For a permanent-collection show, moca took as its centerpiece, catalogue cover and exhibition title Baldessari’s This Is Not to Be Looked At, 1966–68. Widely read as a send-up of Minimalist art, this wink of a work displays a silkscreened image of an Artforum cover featuring a painting by Frank Stella under which Baldessari had a sign painter render the title’s instruction.

Baldessari began his career in the 1960s as a painter, then in 1970 took the rather theatrical and Duchampian step of cremating all his paintings (he folded some of the ashes into cookie dough and displayed the baked goods at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the 1970 survey “Information”). From that time on, he was known for a certain fluidity and hybridity in his art, working at the intersection of photography and painting, and of image and word. “He always loved text as a kind of image,” explains the poet David Antin, an early friend of Baldessari’s. “He would use a line of text in such an isolated way, as if it were a painting.”

Often the artist’s combinations of photographs and text creates a sense of narrative as well, if only by magnifying the most subtle or uneventful of events. The Pencil Story, 1972–73, for example, juxtaposes two shots of a pencil—the first dull, the second sharp. Beneath the pair, a caption reads: “I had this old pencil on the dashboard of my car for a long time. Every time I saw it, I felt uncomfortable, since its point was so dull and dirty. I always intended to sharpen it and finally couldn’t bear it any longer and did sharpen it. I’m not sure, but I think this has something to do with art.”

The pencil has recently come back into Baldessari’s work, and sharper than ever: In his clever design for LACMA’s new logo, one is held beside a distant image of a palm tree as if to measure it—although on paper they oddly appear the same size. Above reads the acronym LACMA with the first and last letters underlined.

“We asked him to work with us on the logo because he is one of the most extraordinary graphic artists, in the way he deals with flat images,” says Govan. “And this idea was brilliant. This simple decision turns L.A. into something graphic, active.”

In the 1980s, Baldessari focused on making artworks by combining and often cropping found images, usually news photos or Hollywood B-movie stills. On top of these compositions, he often used perfect, solid circles of vinyl paint to block out key spots. In Seashells, Tridents, Frames, 1988, owned by Eli Broad, for instance, blue and black spots eclipse, respectively, a woman’s and a man’s head.

The power of such pieces, he likes to say, stems from what gets left out as much as from what is left in. “A Shakespeare teacher of mine once said that a term paper should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject, short enough to be interesting,” he says. “I think art should be the same way.”

Or in terms of his own work: “We always look at the faces in photographs,” he says, “but by covering up the faces you could see the figures more clearly. You could see how they were dressed, how they were standing, how they were interacting.”

It was not a quantum jump to move from these photo collages to the nose images—typically photographic fragments floating on colorful but otherwise blank faces—that now appear on posters on his studio walls, in prints on his desk and even in the form of a rubbery key chain tacked to his bulletin board. Baldessari began this series three years ago.

“I noticed that you get isolated eyeballs in art, and you get lips, like with the famous Man Ray, but nobody has done noses,” he says. A fan of absurdity in literature as well as in life, he also cites as inspiration Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story “The Nose,” about a bureaucrat who wakes up one day to discover that this feature is missing from his face. Baldessari has expanded the scope of the series in “Noses & Ears, Etc.,” which has appeared at Cristina Guerra, in Lisbon; Marian Goodman, in New York and Paris; and Margo Leavin, in L.A.