Travelers Company

Exhibitions at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art are always minimal, but “Classic Contemporary: Lichtenstein, Warhol & Friends,” is minimalist in both content and theme.  A dozen or so works from the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego are scattered throughout the gallery with enough white space in between to make each appear to be a featured piece.  Culled from major Contemporary artists primarily from the 1960s and ’70s who became leaders in their generation, the exhibit showcases the artists’ deconstruction of art forms into their most basic: an exploration of space, color and texture and how we inevitably build meaning into the most abstract of forms.

The exhibit showcases important schools of American painting that developed after World War II, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. Dan Flavin, Untitled (To Marianne), 1970, bolts together four beams of unadorned fluorescent lights.  Two parallel tubes beam out while two face the wall.  Affixed to a corner, the light tricks the eye into creating matter from space and structure from its absence.

Andy Warhol’s Mao Tse Tung, 1972 splashes swathes of cartoonish color over the face of one of the last century’s most feared leaders in a way that bleeds the ubiquitous portrait of its ability to terrorize.

My favorite, however, is the multiple panel pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Cathedral Series #1-6, 1969. Echoing Monet’s famous exploration of light in his series of the Façade of Rouen Cathedral, Lichtenstein explores the illusion of depth. His first lithograph looks as if the cathedral rests behind a scrim of punch paper. In the second lithograph, the cathedral moves forward so that the dark stars and dots coexist side by side with the church; by the third, now reduced to deep purples and flat blacks, the cathedral struggles to be seen within the wash of eye-straining dots and stars.

In its final month, the exhibition runs through September 2009.

Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art

3600 Las Vegas Blvd. South (map it)

702-693-7871

Daily 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., until 7 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays

(last admission one half hour before closing)

Tickets $15, $12 for NV residents and seniors, $10 for students, teachers and military; 12 and under free

LOCALS Special Wednesday from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. $8

Image courtesy of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art.

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