The Art Newspaper

Essential LA: Larry Bell

The artist shares his favourite spots

By The Art Newspaper. Web only
Published online: 30 September 2011

Larry Bell thinks Musso and Frank Grill is "fantastic"

If there was any influential artist whose work really affected me it was the ceramic artist Ken Price [see guide, “Clay’s Tectonic Shift”, p37]. Even though the most obvious things in our work are totally different, there is a certain kind of intuitive movement and development within his things that also profoundly affected me.

I like the Watts Towers (p12), which were also done very spontaneously and intuitively out of found objects. It was the life’s work of a guy called Simon Rodia, an immigrant Italian who came to Los Angeles and worked in construction. In his off hours he built these incredible structures, in this very poor part of the city, and they still stand and are still very beautiful. It’s a very poor area still, but because of the towers being a cultural icon, it is in nowhere near the desolate kind of situation it was.



There’s an old place called the Musso and Frank Grill (p20) in Hollywood, and it’s been around forever. I believe it’s the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, and it is fantastic. There’s a Mexican restaurant called Don Antonio’s (this page) on the Westside that has great menudo [spicy tripe soup], which I love. And there are some Chinese take-out places that also have dining, and one in particular, called Hop Woo (p12), has spectacular food. It’s very inexpensive and exceptionally good.

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