Beauty and the Stealth Museum - December 2011

Helen Frankenthaler dared to embrace the importance of beauty in art. A color field painter in a movement dominated by men, she forged her own path. In a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, a portion of which aired recently, she explained , "I think that today beautiful...has become an incendiary word, because in many ways today, beauty is obsolete, not the main concern of art, and you can't prove beauty. It's there as a fact and you know it and feel it and it's real, but you can't say to somebody, this is it... it gives no specific message other than itself which in turn should be able to move you into some sort of truth and insight and something beyond art..."

Listen to the conversation in We Remember the People We Lost in 2011. It is the last interview in the segment. And view some of her beautiful paintings. How fortunate we are that she lived such a long and productive life.

Recently encountered - a museum space in a derelict former automobile showroom at 4th and La Brea in Los Angeles - my own neighborhood. A massive shiny sculpture of Lenin's head was the first visible sign of habitation. The ultimate stealth museum - minimal signage, limited hours, the entrance down an unmarked alley. Curious, we ventured inside to find THE (SECRET) RETURN OF NOEVER, a SCI-Arch-curated exhibit "documenting 25 years of Peter Noever's curatorial adventurism" as Director of the MAK Museum in Vienna and the MAK Center in Los Angeles.

I foraged through 25 years of MAK/Noever-related publications, and found several with textile subjects - Fragile Remnants, Universum in Seide (Universe in Silk) Kiki Kogelnik: Hangings, and most intriguing to me, Lace and So On, the lace collection of Bertha Pappenheim - aka patient "Anna O" the first of Freud's recorded cases to be treated with psychoanalytical therapy -also a prominent activist for women's rights AND a generous collector.