Big Baby!

At the Long Beach Museum of Art, a large orange fiberglass baby measuring fifteen feet tall has held court for the last year or so. Amidst the post-nuclear charm and malice that dance around Long Beach's Ocean Blvd. waterfront, the stark and tragically oversized infant has brought a sense of urgency; standing so aloft and so aglow, the Big Baby, as we affectionately called him and yelled out in the car as we passed him, helped us see that our young nation is awkward and lonely, goofy and imposing. I loved it. I thought it powerfully metaphoric, and even a little rebellious, especially for our LBMA, known for it's collection of impressionist works, and strange colored pencil 1980's works.

Well, the Big Baby is gone; now in storage somewhere. The empty space that he once occupied now feels cold and drab. He took with him all the promise of a new Long Beach, an appreciative and refreshingly hopeful Long Beach; a Long Beach that wouldn't tear down it's historical buildings to the tune of 2 million dollars -- and I know, 2 million dollars sounds really good right now -- but you can't get these buildings back, people! Someone laid bricks, someone cut a ribbon, someone (okay, me) found first editions and excellent used copies of her favorite authors in your establishment. Legends are being razed, and we don't even have our Big Baby to turn to.

But I have found a new Big Baby. Marlene Dumas is a painter from South Africa and the Netherlands who paints babies, big.

Her painting, The Painter, currently on display along with dozens of others at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand, downtown, is magnetic. It's a painting of a washed out nude threeish year old, with one red hand and one blue hand, and it's breathtaking. Her works are disturbing, but of course that's the point, and I am moved by them. Her more obvious shocking images, like a Marilyn Monroe death mask painting, and several paintings of dead bodies and people hanging from the scaffold, are not joyful, but they are somewhat sublime.

What is even more spectacular is that she is this bubbly blonde European woman with a fast tongue and an eagerness to talk that pleasantly surprises one, as these days you have to be on a New York society page to get coverage as an artist -- see Schnabel (Dumas' work is in an other, vastly superior, realm than his is), or these other connected artists that you could never have a conversation with about zits or sit with and eat a Greek omelette.

I really recommend seeing this show, not only for the NBB (New Big Baby), but for her whole body of work. It is something to see.