Stanley Kubrick at LACMA: Art of the Americas Building

Stanley Kubrick is the first retrospective exhibition of the legendary filmmaker’s work in the United States. Born in 1928 in New York, Kubrick reconceived each genre in which he worked, talking on a broad variety of subjects, themes, and ideas. Even before he began to make films, while working as a photographer for “Look” magazine in the 1940s, he demonstrated the compositional virtuosity that would characterize his groundbreaking directorial achievements from the 1950s through the 1990s, in films such as “Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) and “The Shining” (1980).

Throughout his career Kubrick reinvented his visual style with each film while revisiting a set of conceptual preoccupations. What set him apart from other filmmakers with ability to construct films that strike us as unexpected, a response that is soon deepened by our realization of the work’s creative integrity. He drew inspiration from many other artists and art forms, and he in turn influenced a vast array of other mediums, including film, art, and design.

Stanley Kubrick is organized thematically in order to examine these concepts and influences and to understand how they are manifested in the films. Rather than surveying the work chronologically, the exhibition is intended to evoke singular moments from the films for those who are familiar with them and to serve as an introduction for those who are not. Just as the films themselves reflect the fragmentation of experience, the element on display—including moving images, film stills, and supplementary objects—constitute a series of fragments that speak to each film as a whole and to the the craft of fillmmaking.

Kubrick’s exacting methods—he was renowned for exercising control over every aspect of the filmmaking process—resulted in a series of masterpieces, each a complete and distinct universe unto itself. This exhibition illuminates how he became a master of the art cinema.

November 1, 2012-June 30, 2013

The exhibition is organized by the Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Christiane Kubrick, and the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, with the support of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Sony-Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Universal Studios Inc., and SK Film Archives LLC.

In Los Angeles, Stanley Kubrick is co-presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and has been generously supported by Steve Tisch. Additional funding has been provided by Warner Bros. Entertainment, Violet Spitzer-Lucas, and the Spitzer Family Foundation.

The Los Angeles presentation was designed by Patti Podesta.