art

Frederick M. Nicholas, a war hero, attorney and real estate developer who shaped several of Los Angeles’ major arts and public service institutions, died peacefully at his home Saturday. He was 105.

Nicholas led the design and development of major L.A. landmarks, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Surprisingly enough, Nicholas discovered his love of the arts in law school at the University of Chicago. “When I went downtown, I saw an art gallery for the first time,” he said in a 2022 YouTube interview with Blake Meidel, a young film creator. “I went inside and I looked at it and I was overwhelmed.”

When he returned to L.A., where he had studied journalism at USC, Nicholas took classes in the visual arts and built a law practice that included representation of artists and galleries. He took on several distinguished roles in the arts community, serving as MOCA’s chairman and vice chairman for a cumulative 11 years and a life trustee for the remainder of his life. Nicholas was instrumental to the development of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

It is little wonder that he was nicknamed “Mr. Downtown Culture.” In the 1980s, Nicholas led the city out of a cultural stasis and turned it into a global cultural and architectural powerhouse.

“Fred, we literally wouldn’t be L.A. without you,” former mayor Eric Garcetti said in a message to Nicholas on his 100th birthday.

Renowned architect Frank Gehry told The Times that Nicholas’ involvement in MOCA “was too good to be true.”

“He is an extremely smart man, and he’s sensitive. He’s been involved in and interested in the arts as a collector,” Gehry said in 1982. “He understands both the architecture and business of development. He knows all the players involved with the museum, and he has their respect. When I heard he was involved I thought it was too good to be true. I know he can pull it off.”

Nicholas negotiated with Giuseppe Panza of Varese, Italy, to acquire the Panza Collection. Including works from Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and others, the art now forms the core of MOCA’s permanent collection.

As chair of the Walt Disney Hall Concert Committee beginning in 1987, Nicholas headed a committee to find an architect (Gehry was eventually hired for the coveted gig), fundraise and plan the building process.

Over 105 years, Nicholas engaged with some of history’s greatest artists. “I met Pablo Picasso and I had dinner with him,” he told Meidel breezily.

Nicholas’ influence in L.A. extended into the realm of public service as well. After an incredibly successful law career, he shifted to pro bono work. “I thought that lawyers should do something to help the poor,” Nicholas told Meidel. Nicholas founded Public Counsel in 1970, which provided legal support to vulnerable people, including veterans and unhoused families, in what is now the largest firm of its kind in the U.S.

“Public Counsel really is his greatest legacy,” Nicholas’ son, Anthony Nicholas, told The Times on Tuesday. “They are still helping people today.”

Nicholas was born on May 30, 1920 in Brooklyn, N.Y. When he was 14, his family moved to L.A. In 1941, Nicholas served in the Army and was discharged five years later.

“One of the things that made me successful in law was that I was always in a hurry. I was always eager to move because I felt that I had lost so much time in the war. I had to make it up,” Nicholas, one of the oldest and most decorated WWII veterans, said in a retrospective on his life and work at age 100.

Nicholas was also adored by his family. Anthony recalled his father’s “beaming smile,” “great, great energy” and “the love he spread around the world.”

Nicholas is survived by his children, Deborah, Jan and Anthony; Anthony’s wife Mona; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and sister Helen Devor.

Emmy nominations voting ends tonight at 10 p.m. PT. Still need help with your ballot?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Still time to bite into a “Jaws” doughnut and peruse my picks for this year’s Emmy races. (An ordinary bagel will do.)

My personal picks in 15 Emmy categories

There are more than 100 Emmy categories, and if you scrolled through each and every one of them on the Television Academy’s website, you are probably one of those people who read the terms and conditions on a document before signing your name.

For me, simply filling out the following 15 categories — five each for comedy, drama and limited series — left me exhausted and in need of a sweet treat. And I already finished my “Jaws” doughnut. Maybe this cherries jubilee? Paul Giamatti would approve.

Without further ado, here are my picks and a brief line of reasoning for each. And if it’s predictions you’re after, you can find our full BuzzMeter panel’s choices here.

Bridget Everett in “Somebody Somewhere.”

(Sandy Morris / HBO)

COMEDY SERIES
“Abbott Elementary”
“The Bear”
“Hacks”
“A Man on the Inside”
“Only Murders in the Building”
“The Rehearsal”
“Somebody Somewhere”
“The Studio”

Yes, “The Rehearsal” is a comedy.

COMEDY ACTRESS
Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”
Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”
Bridget Everett, “Somebody Somewhere”
Natasha Lyonne, “Poker Face”
Jean Smart, “Hacks”

Last call on nominating Everett (and her magical series), which has won a Peabody.

COMEDY ACTOR
Ted Danson, “A Man on the Inside”
Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”
Seth Rogen, “The Studio”
Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building”
Jeremy Allen White, “The Bear”

Best Netflix comedy: “A Man on the Inside,” anchored by Danson, still a master of light laughs.

COMEDY SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Liza Colón-Zayas, “The Bear”
Hannah Einbinder, “Hacks”
Kathryn Hahn, “The Studio”
Linda Lavin, “Mid-Century Modern”
Jane Lynch, “Only Murders in the Building”
Catherine O’Hara, “The Studio”
Sheryl Lee Ralph, “Abbott Elementary”

Colón-Zayas won last year, probably for the episode that she submitted this year. It’s weird when shows drop their new seasons in June.

COMEDY SUPPORTING ACTOR
Ike Barinholtz, “The Studio”
Colman Domingo, “The Four Seasons”
Paul Downs, “Hacks”
Harrison Ford, “Shrinking”
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Bear”
Tyler James Williams, “Abbott Elementary”
Bowen Yang, “Saturday Night Live”

Thank you, Sal Saperstein!

Tramell Tillman in “Severance.”

(Apple TV+)

DRAMA SERIES
“Andor”
“The Last of Us”
“Paradise”
“The Pitt”
“Severance”
“Slow Horses”
“The White Lotus”
“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light”

Voting for “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” checks a couple of boxes.

DRAMA ACTRESS
Kathy Bates, “Matlock”
Britt Lower, “Severance”
Elisabeth Moss, “The Handmaid’s Tale”
Kaitlin Olson, “High Potential”
Bella Ramsey, “The Last of Us”

Moss won this Emmy eight years ago. With the show ending, she has earned a parting gift.

DRAMA ACTOR
Sterling K. Brown, “Paradise”
Gary Oldman, “Slow Horses”
Pedro Pascal, “The Last of Us”
Adam Scott, “Severance”
Noah Wyle, “The Pitt”

“Why don’t you say whatever speech you’ve got rehearsed and get this over with.” Godspeed, old friend. Also: Joel’s parting words should flash onscreen any time an Emmy winner goes long at the podium.

DRAMA SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Carrie Coon, “The White Lotus”
Taylor Dearden, “The Pitt”
Fiona Dourif, “The Pitt”
Tracy Ifeachor, “The Pitt”
Katherine LaNasa, “The Pitt”
Julianne Nicholson, “Paradise”
Parker Posey, “The White Lotus”

Women of “The Pitt” > Women of “The White Lotus”

DRAMA SUPPORTING ACTOR
Patrick Ball, “The Pitt”
Gerran Howell, “The Pitt”
Jason Isaacs, “The White Lotus”
Damian Lewis, “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light”
Jack Lowden, “Slow Horses”
Tramell Tillman, “Severance”
John Turturro, “Severance”

I don’t know. Tillman might deserve the Emmy for this alone.

Christine Tremarco and Stephen Graham in “Adolescence.”

(Netflix )

LIMITED SERIES
“Adolescence”
“Dope Thief”
“Dying for Sex”
“The Penguin”
“Say Nothing”

“Adolescence” should win everything.

LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE ACTRESS
Kaitlyn Dever, “Apple Cider Vinegar”
Cristin Milioti, “The Penguin”
Lola Petticrew, “Say Nothing”
Michelle Williams, “Dying for Sex”
Renée Zellweger, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”

OK, maybe not everything, as “Adolescence” doesn’t have a submission here. Zellweger probably won’t win because comic acting rarely does, even though it most definitely should.

LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE ACTOR
Colin Farrell, “The Penguin”
Stephen Graham, “Adolescence”
Brian Tyree Henry, “Dope Thief”
Kevin Kline, “Disclaimer”
Cooper Koch, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”

Farrell has already won so many awards for “The Penguin,” it feels like either A) he must have won the Emmy too or B) he hasn’t, and good God, let somebody else have a prize. (Like Graham.)

LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Erin Doherty, “Adolescence”
Ruth Negga, “Presumed Innocent”
Deirde O’Connell, “The Penguin”
Imogen Faith Reid, “Good American Family”
Jenny Slate, “Dying for Sex”
Christine Tremarco, “Adolescence”

Doherty will likely win for the series’ third episode, the taut two-hander with Owen Cooper. But the fourth episode is just as good — maybe even better — featuring a heart-rending turn from Tremarco as the mom trying to hold it together.

LIMITED SERIES/MOVIE SUPPORTING ACTOR
Javier Bardem, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story”
Owen Cooper, “Adolescence”
Rob Delaney, “Dying for Sex”
Rhenzy Feliz, “The Penguin”
Hugh Grant, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”
Ashley Walters, “Adolescence”

Cooper will soon become the fifth teen actor to win a Primetime Emmy.

Charlie English begins “The CIA Book Club” by describing a 1970s technical manual: a dull cover, as uninviting as anything. A book that practically begs you to put it back on the shelf and move on.

Which was exactly the point. Secreted inside the technobabble dust jacket was a Polish-language copy of George Orwell’s “1984,” the boring cover a deliberate misdirection to deter prying eyes. The false front is a bit of skullduggery that harks back to a world where conspiracy to escape detection was a part of everyday life. A world where literature could be revolutionary, “a reservoir of freedom.”

English, formerly a journalist for the Guardian, specializes in writing about how art and literature are used to fight extremism: “The Storied City,” published in the U.K. as “The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu,” spotlights librarians who heroically saved priceless manuscripts of West African history from al Qaeda; “The Gallery of Miracles and Madness” traces the “insane” artists who influenced the early 20th century Modernism movement and Hitler’s attempts to stamp out their art — and them. His new book takes us through five decades of Poles fighting Soviet domination and Communist propaganda with a potent weapon: literature.

Even from the vantage point of the 21st century, when we know what became of the USSR, English’s book reads like a thriller. There are CIA suits, secret police, faceless bureaucrats and backstabbing traitors lurking in these pages. We face tensions between paramilitary cowboys and prudent intellectuals, between paper-pushing accountants and survivors saving a culture. While reading, I worried about figures like Helena Łuczywo, who edited and published an underground newspaper, and Mirosław Chojecki, who smuggled books and printing supplies into Poland. As with the best spy novels, we know the good guy is going to win while reading “The CIA Book Club,” but how English gets us there is exciting.

His best chapters follow the protests in the Gdańsk shipyards that led to the Solidarity trade union. A better future shimmers on the page when Lech Wałęsa climbs over a fence as an unemployed electrician, taps someone on the shoulder and becomes “the face of the Polish revolution.” (Ten years later, he became president of Poland, too.) In the violent crackdown that followed the momentary blossoming of freedom after Gdańsk, we feel the heartbreak and fear of the people. We hope again when fighters like Łuczywo begin printing a scant newsletter whose “main job was just to exist” and remind people they weren’t alone.

The book is gripping, but it doesn’t quite deliver on its subtitled promise to “win the Cold War with forbidden literature.” The story English has researched and put together focuses almost entirely on Poland’s fight for freedom from the USSR. Of course, the CIA’s funding of smuggling illicit literature into the Eastern Bloc is an important story, and a nearly forgotten one. As English mentions in the epilogue, while “the book program’s latter-day budget stood at around $2 million to $4 million annually, [the Afghan operation] by 1987 was running at a cost of $700 million a year, taking up 80 percent of the overseas budget of the clandestine service.” Apparently, an operation costing nearly 200 times the other deserves nearly 200 times the credit as well. The result is that the power of inexpensive books was swept under the rug in favor of expensive shows of force.

Still, the impressive power of the book club might have been better elucidated if details about its impact in other Eastern Bloc countries were brought into the story. The focus on Poland obscures what was happening in the USSR. English focused on Poland because the country had a long history of underground revolutionary culture; when the USSR turned independent Poland into a client state known as the People’s Republic of Poland, the Poles already knew how to go underground to fight back. The lifestyle doublespeak people used to survive under successive dictatorships in Eastern Europe came a little more easily to Poles, who had practiced it before. When the CIA offered funding, they were ready. Still, it would have been nice to see how “1984” inspired people in Ukraine or Moldova or Kyrgyzstan. If books are an answer to dictatorships — and as strong as “an organization packed with spooks and paramilitaries who fought in warzones” — it would be inspiring to see more of that. Hopefully a sequel is in the planning stages.

What this book does incredibly well is document an oral history of Polish resistance that has, until now, only been told in bits and pieces. There is archival research in here, but it is in the nature of dictatorships to destroy evidence of their crimes. Fortunately, English talked to many of the people who were there, publishing underground newspapers and smuggling in illicit literature. What information has been declassified — and much of it hasn’t been — bolsters the memories of survivors.

One of the most interesting details of “Book Club” is not that books inspired a nation but which books did. Philosophical tracts and political satires were smuggled in, of course; Poland received its share of “Animal Farm” and “1984” and “Brave New World.” But just as important to the Poles living under Soviet dictatorship were art books, fashion magazines, religious texts, lighthearted novels and regular newspapers. More influential than anti-Communist diatribes were the reminders that there was a world outside Soviet propaganda; each book read was a bid to avoid brainwashing, to not become a tool of the state.

This literary history is a prescient one. As book bans increase around the United States and peaceful protests are met with state violence here in Los Angeles, a tale of when stories saved the day is inherently hopeful. This book is a reminder that words are powerful and that stories matter. Sometimes the most rebellious thing one can do is read a book.

Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of “Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.”

The concrete walls of the David Geffen Galleries were still bare Thursday evening. The landscaping outside was still settling in, and pockets of construction were still visible. But the minute the music poured out of the upstairs entryway, it finally hit: The new LACMA was actually here.

After five years of construction, so much debate about its scale, design and ambitions, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held its first event Thursday night inside the Peter Zumthor-designed building. A sprawling, immersive concert by composer and SoCal jazz hero Kamasi Washington called for multiple bands, each with about a dozen musicians, to play site-specific arrangements throughout the empty galleries before art has been installed. A woodwind ensemble overlooked Park La Brea through floor-to-ceiling glass; a choir stacked harmonies that floated over the span of the structure as it crossed Wilshire Boulevard.

Hundreds of VIPs and members of the media took it all in. The project has its skeptics, including how the museum’s permanent collection will function in it. But for now, museum members could slink about the echoing halls of L.A.’s newest landmark and ponder the possibilities.

Guests at the sneak peek inside the new building Thursday cross a glass-lined expanse that crosses over Wilshire Boulevard.

LACMA Director Michael Govan addresses members of the media assembled for the first public peek inside the empty building, which still needs to complete some construction details and install the art before opening, targeted for April 2026.

The design of the museum has morphed over the years, from a dark, curvaceous amoeba-like form that echoed the nearby La Brea Tar Pits to a design that retains the curves up top but shifts to rectilinear glass on the galleries level below.

The preview event Thursday featured musicians staged throughout the building.

Preview events give museum members a chance to view Zumthor’s design before art is installed. One of the lingering questions is how the concrete walls will fare given the museum’s new plan to shift from permanent collection displays to ever-rotating exhibitions — and all the rehanging of artworks that will be required.

The setting sun casts long shadows from visitors looking out toward the rooftop of Renzo Piano’s Resnick Pavilion and, off in the distance on the left, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ domed terrace.

Artist Tony Smith’s installation “Smoke” has a new home outside the David Geffen Galleries. The museum recently announced the addition of a forthcoming Jeff Koons’ sculpture, “Split-Rocker.”

When the new building opens in April 2026, LACMA has said, the ticketing process will be handled at kiosks on the ground level.

Inside another one of the galleries. Some of the architecture-circle speculation about the building has centered on the finish of the building’s concrete, inside and out.

The view from the David Geffen Galleries as it crosses Wilshire Boulevard.

Times art critic Christopher Knight, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his early analysis of the LACMA building plan, and Times music critic Mark Swed attended the preview concert event Thursday. Check back for their first impressions of the new space.

“The general public was admitted to new Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the first time on Friday night — not to look at art but to listen to music,” wrote Times music critic Albert Goldberg in 1965. Exactly 70 years and three months later, history repeated itself.

Thursday night was the first time the public was allowed into LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries. The occasion was a massive sonic event led by jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington. More than a hundred musicians spread out in nine groups along 900-foot serpentine route of Peter Zumthor’s new building, still empty of art.

The celebration, which drew arts and civic leaders for the first of three preview nights, was far grander than the concert on March 26,1965, that opened LACMA’s Leo S. Bing Theatre the night before the doors opened to the museum’s original galleries. That occasion, a program by the legendary Monday Evening Concerts in which Pierre Boulez conducted the premiere of his “Éclat,” helped symbolize an exuberant L.A. coming of age, with the Music Center having opened three months earlier.

Monday Evening Concerts had been a true L.A. event drawing local musical celebrities including Igor Stravinsky and showing off L.A.’s exceptional musicians. The mandolinist in “Éclat,” for instance, was Sol Babitz, the father of the late, quintessential L.A. writer Eve Babitz. Boulez, an explosive composer, eventually turned the 10-minute “‘Éclat,’ for 15 instruments” into a 25-minute orchestral masterpiece, “Éclat/Multiples,” and left unfinished sketches behind to extend that to a full hour.

Kamasi Washington performing Thursday night.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Washington turned out to be the ideal radical expansionist to follow in Boulez’s footsteps for the new LACMA, with a resplendent enlargement of his 2018 half-hour EP, “Harmony of Difference.” The short tracks — “Desire,” “Knowledge,” “Perspective,” “Humility,” “Integrity” and “Truth” — employ nearly three dozen musicians in bursts of effusive wonder.

For LACMA, Washington tripled the number of musicians and the length. What some critics thought were bursts of bluster, however enthralling, became outright splendor. Introducing the program, LACMA Director Michael Govan called it an event that has never happened before and may never happen again. I got little sense of what this building will be like as a museum with art on the walls, but it’s a great space for thinking big musically and, in the process, for finding hope in an L.A. this year beset by fires and fear-inducing troops on our streets.

Washington is one of our rare musicians who thrives on excess. He has long been encouraged to aim toward concision, especially in his longer numbers, in which his untiring improvisations can become exhausting in their many climaxes. But that misses the point. I’ve never heard him play anything, short or long, that couldn’t have been three times longer. His vision is vast, and he needs space.

In the David Geffen Galleries, he got it. The nine ensembles included a large mixed band that he headed, along with ensembles of strings, brass, woodwinds and choruses. Each played unique arrangements of the songs, not quite synchronized, but if you ambled the long walkways, you heard the material in different contexts as though this were sonic surrealism.

A crowd gathers to watch Washington on Thursday.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Acoustically, the Geffen is a weird combination. The large glass windows and angled concrete walls reflect sound in very different ways. Dozens of spaces vary in shape, size and acoustical properties. During a media tour earlier in the day, I found less echo than might be expected, though each space had its own peculiarities.

Washington’s ensembles were all carefully amplified and sounded surprisingly liquid, which made walking a delight as the sounds of different ensembles came in and out of focus. A chorus’ effusiveness gradually morphed into an ecstatic Washington saxophone solo down the way that then became a woodwind choir that had an organ-like quality. The whole building felt alive.

There was also the visual element. The concert took place at sunset, the light through the large windows ever changing, the “Harmony of Difference” becoming the differences of the bubbling tar pits nearby or the street life on Wilshire or LACMA’s Pavilion for Japanese Art, which looks lovely from the new galleries.

Govan’s vision is of a place where art of all kinds from all over comes together, turning the galleries into a promenade of discovery.

LACMA Director Michael Govan addressing the crowd Thursday night before Kamasi Washington performs.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Musically, this falls more in line with John Cage’s “Musicircus,” in which any number of musical ensembles perform at chance-derived times as a carnival of musical difference — something for which the Geffen Galleries is all but tailor-made. Nevertheless, Washington brilliantly demonstrated the new building’s potential for dance, opera, even theater.

The museum may not have made performance a priority in recent years, but Washington also reminded us that the premiere of Boulez’ “Éclat” put music in LACMA’s DNA. Seven decades on, Zumthor, whether he intended it or not, now challenges LACMA to become LACMAP: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Performance.

Ever since Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, the style has been polarizing. Concrete might be gray, but public response rarely enters into gray areas. The buildings’ raw, unfinished concrete forms, typically simple, are loved or hated.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is nearing completion of its own new Brutalist building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, 82, to house the permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and other works of art. For three days and one evening, beginning July 3, museum members will get a sneak peek at the empty interior spaces of the David Geffen Galleries. The fully finished project, with art installed, doesn’t open until April 2026.

Concrete is not eco-friendly, either in production or in results like heat magnification, and some celebrated architects with a social justice bent refuse to use it. But its visual power is undeniable — a strength of the huge Zumthor design. His poured-in-place concrete gobbles 347,500 square feet, including 110,000 square feet in 90 exhibition galleries and corridors lofted 30 feet above ground atop seven massive piers, crossing Wilshire Boulevard.

Some of my favorite art museum buildings are Brutalist in design, like Marcel Breuer’s fortress-like former Whitney in New York (1966), and Louis Kahn’s refined classicism at the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972). Brad Cloepfil’s Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which may be the best new American museum built for art in the last 15 years, uses concrete brilliantly to illuminate Still’s rugged painting motifs. Zumthor’s Geffen doesn’t come close.

I’ve written a lot about the long-aborning LACMA project over the last dozen years, focused on the design’s negative impact on the museum program, but that’s now baked in. (The museum pegs the building cost at $720 million, but sources have told me the entire project cost is closer to $835 million.) L.A.’s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back. Changing theme shows drawn from the collection, curatorially driven, are the new agenda.

Horrizontal light enters from floor-to-ceiling windows around the perimeter of Peter Zumthor’s LACMA design.

(Iwan Baan)

Having theme galleries is like banishing the alphabet that organizes the encyclopedia on your shelf. Chronology and geography are not some imperialistic scheme dominating global art. They just make finding things in a sprawling encyclopedic art collection easy for visitors. Good luck with that now.

I’ve pretty much avoided consideration of the building’s aesthetics. The exception was a 2013 column responding to “The Presence of the Past,” a somewhat clumsy exhibition of Zumthor’s still-evolving design conception, which has changed greatly in the final form. Reviewing purpose-built architecture is a fool’s errand when you can’t experience the purpose — impossible for another 10 months, when the art-installed Geffen opens.

A press event Thursday allowed entry into the gallery spaces, however, so a few things are now obvious. One is that museum galleries are theatrical spaces — there’s a reason they’re called shows — and chances are you’ve never seen so much concrete in one place. Sometimes it’s sleek and appealing, sometimes splotchy and cracked. (Surface mottling could soften over time.) But across floors, walls and ceilings of 90 bunker-like rooms and long, meandering corridors, the limitless concrete is monotonous. Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” meets Beckett’s theater of the absurd.

Another is that views from the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround the building will offer lovely, interesting city vistas — welcome relief from the monotony. (Curtains will be installed around the perimeter.) A third is that the light, some entering horizontally from the side windows and a couple thin clerestory slots, but much of it from fixed vertical ceiling cans, is going to be a problem.

Those windows are also one of the biggest design losses in the value-engineering, undertaken to control ballooning costs. (Adjusted for inflation, the original Whitney Museum’s construction cost per square foot was about $633, Kimbell’s was about $469, and LACMA clocks in at $1,400, according to its website. Brutalist, indeed.) The floor plate was originally planned to follow the organic curves of the ceiling plate, with continuous, hugely expensive curved-glass windows linking the two. Now the floor plan is largely rectilinear.

The glass panels had to be flat, so the composition is a bit more dynamic. But the roofline overlaps can be jarring. At one end the hovering curved roof looks like a pizza too big for the box below.

All surfaces of 90 bunker-like galleries are concrete, with plans for drilling holes and pounding in anchors to hang art.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Also daunting: Art will be hung on all that concrete by drilling holes in the walls and pounding in anchors. Moving the art will be cumbersome, requiring concrete patching. The entire process is labor-intensive and expensive.

Zumthor is the sixth architect to have had a whack at LACMA, following earlier efforts by William L. Pereira, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, Bruce Goff, Rem Koolhaas, and Renzo Piano. Koolhaas never got beyond the proposal stage, although his marvelous idea pioneered the teardown-then-build-a-pavilion-on-stilts plan now coming to very different fruition. Only Goff produced a notable building, with a novel Japanese Pavilion that conceptually turned inside out the spiral Guggenheim Museum by his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Happily, the Japanese Pavilion can now be seen from the street.) The rest were mostly meh, salted with an occasional ugh.

Zumthor and LACMA Director Michael Govan pronounce the new Geffen building to be “a concrete sculpture,” which is why it’s being shown empty now. The cringey claim is grandiose, and it makes one wonder why being architecture is not enough. If it’s true, it’s the only monumental sculpture I know that has a couple of restaurants, an auditorium and a store. Apparently, an artistic hierarchy exists, with sculpture ranked above architecture.

That’s odd, because we’ve also been repeatedly told that LACMA built the place to undermine such conceits. Museum officials are still banging away on the absurd claim that a single-story building for art, banishing distinctions between “upstairs/downstairs,” confers an egalitarian marker on what global cultures produce. Hierarchy, however, is not a matter of physicality or direction, but of conceptual status. Rosa Parks was riding on a single-level bus, not a double-decker, and she knew exactly what her mighty refusal to sit in the back meant.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

LACMA should be half as savvy. Climb the 60-plus steps up to the Geffen Galleries, or take an elevator, and when you arrive some art will be out front and some out back. Surely, we won’t regard that front/back difference as anti-egalitarian.

Will the Geffen Galleries be successful? My crystal ball is broken, but I see no reason why it won’t be a popular attraction. And that is clearly the museum’s priority.

An urban environment with a talented architect’s unusual art museum design tagged by a monumental topiary sculpture on the main drag — that’s a description of Frank Gehry’s incomparable Guggenheim Bilbao, the great 1997 museum in Basque northern Spain, where Jeff Koons’ marvelous floral “Puppy” sculpture holds court out front. (Every palace needs topiary, a leafy green power emblem of culture’s control over nature; Koons’ 40-foot-tall West Highland white dog makes for an especially cuddly symbol of guardianship.) Now the description fits LACMA too.

The museum just announced the acquisition of Koons’ floral behemoth, “Split-Rocker,” a rather bland hobby horse topiary that merges a toy dinosaur’s head with the hobby horse’s head. LACMA is next door to the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, and the kiddie dino, a natural history plaything, forces a shotgun wedding with a degraded example of art history’s triumphant motif of a man on a horse. Govan worked on Bilbao before coming to L.A., and the formula there is being repeated here. L.A.’s eye-grabbing building won’t be as great nor its Instagram-ready topiary be nearly as good as the Bilbao ensemble, but when does lightning strike twice?

As museums, Bilbao and LACMA couldn’t be more different. One has a small, mostly mediocre permanent collection of contemporary art, while the other has a large, often excellent permanent collection of global art from all eras. The so-called Bilbao Effect sent cultural tourism, then already on the rise, skyrocketing. With the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA has put its very expensive eggs in that tourism basket.

Guests walks across part of the new building that spans Wilshire Boulevard.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

It might take some time to work. The U.S. is the world’s largest travel and tourism sector, but it’s the only one forecast by the World Travel & Tourism Council to see international visitor decline in 2025 — and probably beyond. Between erratic pandemic recovery and an abusive federal government hostile to foreigners, worries are growing in L.A. about the imminent soccer World Cup and the Olympics.

It’s also surprising that the museum is now bleeding critical senior staff, just as LACMA’s lengthy transformation from a civic art museum into a tourist destination trembles on the verge of completion. Previously unreported, chief operating officer Diana Vesga is already gone, deputy director for curatorial and exhibitions J. Fiona Ragheb recently left, and chief financial officer Mark Mitchell departs next week.

Those are three top-tier institutional positions. Let’s hope they don’t know something we also don’t know.

Weathered and bumpy, the wall hidden among the surplus clothing stores of the Fashion District was hardly the perfect canvas.

But artist Sloe Motions’ vision for the memorial mural in honor of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna following their deaths in 2020 brought the stretch of Main and 14th streets to life with vibrant hues of purple and gold.

One of the most well-known Kobe murals across Southern California, the art piece — outside Jimmy Jam T-Shirts — was the backdrop for a commercial for Super Bowl LVI featuring Vanessa Bryant and has drawn fans from near and far.

For years, the mural remained untouched — an unspoken mark of respect for the artist and the subject but one that abruptly ended this year.

In late March, someone tagged the artwork with large bubble letters outlined in black and filled in with white — a similar style to other street tagging visible across the city.

Sloe Motions went back to work, painstakingly restoring the mural. There was much fanfare in downtown when the new mural made its debut in late May. But within a few days, it was again defaced. The artist is disappointed but vows to restore it once again — this time in a new location.

“This one has a lot of meaning to it, so it hurts me that people would do something like this where they’re disrespecting the Bryant family. It just exposes these people’s demons,” Sloe Motions said.

Graffiti has long been an element of Los Angeles life, and residents of downtown are used to tags as part of the landscape. This is, after all, the place where taggers coated the unfinished Oceanwide Plaza high-rise complex with graffiti, generating international attention and debate about the line between art and vandalism.

But the treatment of the Kobe tribute surprised Sloe Motions.

“This isn’t just another Kobe mural. It’s a memorial,” he said.

Street art has long been a part of the culture of Los Angeles, where murals — sanctioned and unsanctioned — and graffiti harmoniously share canvas space. Some abide by the unwritten code that you don’t cover someone else’s art. Others take a more autonomous approach, creating what they want where they want.

“Great cities have great public art,” said Wyland, a Laguna Beach-based artist who has painted murals across the world. “This Kobe mural, it’s become part of the fabric of Los Angeles. And for someone to come in and destroy it like that doesn’t make any sense.”

Los Angeles is known as a city of murals — some of which remain respectfully untouched for years, while others like the Kobe memorial are a seemingly irresistible target for taggers. There was a time when some property owners believed hiring the right muralist to grace your walls — or including a portrait of the Virgen de Guadalupe — could keep taggers away. But not anymore.

In many ways downtown Los Angeles is the perfect gallery for viewing street art, turning nondescript buildings into colorful canvases that tell the story of the region.

Ife Ewing, co-owner of Jimmy Jam T-Shirts, says street art has changed in the 13 years her business has been housed on Main Street.

James Ewing, co-owner of Jimmy Jam T-Shirts, looks at a mural Wednesday of Kobe and Gianna Bryant that has been vandalized again on the side of the business at 14th and Main streets.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“Before, it was isolated to designated areas,” she said. “It’s a different breed of artists now. They have no respect for business owners, property owners. It’s disrespectful. You have to call it what it is, it’s just disrespect.”

Sloe Motions is far from the only muralist to feel burned.

Judy Baca’s famed mural of a female Olympic runner is beloved, even though it has been hit by taggers in the past. Then in 2019, the mural — part of the 1984 Olympics art movement — was mysterious whitewashed, sparking outrage. Metro eventually admitted one of its graffiti abatement contractors had covered the mural and vowed to restore it.

“They would rather paint on the mural than see even a mark of graffiti on the mural,” Baca said at the time.

The latest vandalism to Bryant’s mural felt like another blow to the area.

A post on June 3 from the DTLA Insider Instagram account summed up the situation simply: “We really can’t have nice things.”

The mural image is a spin on a photograph capturing a sweet moment during the 2008 NBA Finals when the Lakers legend — a proud “girl dad” — leans down and kisses the side of his smiling toddler’s head as he cradles her in his arm during a news conference.

Sloe Motions was drawn to the emotion in the photograph — the purity of a father’s love and a daughter’s admiration for her hero. It was captured years before Gigi started playing basketball, showing off her own version of her dad’s envied fadeaway jumper.

Next to them, the words “Mambas Forever” with an infinity symbol are painted in purple and gold.

Bryant, 41, and 13-year-old Gigi, along with seven others — John Altobelli, 56; Keri Altobelli, 46; Alyssa Altobelli, 13; Christina Mauser, 38, Sarah Chester, 45; Payton Chester, 13; and pilot Ara Zobayan, 50 — died Jan. 26, 2020, when the helicopter Zobayan was flying crashed in the hills of Calabasas.

After the initial vandalism in late March, Sloe Motions had sought donations to help cover the cost of restoring the mural in the current location, hoping to preserve the spot for the Bryant family.

“There’s just a lot of meaning at that wall,” he said.

Lakers star Luka Doncic’s foundation quickly jumped into action, donating $5,000, the full amount needed, to a fundraiser to help restore the art piece.

In late May, Sloe Motions posted on Instagram that the mural was finally finished. He’d added a few additional touches, painting the No. 8 on Gigi’s jersey, an homage to the number that Kobe wore for the first 10 seasons of his career.

A week later, the new details were still visible but under the scrawl of white paint.

On June 4, television news cameras were positioned near the mural, and passersby stopped to assess the damage. A jumble of bright white paint cut across the image, and heavy white dots covered Kobe’s and Gigi’s eyes.

“This time, they really went heavy,” Sergio Bautista, 35, said as he stood in front of the mural. “It’s sad to see.”

Sky Hendrix, who was in the area filming a music video with a friend, expressed his disbelief.

“That’s disrespecting the dead,” Hendrix said as he took in the scene. “Who would do that? He’s the GOAT and she’s just a little girl.”

Despite the vandalism, Sloe Motions showed no real sign of anger as he talked about the future of the art piece somewhere else where more people could view and appreciate it. He said he sent “prayers” to the people who vandalized his work.

“Nothing’s forever, and that’s the beauty of this stuff,” Sloe Motions said. “Some stuff could last a minute, some stuff could last a day, some stuff could last years.”

Times photographer Genaro Molina contributed to this report.