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
Over the past several years while the David Geffen Galleries were under construction, I watched the protracted and arduous process from my office window across the street while also preparing for the future galleries in collaboration with curatorial and conservation colleagues and our design team. Although at times it seemed like this moment would never arrive, now at long last we have begun the art installation process. Because they are so sizable and unwieldy, among the first works installed were our three monumental Assyrian reliefs. For those who do not remember them from past visits to LACMA, they might nonetheless conjure up images from Art History 101 of giant sculpted human-headed winged bulls or the famous dying lioness relief from Nineveh, in the British Museum.
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The LACMA reliefs belong to the first half of the first millennium BCE, when the Assyrian Empire extended from the eastern Mediterranean to western Iran, with its heartland clustered around several capital cities in modern-day northern Iraq. There, at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883−859), established his capital, and built a great palace complex. Beginning in 1845, excavations at the so-called Northwest Palace under Henry Austen Layard, a young English diplomat, politician, and archaeologist, revealed an extensive sequence of alabaster slabs along its interior walls, carved in place and originally painted in black, white, red, and blue. The LACMA reliefs are said to have been removed from the site in 1855 by William Kennett Loftus, who succeeded Layard.
While some of the excavated material from Nimrud remained in Iraq, then part of the Ottoman Empire, many artworks, including large stone sculptures and reliefs, made a long and difficult journey to England. They traveled via rafts on the nearby Tigris River to Basra, a port city in southern Iraq, from there by steamship to Bombay, India, and then by ship around Africa to London. The LACMA reliefs were trekked still further to Northern England, to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, apparently as a gift from Loftus. By the 1960s they had come on the art market and were subsequently acquired by Anna Bing Arnold for LACMA. Like other relief sculpture from Nimrud, the back halves of our panels were chiseled off to make them easier to remove and transport. Even so, the heaviest of the LACMA reliefs weighs more than two tons.
Such large and precious stone sculptures are still difficult to move and maneuver. We had the use of specially padded crates, forklifts and a gantry, while we created full-scale photographic mockups to determine their exact placement before carefully lifting each panel into place. Today, these detailed and sensitively rendered reliefs—the king and his unearthly winged human- and eagle-headed companions—patiently await a new audience, beginning in April 2026.