lapis lazuli that was aligned with the Virgin Mary and purple-red stone linked with divinity and empire. The bust, made within the 16th century, is introduced alongside a Neo-Assyrian stamp seal made from lapis lazuli from the late eighth to seventh century, exhibiting the lengthy historical past of this stone — nonetheless common in crystal retailers in the present day — with magnificence, energy and the spirit.
I ended by a small stone mosaic of white chalcedony, gentle stones, and marble depicting valkyrie. The black and white figures seem unhappy or drained, slumped on horseback. Extra alive is the marble behind them, quarried from the Apuan Alps of northern Tuscany. It seems to be like a storm rolling in, a twister maybe, an earthly object as dynamic because the skies of Italy. It’s straightforward to consider stone as static, immutable, however as Everlasting Medium exhibits, stone is a slice of the earth itself, as alive because the artists who mildew and form it.
Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone continues on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (5905 Wilshire Blvd, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) by means of February 11. The exhibition was curated by Rosie Mills, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Basis Affiliate Curator, Ornamental Arts and Design.
