As LACMA prepares for the 2026 public opening of the new David Geffen Galleries, the future home of the museum’s permanent collection spanning a breadth of eras and cultures, we’re sharing 50 iconic artworks that will be on view in the building over the next 50 weeks in the series 50 Works 50 Weeks.
In 1916, LACMA’s predecessor, the Los Angeles County Museum of Science, History, and Art, purchased George Bellows’s Cliff Dwellers, one of the first works acquired for the museum’s collection. The artist was among a generation of painters, later dubbed the Ashcan School, who depicted modern urban life amid dramatic social and economic change. In this view of an overcrowded tenement on New York City’s Lower East Side, Bellows adopted a somber color palette and rough brushwork to convey the harsh realities of life in immigrant and working-class communities.
Southern California’s Millard Sheets was able to see Cliff Dwellers shortly after it was acquired by the museum, and was inspired to eventually create his own depictions of local tenement life. This includes the 1931 painting Angel’s Flight, whose title refers to one of the original funiculars that were part of Los Angeles Railway built in 1901 to carry pedestrians on Third Street up from Hill Street to Olive Street, on the top of Bunker Hill. Sheets created this scene of Angel's Flight from atop the hill, presenting the steep terrain of downtown and the inhabitants who called it home. The two young women in the foreground—both modeled after the artist’s wife Mary—look down onto a meandering staircase, rooftops, and neighborhood dwellers enjoying nestled spaces throughout the scene, whose height and dynamism is exaggerated by differing perspectives, a bright palette of colors, and an interplay of light and shadow.
Sheets painted Angel’s Flight for the 1931 Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, the first major international show he was invited to participate in. In 1932, the painting won a prize for the “most representative work” at the annual exhibition held at the Los Angeles Museum and was subsequently purchased for its collection. This piece of Los Angeles history is now on view in the David Geffen Galleries alongside Bellows’s Cliff Dwellers, presenting a snapshot of urban life in L.A. and New York in the early 20th century.