Patrick Graham, Dead Swan/Captain’s Hill, 1998-99, Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas Diptych, 72 x 132 inches, JRFA #8169 [photo credit: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Inc]
“Pasadena: L.A.’s Art Legacy” brings together 70 works by nearly 60 artists, each accompanied by a label noting provenance and the year a local museum exhibited the artist, according to the gallery. The opening reception runs from 3 to 6 p.m. Sunday, June 7, and the show continues through August 29.
The gallery, which describes itself as among the longest established in Los Angeles, said the broader Pasadena area has long lacked a sustaining gallery scene to complement its museums, and that even the area’s most consequential artists rarely exhibited in Pasadena galleries.
Among the works on view is Hans Burkhardt’s (1904–1994) large 1948 painting “Pasadena Bridge,” a surrealist, expressionist depiction of the Colorado Street Bridge. The Pasadena Art Museum presented a Burkhardt mid-career retrospective in 1957, the gallery said.
The exhibition also includes work by Alexander Calder, who lived in Pasadena from 1907 to 1909, according to the gallery. Calder’s father created a basement studio for him just blocks from the gallery’s present location, where the young artist made drawings and objects crafted from wire and other materials. Attending the Tournament of Roses and seeing horse-drawn chariots, the gallery said, may have seeded Calder’s lifelong interest in the circus, most famously his 1926 work “Calder’s Circus.”
Julian Wasser’s photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz at Duchamp’s 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum is pictured on a wall label accompanying two works by Jacques Villon (1875–1963). Villon, Duchamp’s older brother, showed at the museum in 1966, according to the gallery.
A recently rediscovered 1887 oil on canvas by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904),”Bouquet of Flowers,” will be exhibited for the first time. Two original lithographs are also included — one depicting his sisters embroidering, the other inspired by a Wagnerian opera. The Pasadena Art Museum presented Fantin-Latour exhibitions in 1953–54 and 1970.
Other featured artists range from old masters Francisco Goya, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Jacques Callot to modern and contemporary figures including Sam Francis, Robert Motherwell, Man Ray, Louise Nevelson, Ed Ruscha, Llyn Foulkes and Alison Saar. Goya has been presented at the Pasadena, Norton Simon and Huntington museums, the gallery said.
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is located at 600 South Lake Avenue, #102. Free parking entrance is on South Lake Avenue, with gallery entry through the lobby. Regular hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For information, call (323) 938-5222 or jrutberg@jackrutbergfinearts.com.
All 70 works in the exhibition are for sale, the gallery said.
