Word: moma
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These are the pictures that open the Chicago show, curated expertly by Stephanie D'Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of MOMA. They represent a final prelude to the leap Matisse would make around 1913 into radical distortion and near abstraction. Much of that work he would do in the shadow of World War I. Rejected for service - he was 44 when the war began - he went on working in a Paris studio, while outside his door Europe hammered itself to pieces. Not long after, his hometown in northern France was occupied by German troops, his mother left...
...monolithic institution we meet in "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," a new show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which runs there until Jan. 25. It's a collective of fierce individuals and a continuing work in progress. But while the school may have been a group enterprise, it was largely the creation of one man. In 1919, the year it opened, Walter Gropius was a young German architect recovering from dual traumas--World War I and his turbulent first marriage to the formidable Alma Mahler. One of history's supreme narcissists, she betrayed...
...Bauhaus way of thinking, geometric abstraction was the language of modernity, and the grid was one of its most powerful instruments, a formal system that could confine Expressionist excesses. In the catalog to the MOMA show, which was organized by curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall...
...became clear relatively quickly, however, that the presumable motive for the meeting—a discussion of how best to “communicate beauty”—masked an exercise in negative aesthetics. No tourist will ever mistake the Vatican for the MoMA; the church’s vision for a new art seems mostly to be an art that won’t offend said church...
...uncomprehending contemporary crowd was a favorite. That's also the subject of his most famous painting, Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. A cartoonish cacophony of marching bands and lurid faces, it's a mob scene straight out of South Park. (Unfortunately it's not included in the MOMA show, which was organized by assistant curator Anna Swinbourne, because the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which owns the picture, doesn't let it travel...