Aviva and I wanted to see the current show “Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples” so we dropped Basil at his sitter’s house and drove to the museum.

A car with the license plate HEATHER – made me think
of the movie “Heathers”

On the way into the museum we saw a couple of outdoor exhibits that were pretty cool: the first is a hanging bunch of brightly colored kitchen plasticware, the second a permanent installation of a large number of street lights.

An installation of kitchen plasticware	A detail of the installation
A permanant installation of street lights	The ticket agent and exhibition banner

Aviva is a member of LACMA so we get in for free, but we still needed a ticket to enter the special exhibits.

There’s a really large sculpture on the way into the complex of buildings that make up LACMA.

We started with  Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.  We’ve seen some of the material in this exhibit before – we went on vacation to Naples in 2005 and visited the Museo Nazionale, which supplied many of the works for this show (if you go to that page, you’ll see a detail of the statues of the daughters of Danaus – that statue was in this show!).

My favorite pieces were the painted walls; I thought those were really amazing.  They are full size walls taken from walls in villas; we saw the lower wall below, which is part

Wall painting from the House of the Golden Bracelet

Apollo with the muses Clio Euterpe

There was a great set of four frolicking centaurs, including female ones!

The statues were pretty cool as well.

Sytr and Hermaphrodite – click and look carefully
on the left figure’s thigh – (s)he’s got breasts too

And there were lots of household items on exhibit including oil lamps and various cups and vessels.

Skyphos with Egyptian figures

We then had an early dinner because we were both hungry.  The restaurant, Pentimento, was okay – the service was very nice and friendly but the food was only middling.

The centerpieces were cool

Next stop was the bookstore; Aviva bought a book on Carpaccio (we saw a lot of his work in Venice) for less than 3 USD, we bought the catalog for the Pompeii exhibit, and a cool set of page flags (I use page flags to remember pages I want to note when I write book reviews).

We then walked over to the new Japanese Pavilion; this houses the collection of Japanese painted wall hangings and screens, as well as a small collection of statues, a suit of samurai armor, and a room of Netsuke.

The Japanese Pavilion
A ghost	A woman
A boar	A woman looking out a door
Iris screen

From the Wikipedia page on netsuke:

Netsuke (Japanese:根付) are miniature sculptures that were invented in 17th century Japan to serve a practical function (the two Japanese characters ne+tsuke mean “root” and “to attach”). Traditional Japanese garment—robes called kosode and kimono—had no pockets, however men who wore them needed a place to store their personal belongings such as pipes, tobacco, money, seals, or medicines.

An owl netsuke	This demonstrates how the netsuke (top) holds the pouch
A turtle netsuke with a human head!	A reclining skeleton netsuke

And then we drove back to the Valley, picked up Basil, and went home.

The dogs at the dog sitter’s house