This Weekend at LACMA

July 9, 2010

Have you ever seen someone beatbox through a flute? Me neither, until I saw Katisse do it. The jazz/hip hop/funk group is playing for free tonight. Check this video for a sample—the way Katisse is able to punctuate his beats with melody from the flute is mind-blowing.

As with every weekend we’ve got free concerts every night: Saturday, Braziliando performs a mix of samba, Brazilian jazz, and bossa nova in Hancock Park. Sunday in the Bing Theater, Phillip Levy and Francois Chouchan perform works by Beethoven and Grieg.

Starting tonight we’re also kicking off a month-long salute to the great director Ernst Lubitsch’s American comedies.The series opens with the film Lubitsch considered his personal favorite, Trouble in Paradise paired with the Lubitsch-produced 1936 comedy Desire, starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper. Lubitsch’s daughter, Nicola, will be in attendance for the opening night. Read the L.A. Times article on the series, in case you missed it.

Saturday sees two more Lubitsch films, the Oscar-nominated Garbo comedy Ninotchka and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, the latter another Cooper vehicle also starring Claudette Colbert and David Niven. Both feature screenplays written by Charles Bracket and Billy Wilder. Here’s a trailer for Bluebeard, should you need to be reminded of “the Lubitsch touch”:

Art-wise, we’re happy to have opened four more galleries for our permanent European collection, as you may have surmised from yesterday’s post. We’ve been reinstalling the entire third floor of the Ahmanson Building in phases over the last few months, with plans for completion soon. The latest galleries to open feature works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mostly Italian and French (joining the already-open galleries for Dutch paintings and works from Spain and Northern Italy). Do check out the latest additions, which includes Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Jean-Pierre Delahaye, Ludovico Mazzanti’s Death of Lucretia, and a gallery full of Monets, Gaugins, Cézannes, and more.

Scott Tennent