Word: moma
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...only had 24 hours in New York City, one stop on their five-day cruise around the Northeast. We discussed the ins-and-outs of the hop-on/hop-off bus. I asked if they had been to Central Park, to Broadway, or to museums. They hadn't. Not the MoMA or the Met or even the Museum of Natural History. They seemed like pretty lousy tourists...