In 1920s Germany, Galka Scheyer began championing recent painting by artists she dubbed The Blue Four: Alexej Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Wassily Kandinsky. A decade later, Scheyer was settled in Los Angeles, a Weimar Auntie Mame tirelessly promoting modern art and its capacity to alter lives and transform attitudes. Her collection, the first important collection of German modernism in Southern California, is now known around the world.

Film stills are useful to Baldessari precisely because they are detached from the movie, cut away from their meaningful context. His inventory of film stills constitutes a deep image bank of 20th century American culture, a proliferation of images that haunt us, or at least those of us old enough to remember watching black-and-white movies on TV in the afternoons after school. Arguably those born after about 1980 have internalized an entirely different kind of image bank, a digital one, which exists without limits, instantly available, taking up no space, and requiring only a wireless connection and a screen.

Coefficient of friction: Photographer James Welling talks with Ingrid Calame about her large scale drawings and paintings, one-to-one-scale tracings taken from the Indianapolis Speedway racetrack, the floor of the Stock Exchange, and the bottom of the Los Angeles River.

Artist Don Bachardy, who was born in Los Angeles in 1934, has remarked that LA was the best place to live because it’s where movies are made. “I’m convinced,” he wrote in 2000, “that my interest in looking at people came directly from gazing, when I was very young and impressionable, at close-ups of movie actors several hundred times larger than life.”