BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- Museum of Modern Art -- 5th Floor (Collection 1880s-1940s) -- Other

NY -- NYC -- Museum of Modern Art -- 5th Floor (Collection 1880s-1940s) -- Other:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Description of Pictures: Collection 1880s–1940s
Floor 5
Arranged in a loosely chronological order, each of the 23 galleries on this floor explores an individual topic. A gallery may be devoted to an artist, a specific medium or discipline, a particular place in a moment in time or a shared creative idea. These presentations are conceived by teams of curators from all fields and at all levels of seniority collaborating closely to share expertise and viewpoints. An ongoing program of frequent reinstallation will feature a wide range of artworks in new combinations—a reminder that countless ideas and histories can be explored through the Museum’s rich collection.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.144.252.140 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] MOMA5E_191221_001.JPG	[2] MOMA5E_191221_002.JPG	[3] MOMA5E_191221_005.JPG
[4] MOMA5E_191221_008.JPG	[5] MOMA5E_191221_011.JPG	[6] MOMA5E_191221_014.JPG
[7] MOMA5E_191221_016.JPG	[8] MOMA5E_191221_018.JPG	[9] MOMA5E_191221_021.JPG
[10] MOMA5E_191221_023.JPG	[11] MOMA5E_191221_025.JPG	[12] MOMA5E_191221_029.JPG
[13] MOMA5E_191221_033.JPG	[14] MOMA5E_191221_038.JPG	[15] MOMA5E_191221_041.JPG
[16] MOMA5E_191221_044.JPG	[17] MOMA5E_191221_048.JPG	[18] MOMA5E_191221_055.JPG
[19] MOMA5E_191221_058.JPG	[20] MOMA5E_191221_060.JPG	[21] MOMA5E_191221_066.JPG
[22] MOMA5E_191221_068.JPG	[23] MOMA5E_191221_072.JPG	[24] MOMA5E_191221_075.JPG
[25] MOMA5E_191221_078.JPG	[26] MOMA5E_191221_082.JPG	[27] MOMA5E_191221_084.JPG
[28] MOMA5E_191221_087.JPG	[29] MOMA5E_191221_091.JPG	[30] MOMA5E_191221_094.JPG
[31] MOMA5E_191221_095.JPG	[32] MOMA5E_191221_099.JPG	[33] MOMA5E_191221_103.JPG
[34] MOMA5E_191221_104.JPG	[35] MOMA5E_191221_106.JPG	[36] MOMA5E_191221_110.JPG
[37] MOMA5E_191221_112.JPG	[38] MOMA5E_191221_118.JPG	[39] MOMA5E_191221_121.JPG
[40] MOMA5E_191221_129.JPG	[41] MOMA5E_191221_134.JPG	[42] MOMA5E_191221_138.JPG
[43] MOMA5E_191221_141.JPG	[44] MOMA5E_191221_145.JPG	[45] MOMA5E_191221_149.JPG
[46] MOMA5E_191221_151.JPG	[47] MOMA5E_191221_152.JPG	[48] MOMA5E_191221_155.JPG
[49] MOMA5E_191221_157.JPG	[50] MOMA5E_191221_160.JPG	[51] MOMA5E_191221_162.JPG
[52] MOMA5E_191221_164.JPG	[53] MOMA5E_191221_166.JPG	[54] MOMA5E_191221_167.JPG
[55] MOMA5E_191221_170.JPG	[56] MOMA5E_191221_171.JPG	[57] MOMA5E_191221_175.JPG
[58] MOMA5E_191221_177.JPG	[59] MOMA5E_191221_181.JPG	[60] MOMA5E_191221_184.JPG
[61] MOMA5E_191221_188.JPG	[62] MOMA5E_191221_189.JPG	[63] MOMA5E_191221_192.JPG
[64] MOMA5E_191221_194.JPG	[65] MOMA5E_191221_196.JPG	[66] MOMA5E_191221_201.JPG
[67] MOMA5E_191221_204.JPG	[68] MOMA5E_191221_207.JPG	[69] MOMA5E_191221_210.JPG
[70] MOMA5E_191221_214.JPG	[71] MOMA5E_191221_217.JPG	[72] MOMA5E_191221_218.JPG
[73] MOMA5E_191221_221.JPG	[74] MOMA5E_191221_226.JPG	[75] MOMA5E_191221_230.JPG
[76] MOMA5E_191221_232.JPG	[77] MOMA5E_191221_235.JPG	[78] MOMA5E_191221_238.JPG
[79] MOMA5E_191221_241.JPG	[80] MOMA5E_191221_247.JPG	[81] MOMA5E_191221_251.JPG
[82] MOMA5E_191221_254.JPG	[83] MOMA5E_191221_261.JPG	[84] MOMA5E_191221_263.JPG
[85] MOMA5E_191221_266.JPG	[86] MOMA5E_191221_268.JPG	[87] MOMA5E_191221_271.JPG
[88] MOMA5E_191221_274.JPG	[89] MOMA5E_191221_275.JPG	[90] MOMA5E_191221_279.JPG
[91] MOMA5E_191221_283.JPG	[92] MOMA5E_191221_287.JPG	[93] MOMA5E_191221_291.JPG
[94] MOMA5E_191221_295.JPG	[95] MOMA5E_191221_300.JPG	[96] MOMA5E_191221_301.JPG
[97] MOMA5E_191221_305.JPG	[98] MOMA5E_191221_310.JPG	[99] MOMA5E_191221_315.JPG
[100] MOMA5E_191221_318.JPG	[101] MOMA5E_191221_321.JPG	[102] MOMA5E_191221_326.JPG
[103] MOMA5E_191221_329.JPG	[104] MOMA5E_191221_333.JPG	[105] MOMA5E_191221_342.JPG
[106] MOMA5E_191221_346.JPG	[107] MOMA5E_191221_349.JPG	[108] MOMA5E_191221_354.JPG
[109] MOMA5E_191221_358.JPG	[110] MOMA5E_191221_359.JPG	[111] MOMA5E_191221_364.JPG
[112] MOMA5E_191221_368.JPG	[113] MOMA5E_191221_376.JPG	[114] MOMA5E_191221_379.JPG
[115] MOMA5E_191221_381.JPG	[116] MOMA5E_191221_386.JPG	[117] MOMA5E_191221_387.JPG
[118] MOMA5E_191221_389.JPG	[119] MOMA5E_191221_393.JPG	[120] MOMA5E_191221_401.JPG
[121] MOMA5E_191221_409.JPG	[122] MOMA5E_191221_416.JPG	[123] MOMA5E_191221_419.JPG
[124] MOMA5E_191221_423.JPG	[125] MOMA5E_191221_425.JPG	[126] MOMA5E_191221_427.JPG
[127] MOMA5E_191221_429.JPG	[128] MOMA5E_191221_432.JPG	[129] MOMA5E_191221_433.JPG
[130] MOMA5E_191221_435.JPG	[131] MOMA5E_191221_438.JPG	[132] MOMA5E_191221_440.JPG
[133] MOMA5E_191221_441.JPG	[134] MOMA5E_191221_444.JPG	[135] MOMA5E_191221_446.JPG
[136] MOMA5E_191221_448.JPG	[137] MOMA5E_191221_449.JPG	[138] MOMA5E_191221_451.JPG
[139] MOMA5E_191221_452.JPG	[140] MOMA5E_191221_455.JPG	[141] MOMA5E_191221_456.JPG
[142] MOMA5E_191221_461.JPG	[143] MOMA5E_191221_464.JPG	[144] MOMA5E_191221_467.JPG
[145] MOMA5E_191221_469.JPG	[146] MOMA5E_191221_472.JPG	[147] MOMA5E_191221_474.JPG
[148] MOMA5E_191221_478.JPG	[149] MOMA5E_191221_481.JPG	[150] MOMA5E_191221_483.JPG
[151] MOMA5E_191221_487.JPG	[152] MOMA5E_191221_491.JPG	[153] MOMA5E_191221_494.JPG
[154] MOMA5E_191221_497.JPG	[155] MOMA5E_191221_498.JPG	[156] MOMA5E_191221_499.JPG
[157] MOMA5E_191221_502.JPG	[158] MOMA5E_191221_505.JPG	[159] MOMA5E_191221_507.JPG
[160] MOMA5E_191221_509.JPG	[161] MOMA5E_191221_512.JPG	[162] MOMA5E_191221_514.JPG
[163] MOMA5E_191221_516.JPG	[164] MOMA5E_191221_518.JPG	[165] MOMA5E_191221_520.JPG
[166] MOMA5E_191221_525.JPG	[167] MOMA5E_191221_528.JPG	[168] MOMA5E_191221_532.JPG
[169] MOMA5E_191221_535.JPG	[170] MOMA5E_191221_538.JPG	[171] MOMA5E_191221_540.JPG
[172] MOMA5E_191221_542.JPG	[173] MOMA5E_191221_549.JPG	[174] MOMA5E_191221_551.JPG
[175] MOMA5E_191221_554.JPG	[176] MOMA5E_191221_555.JPG	[177] MOMA5E_191221_557.JPG
[178] MOMA5E_191221_561.JPG	[179] MOMA5E_191221_565.JPG	[180] MOMA5E_191221_568.JPG
[181] MOMA5E_191221_571.JPG	[182] MOMA5E_191221_574.JPG	[183] MOMA5E_191221_578.JPG
[184] MOMA5E_191221_582.JPG	[185] MOMA5E_191221_586.JPG	[186] MOMA5E_191221_590.JPG
[187] MOMA5E_191221_597.JPG	[188] MOMA5E_191221_602.JPG	[189] MOMA5E_191221_604.JPG
[190] MOMA5E_191221_607.JPG	[191] MOMA5E_191221_610.JPG	[192] MOMA5E_191221_612.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. MOMA5E_191221_001.JPG: Collection Galleries 1880s-1940s
2. MOMA5E_191221_002.JPG: Collection 1880s–1940s Arranged in a loosely chronological order, each of the 23 galleries on this floor explores an individual topic. A gallery may be devoted to an artist, a specific medium or discipline, a particular place in a moment in time or a shared creative idea. These presentations are conceived by teams of curators from all fields and at all levels of seniority collaborating closely to share expertise and viewpoints. An ongoing program of frequent reinstallation will feature a wide range of artworks in new combinations -- a reminder that countless ideas and histories can be explored through the Museum's rich collection.
3. MOMA5E_191221_005.JPG: 500 Constantin Brancusi Born in rural Romania, Brancusi came to art through traditional crafts, learning woodworking techniques in his youth. After moving to Paris in 1904, he joined avant-garde artistic circles, where he drew on his craft-based training to develop a new approach to modern sculpture. Brancusi directly carved his work from marble, limestone, and various woods, sometimes casting the results in bronze. Using a vocabulary of simplified shapes that pushed towards abstraction, Brancusi created imaginative sculptures that evoke rather than resemble their subjects. He frequently made multiple versions of the same work, returning to the same subjects -- birds, newborn babies, female heads -- again and again. His multi-part bases often combine several materials to achieve a variety of color and texture. As such, they, perform a dual function: they serve simultaneously as components of the artworks and as their supports.
4. MOMA5E_191221_011.JPG: Constantin Brancusi Bird in Space, 1928
5. MOMA5E_191221_014.JPG: Constantin Brancusi Fish Paris, 1930 This sculpture is the last of the seven Fish Brancusi created, and the largest. It attests to the artist's deep interest in movement; not only does its heavy body, made of flecked blue-gray marble, evoke aquatic motion, it rests on a pivot that once allowed the work to spin. Even when still, the work changes as one moves around it. Broad and horizontal, the marble transforms into an attenuated sliver from particular points of view.
6. MOMA5E_191221_016.JPG: Constantin Brancusi The Cock Paris, 1924 Brancusi carved this work, including the cylindrical base, from a single piece of wild cherry wood. Its simplified form suggests the serrated outline of the comb that crowns a rooster's head. While Brancusi would go on to create other, larger versions of The Cock and had ambitions to erect one at a monumental scale, he made only two versions in wood, and this is the only one that survives. The Cock held particular significance for Brancusi, who purportedly said time and again, "Le Coq c'est moi" (The Cock is me).
7. MOMA5E_191221_018.JPG: Constantin Brancusi Mlle Pogany version I, 1913 (after a marble of 1912) This sculpture is a portrait of Margit Pogany, a Hungarian artist who sat for Brancusi several times in 1910 and 1911 while she was in Paris studying painting. Shortly after her return to Hungary, Brancusi carved a marble Mlle Pogany from memory, then made a plaster mold of the work, from which he cast four additional versions, including this one, in bronze. In representing its subject through highly stylized and simplified forms, the work was a significant departure from conventional portraiture. Large almond-shaped eyes overwhelm the oval face, and a black patina represents the hair that covers the top of the head and extends over the elaborate chignon at the nape of the neck. As with other motifs, this was a subject Brancusi would return to and rework in the years to come.
8. MOMA5E_191221_025.JPG: 501 Nineteenth-Century Innovators The late 19th century was an era of rapid change: the emergence of a mass media, new and faster forms of transportation, noisy and bustling cities, and developments in industry, from the sewing machine to the telegraph. Vision itself was likewise transformed, whether by new kinds of illumination -- such as electric light -- or by the increasingly widespread availability of photographic images. Seeing the world differently, artists reacted to these changes; how one saw was as crucial as what was seen. Paul Cézanne took up the challenge by looking harder and closer, conscious of alterations in the visual experience of each moment. Others turned their backs on industrial and technological change to look inward, focus on the domestic, or represent the unconscious, dream, and fantasy. Vincent van Gogh, too, attempted to visualize the evanescent -- wind, stars, darkness -- using thick paint to render scenes "as if seen in a dream, in character and yet at the same time stranger than the reality."
9. MOMA5E_191221_029.JPG: Medardo Rosso Woman with a Veil, 1895
10. MOMA5E_191221_038.JPG: George Ohr Bowl, c. 1900
11. MOMA5E_191221_041.JPG: 502 Early Photography and Film When photography and film first appeared in the 19th century, they fascinated viewers with their ability not only to record but also to reinvent reality. These technologies reshaped the visual culture of the time, providing an alternative to traditional methods of image-making involving hand, pen, and brush. Cameras served a variety of functions: they were used as documentary tools, instruments of science, and aids to artists and artisans working in other media. And they allowed photographers to create remarkable works of art. Photographs and films captured the highs and lows of life with deadpan mechanical precision. Upending earlier modes of information distribution, they exposed social concerns and facilitated the development of new narrative forms. By reproducing movement in unprecedented ways, and by making the familiar unfamiliar and the invisible visible, these lens-based techniques contributed to shifting conceptions of time and space in the modern era.
12. MOMA5E_191221_044.JPG: Hippolyte Bayard Self-Portrait in the Garden, c 1847
13. MOMA5E_191221_048.JPG: Hugo van Werden Friedrich Krupp Cast Steel Works, Essen, 1872-73
14. MOMA5E_191221_055.JPG: Timothy O'Sullivan Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest. South Side of Inscription Rock, New Mexico, 1873
15. MOMA5E_191221_058.JPG: Eugčne Atget Folie Thoinard, 9 rue Coq-Héron, 1909
16. MOMA5E_191221_060.JPG: John Murray Taj Mahal, c. 1860
17. MOMA5E_191221_066.JPG: Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey Rome. Arch of Septimius Severus and Capitoline Lion, 1842
18. MOMA5E_191221_072.JPG: Unknown photographer Untitled, c 1910
19. MOMA5E_191221_075.JPG: Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne, Adrien Tournachon Plate 52 from the chapter The Muscles of Weeping and Wimpering in The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (1862), 1852–56
20. MOMA5E_191221_082.JPG: Jacques Lipchitz The Rape of Europa, II, 1938
21. MOMA5E_191221_084.JPG: 522 Responding to War "I have not painted the war," said Pablo Picasso in 1944, "because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict." In the months that followed, however, he began work on The Charnel House, a monumental evocation of the horror of World War II. It is one of numerous searing, history-engaging works that artists of various nationalities in diverse circumstances created during the cataclysmic period that stretched from the rise of Nazism and other totalitarian regimes, in the 1930s, to the end of the war, in 1945. Some, like José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, had always mixed art and politics. Others, like Picasso, felt newly compelled to use their art to confront the events unfolding across the world stage. In many cases, these artists found a modernist language of fractured forms well suited to conveying a reality contorted by violence and destruction.
22. MOMA5E_191221_087.JPG: Julio González Head of the Montserrat, II, 1942 This head of a peasant woman with her face frozen in terror was cast in bronze from a plaster left in González's studio at the time of his death in 1942. The artist made several paintings and sculptures of this subject beginning in 1936, in response to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which claimed the lives of thousands of civilians before its conclusion in 1939. Montserrat is a mountain range in the Catalonia region of Spain, where González was born; it is also a popular first name for women of the region. This representational work marked a radical departure from the abstract, Cubist-inspired sculptures for which González was best known at the time. In 1937, a full figure sculpture of the same subject stood at the entrance to the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Art in Paris -- a response to Fascist violence in Spain.
23. MOMA5E_191221_091.JPG: Alberto Giacometti Head of a Man on a Rod, 1947
24. MOMA5E_191221_095.JPG: 521 Masters of Popular Painting In the late 1930s and early 1940s, MoMA mounted a number of exhibitions dedicated to artists far removed from the mainstream art world. As Alfred H. Barr Jr., the director at the time, noted, they were known as "naives, amateurs, self-taught, folk or popular artists, Sunday painters, instinctives … which, though none is really satisfactory, throw some light on the character of their art." He was referring to artists who did not train or work as professional artists. Today they are most often described as "self-taught" or "outsider," terms that still fail to convey the broadly eclectic nature of their work. For Barr, who worked to incorporate self-taught artists into the narratives of art history, attention to them was essential to understanding modernism and its insistence on the non-academic and the instinctual. Several of the artists featured here were included in the Museum's 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America, and works by them were acquired soon thereafter.
25. MOMA5E_191221_099.JPG: José Dolores López Adam and Eve and the Serpent, c. 1930
26. MOMA5E_191221_103.JPG: William Edmondson Nurse Supervisor, c. 1940
27. MOMA5E_191221_106.JPG: 520 Picturing America From the depths of the Great Depression, the impulse to capture the distinctive character of the United States was felt by photographers, poets, filmmakers, and painters alike. Walker Evans answered this call, harnessing photography to connect art with the everyday. His friend Lincoln Kirstein wrote of his photographs in 1938, "What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, [and] the technicians of advertising and radio have in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment." For many artists, the government provided essential support, fostering creative expression as singular as the individuals receiving funding. The resulting works embraced the prevailing progressive agenda and supplied a vision of the lives of ordinary Americans. Nearly half of the pictures Evans included in American Photographs had been commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency. The images function ably both as documents of contemporary experience and in the service of Evans's art.
28. MOMA5E_191221_110.JPG: Robert H. McNeill Untitled from the series The Negro in Virginia, 1938
29. MOMA5E_191221_112.JPG: Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, March 1936
30. MOMA5E_191221_118.JPG: Lisette Model Old Woman, Orchard Street, 1942
31. MOMA5E_191221_121.JPG: Gordon Parks Harlem Newsboy, Harlem, New York, 1943 Behind the young boy in this photograph hangs a poster for one of the "Double V for Victory" campaigns -- racial equality at home along with victory abroad -- organized by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. It serves as a symbol of the emerging forms of civil-rights activism seen in Harlem in these years, and suggests hopes for the future.
32. MOMA5E_191221_129.JPG: Joseph Schwartz Does Discriminate, First Black Women to Picket Chain for Jobs, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1940
33. MOMA5E_191221_134.JPG: Aaron Siskind Peace Meals, 1936
34. MOMA5E_191221_138.JPG: Arthur Rothstein Farmer Who will be Resettled, Wolf Creek Farms, Georgia, September 1935
35. MOMA5E_191221_141.JPG: Ben Shahn Ozark Family, Arkansas, 1935
36. MOMA5E_191221_145.JPG: Louise Dahl-Wolfe Nashville, 1932
37. MOMA5E_191221_149.JPG: Rudy Burckhardt Untitled, 1940
38. MOMA5E_191221_151.JPG: Rudy Burckhardt Untitled, 1940
39. MOMA5E_191221_152.JPG: Unknown photographer Photo-booth self-portraits, 1940s
40. MOMA5E_191221_157.JPG: Mike Disfarmer Jim May Annale, Fay Aldredge, c. 1940
41. MOMA5E_191221_160.JPG: Mike Disfarmer Cloyce and Loy Cannon, cousins, c. 1940
42. MOMA5E_191221_162.JPG: Mike Disfarmer Untitled, c. 1940
43. MOMA5E_191221_164.JPG: Mike Disfarmer Untitled, c. 1940
44. MOMA5E_191221_166.JPG: Mike Disfarmer Herby, Lee and Clarence Rackley, Brothers, c. 1940
45. MOMA5E_191221_167.JPG: Mike Disfarmer Untitled, c. 1940
46. MOMA5E_191221_170.JPG: Unknown photographer Untitled, c 1938-60
47. MOMA5E_191221_175.JPG: 519 Architecture for Modern Art MoMA's first purpose-built building, at 11 West 53rd Street, opened to the public in 1939. It was designed amid lively debates around the question, "How should modern art be exhibited?" Many believed that the radically new forms of early-20th-century art required strikingly new types of spaces in which they would be encountered by the public. Proposals ranged dramatically -- from the scale of the cabinet to the scale of the tower. Some exhibition designers carefully choreographed the trajectory and even the posture of visitors, while others created loosely structured, expansive spaces that encouraged serendipitous discoveries and open-ended associations between works. On the occasion of MoMA's most recent expansion, looking back at some of these concepts reminds us that the architecture of museums, galleries, and exhibitions plays an important role in determining how art is experienced.
48. MOMA5E_191221_177.JPG: Heinz Loew Exhibition Stand with Mandatory Viewing Route, 1929
49. MOMA5E_191221_181.JPG: Philip L. Goodwin, Edward Durell Stone The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York, 1939 In 1939, Goodwin, a member of The Museum of Modern Art's Board of Trustees and an architect practicing in the traditional Beaux-Arts style, teamed with Stone, an ardent modernist, to create a building appropriate to the Museum's mission. The six-story structure is a white marble box with a glass-walled base, two levels of galleries with translucent glazing, and upper-level offices with horizontal strip windows. When completed, the building formed a striking contrast to the neighboring townhouses on Fifty-third Street.
50. MOMA5E_191221_184.JPG: Philip L. Goodwin, Edward Durell The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939
51. MOMA5E_191221_189.JPG: Philip L. Goodwin, Edward Durell The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939
52. MOMA5E_191221_196.JPG: George Howe, William Lescaze A Modern Museum, 1930
53. MOMA5E_191221_201.JPG: George Howe, William Lescaze The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Scheme 4, First Variation), 1930 In 1930, Howe and Lescaze were invited to speculate on the ideal configuration of a new building for The Museum of Modern Art. They generated several schemes, finding different ways to bring light into the galleries. This solution, the fourth and most experimental, separates the galleries into independent horizontal blocks, stacked above one another at right angles. Two sets of columns, tied by beams at each gallery level, support this configuration. Within each gallery, daylight and artificial light are combined in an adaptable light-mixing chamber placed just above the ceiling, which acts as a diffusing scrim. The chambers, visible at the roof line of each gallery unit, are glazed to admit daylight. The opaque external walls of the galleries are clad in marble or white glazed brick. While there are no conventional windows in the galleries, views to the outside are provided in the separate glass-enclosed support tower for stairs and elevators.
54. MOMA5E_191221_204.JPG: Herbert Bayer Floor plan for the exhibition "Bauhaus 1919-1928," The Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 7, 1938-January 30, 1939, 1938
55. MOMA5E_191221_207.JPG: Frederick Kiesler Multi-use Chair, 1942 "The seats were a kind of wave which curved down, surged up, and fell once more, thus forming an object without beginning or end," said Kiesler of his Multi-use Chairs, "and in its convex curves the body could take ease." Kiesler designed these chairs -- constructed for seven dollars each in the Bronx -- to fill the unconventional spaces he created for Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of this Century Gallery on 57th Street. The Surrealist-inspired "rest-forms" were meant to be versatile; Kiesler delineated eighteen uses for them, including seating and stands for the display of objects. Their organic shape demonstrates Kiesler's experimentation with "continuous tension."
56. MOMA5E_191221_210.JPG: Hans Richter, Werner Graeff, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung (Journal for Elementary Construction) no.5-6, April 1926, 1926
57. MOMA5E_191221_214.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Model), 1943–1959
58. MOMA5E_191221_217.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright examining the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum model with students at Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1957.
59. MOMA5E_191221_221.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Model), 1958
60. MOMA5E_191221_226.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Model), 1943
61. MOMA5E_191221_232.JPG: El Lissitzky The New Man (Neuer) from Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show Victory over the Sun (Figurinen, die Plastische Gestaltung der elektro-mechanischen Schau Sieg über die Sonne) 1920–21, published 1923 El Lissitzky had the unusual distinction of being a key member of both the Russian and Western European avant-gardes. He made significant contributions to the Jewish cultural renaissance in Russia, illustrating children's books, designing journals, and co-founding a Yiddish publishing house. He also traveled frequently to Germany, settling there for periods, and becoming well known for his masterful graphic design. His work included paintings, photographs, photomontages, designs for exhibitions, architecture, and books, and also prints, primarily lithographs. At the behest of Marc Chagall, Lissitzky accepted the directorship of the graphic workshop at the Vitebsk Art Institute in 1919. Following Kazimir Malevich's arrival at the school, Lissitzky became greatly influenced by Suprematism and began to work in an abstract style. He invented imagery known as Proun (Project for the Affirmation of the New), which consisted of images of floating architectonic structures that occupied an imagined three-dimensional space through which one might move above, below, and through. The Proun style can be seen in New Man, the name of a character in the groundbreaking 1913 Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. After seeing a 1920 production staged in Vitebsk, Lissitzky adapted the opera for a cast of mechanical puppets. His designs incorporate the geometry and limited color palette of Suprematism and the multidimensionality of the Proun images. Lissitzky's innovations in graphic and book design are strikingly visible in his landmark project For the Voice, a collection of thirteen of the best-known poems by Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The poems were intended to be read aloud, and Lissitzky designed a thumb index with titles to help the reader quickly locate a desired verse. He also designed title pages for each of the poems, constructing images by combining typefaces of various sizes printed in red and black.
62. MOMA5E_191221_235.JPG: 517 Surrealist Objects Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup is a quintessential Surrealist object. To produce it, Oppenheim purchased a cup, saucer, and spoon from a Paris department store and covered these otherwise unremarkable household items with fur. In doing so, she transformed common, utilitarian things into something simultaneously attractive, disturbing, and sexually charged. Beginning in the 1930s, many artists associated with Surrealism turned to object-making with vigor. They were captivated by the notion that certain objects possessed mystical, magical, or talismanic powers. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories -- which suggested objects could function as projections of unconscious sexual desires -- served as an important touchstone. Painting, collage, photography, and film were also enlisted to defamiliarize the familiar and, in the words of René Magritte, to make "everyday objects shriek out loud."
63. MOMA5E_191221_238.JPG: Joseph Cornell Taglioni's Jewel Casket, 1940 The first of dozens of works that Cornell made in honor of famous ballerinas, this box pays homage to Marie Taglioni, an acclaimed nineteenth-century dancer of Italian origin, who, according to the legend inscribed in the box's lid, kept an imitation ice cube in her jewelry box to commemorate the time she danced in the snow at the behest of a Russian highwayman. The box is infused with erotic undertones -- both in the tactile nature of the glass cubes, velvet, and rhinestone necklace (purchased at a Woolworth's dime store in New York) and in the incident itself, in which Taglioni reportedly performed on an animal skin placed across a snowy road. Adding to the intimacy of this delicate construction, the glass cubes were designed to be removed, revealing a hidden recess below that contains two beaded necklaces and rhinestone chips placed on a mirrored surface and seen through blue-tinted glass. Although he spent his entire career based in Queens, New York, Cornell drew inspiration from the European art he saw at the city's Julien Levy Gallery -- the first in the United States to exhibit Surrealist work -- and his art often inspired the European Surrealists in turn. In a press release for a 1939 show by Cornell at the gallery, Salvador Dalí heralded the artist's work as "the only truly Surrealist work to be found in America."
64. MOMA5E_191221_241.JPG: Brassaď (Gyula Halász) Man Sleeping Along the Seine. (Homme endormi au bord de la Seine), 1932
65. MOMA5E_191221_247.JPG: Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) Le Terrain Vague, 1932
66. MOMA5E_191221_251.JPG: Brassaď (Gyula Halász) A Morris column in the fog, Avenue de l'Observatoire, 1934
67. MOMA5E_191221_254.JPG: Salvador Dalí The Little Theater, 1934 This sculpture -- part theatrical maquette, part multi-layered painting -- is composed of eleven painted glass panes that juxtapose several distinct and peculiar worlds. At the margins the proscenium arch, receding stage floor, and inkwell evoke the stage and an unseen playwright, highlighting the orchestrated, artificial character of painting. Behind these Dalí contrasts an idyllic Arcadian scene with a barren, ruined landscape. Dalí's unique construction was inspired by his longstanding fascination with optical devices and with the theater.
68. MOMA5E_191221_268.JPG: Salvador Dalí Retrospective Bust of a Woman, 1933 (some elements reconstructed 1970) Like other Surrealists, Dalí constructed sculpture from disparate found objects. The genesis of this work was his discovery of an inkwell featuring the figures from Jean-Francois Millet's painting The Angelus (1857–59). He embedded the inkwell in a loaf of bread and placed them both on an accessorized bust. The necklace is a strip of repeating images from a zoetrope, a precinematic toy that provides the illusion of movement as it rotates.
69. MOMA5E_191221_279.JPG: Unknown Untitled, 1936
70. MOMA5E_191221_283.JPG: Joan Miró Object Barcelona, spring, 1936
71. MOMA5E_191221_291.JPG: Max Ernst Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (Deux Enfants sont menacés par un rossignol), 1924 Made in 1924, the year of Surrealism's founding, Ernst described this work as "the last consequence of his [sic] early collages -- and a kind of farewell to a technique…" He later gave two possible autobiographical references for the nightingale: the death of his sister in 1897, and a fevered hallucination he recalled in which the wood grain of a panel near his bed took on "successively the aspect of an eye, a nose, a bird's head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on."
72. MOMA5E_191221_295.JPG: Joseph Cornell Untitled (Bébé Marie), early 1940s
73. MOMA5E_191221_300.JPG: Meret Oppenheim Object Paris, 1936 Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup is perhaps the single most notorious Surrealist object. Its subtle perversity was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and the photographer Dora Maar at a Paris café. Admiring Oppenheim's fur-trimmed bracelets, Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything with fur. "Even this cup and saucer," Oppenheim replied. In the 1930s, many Surrealist artists were arranging found objects in bizarre combinations that challenged reason and summoned unconscious and poetic associations. Object -- titled Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Lunch in fur) by the Surrealist leader André Breton -- is a cup-and-saucer set that was purchased at a Paris department store and lined with the pelt of a Chinese gazelle. The work highlights the specificities of sensual pleasure: fur may delight the touch, but it repels the tongue. And a cup and spoon, of course, are made to be put in the mouth. Following his inclusion of the work in MoMA's 1936–37 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the Museum's director, remarked, "Few works of art in recent years have so captured the popular imagination…. The ‘fur-lined tea set' makes concretely real the most extreme, the most bizarre improbability. The tension and excitement caused by this object in the minds of tens of thousands of Americans have been expressed in rage, laughter, disgust or delight."
74. MOMA5E_191221_305.JPG: Alberto Giacometti The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932 In the Surrealist periodical Minotaure, Giacometti described the process that brought into being this fragile, air-filled sculpture. "This object formed little by little toward the end of summer 1932," Giacometti recalled; "it gradually became clearer to me, the various parts taking their exact form and their particular place in the ensemble. Come autumn it had attained such a reality that its execution did not take me more than one day." By privileging an interior mental image over the physical act of making, Giacometti affirmed his commitment to Surrealism's call for the near-automatic recording of visions achieved in a dreamlike state. Within his palace's spindly, tenuously defined spaces, a slender sheet of suspended glass connects its rooms from left to right, adding to the structure's vulnerable appearance. At right a delicate bird skeleton and sinuously curving vertebrae float, suspended, in space-frames or cages; at left a chess piece–like figure of a woman stands before three panels; at center is an enigmatic elliptical shape that the artist identified with himself. In the Minotaure account, Giacometti compared the whole to a "fragile palace of matches" that he and a woman he loved would build every night, only to watch it repeatedly collapse. His words give voice to key Surrealist preoccupations, including all-consuming desire, the power of memory, and the relationship between Eros and Thanatos -- love and death.
75. MOMA5E_191221_310.JPG: Alberto Giacometti Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), 1934 (cast c. 1954-55) This highly stylized figure balances on a cagelike throne which, together with the pillory–like board covering her shins, simultaneously supports and restrains her from movement. Her hands, positioned as if holding or offering something, hold nothing, as suggested by the work's title. Giacometti modeled the figure's head and face after a protective metal mask. This is Giacometti's first large–scale, anatomically complete human figure, and his last major work made within the orbit of Surrealism.
76. MOMA5E_191221_315.JPG: Hans Bellmer The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace, 1937 Bellmer began creating disturbing dolls in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany. Many have interpreted them as acts of political defiance against the Aryan ideals and social norms promoted by the Nazis, whom he openly opposed, and expressions of the personal outrage he felt towards his father, who had joined the Nazi party. Bellmer himself stated, "If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because for me, the world is a scandal." Made in Berlin one year before the artist left for Paris, where he lived for the better part of the rest of his life, this figure is violently fragmented, its body parts splayed and truncated and its scale distorted. Connected mechanically by ball joints, its appendages offer endless perverse recombinations.
77. MOMA5E_191221_321.JPG: Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) Minotaur, 1933
78. MOMA5E_191221_326.JPG: Osamu Shiihara Shampoo, 1930s
79. MOMA5E_191221_329.JPG: Raoul Ubac The Nebula, 1939
80. MOMA5E_191221_333.JPG: Pablo Picasso Girl before a Mirror Paris, March 14, 1932 This image of a young woman and her mirror reflection is riotous in color and chockablock with pattern. It is one of the last in a major series of canvases that Picasso created between 1931 and 1932. According to The Museum of Modern Art's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso said he "preferred this painting to any of the others," which speaks to the painting's dazzling visual and thematic complexity. Its primary subject is the time-honored artistic theme of a woman before her mirror, reinvented in strikingly modern terms. The girl's smoothly painted profile, in a delicately blushing pink-lavender, abuts a heavily built-up and garishly colored frontal view in yellow and red. Allusions to youth and old age, sun and moon, light and shadow are compressed into a single multivalent face. The female protagonist of ΩGirl before a Mirror actively reaches out to embrace the mirror that frames her reflection -- a nominally fleeting image that paradoxically displays a pronounced physicality. The picture's rigorous symmetrical organization creates a structure against which the curves of the model's head and body, as well as those of her reflection, register all the more strongly. Her ithyphallic left arm and testicular breasts continue the game of visual punning seen in Picasso's other paintings and sculptures of the time, in which facial and bodily features double as male and female sex organs
81. MOMA5E_191221_342.JPG: Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) Untitled, c. 1925
82. MOMA5E_191221_346.JPG: 506 Henri Matisse Matisse's audacious experimentation with form and color was inseparable from his dedication to an art of harmonious expression, an ambition lost on most of his contemporary viewers. The earliest works in this gallery, small paintings composed of bold strokes of vibrant color made in 1904 and 1905, are among those that led angry critics to label him and his colleagues "les Fauves" -- wild beasts. Brilliant color would nonetheless continue to be one of Matisse's most important resources, and by 1909 he began to construct compositions featuring flat expanses of vivid tones that saturate the paintings' surfaces. Matisse radically abbreviated the descriptive elements of his subject matter, sacrificing detail to the overall rhythm and unity of the composition. In his 1908 essay "Notes of a Painter," he wrote that he dreamed of "an art of balance, or purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter." Matisse remains one of the great joy-givers of the 20th century.
83. MOMA5E_191221_349.JPG: Henri Matisse Jeannette (I) Issy-les-Moulineaux, January - March (?) 1910 In the process of creating five busts of Jeanne Vaderin between 1910 and 1916, Matisse radically reconfigured traditional representation of the human face. Jeannette I and II were created directly from the model, which is evident in their characteristic, hawklike profiles. These two works then served as templates for Jeannette III, IV, and V. As he progressed with the series, Matisse dramatically abstracted his subject, organizing the head into increasingly simplified chunks. In 1908 he explained that his goal in portraiture was not to achieve visual precision but rather to reveal the "essential qualities" of his sitters -- qualities, he felt, that physical imitation could not capture.
84. MOMA5E_191221_359.JPG: Umberto Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913
85. MOMA5E_191221_364.JPG: Raymond Duchamp-Villon The Horse, 1914 (cast c. 1930-31)
86. MOMA5E_191221_368.JPG: Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine Symphony Number 1, 1913
87. MOMA5E_191221_376.JPG: Pablo Picasso Glass of Absinthe, 1914
88. MOMA5E_191221_379.JPG: 504 New Expression in Germany and Austria In the years before World War I, artists in Germany and Austria developed a provocative new approach based on high-pitched color and jarring distortions of form. Their focus on the human figure was in part a reaction to the rapid transformations affecting society -- industrialization and urbanization, as well as changing attitudes toward sexuality. Expressionism, as such work came to be known, emerged in several distinct artistic centers. These included Vienna, where Egon Schiele forged a brand of searingly psychological portraiture; Munich, where Vasily Kandinsky and others associated with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) emphasized the spiritual values they found in nature and folk culture; and Dresden, where Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others in the Brücke (Bridge) group created scenes of their daily life that were, as Kirchner recalled, "strange to the normal person ... [and] driven by a totally naive, pure need to bring art and life into harmony with each other." A desire for intensely personal expression and emotional authenticity unified the impulses of these artists.
89. MOMA5E_191221_381.JPG: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Kneeling Woman, [Kniende], 1911
90. MOMA5E_191221_386.JPG: Wilhelm Lehmbruck Standing Youth, 1913
91. MOMA5E_191221_389.JPG: Louise Bourgeois Quarantania, I, 1947-53, reassembled by the artist 1981
92. MOMA5E_191221_393.JPG: Pablo Piccaso Women's Head (Female), 1909
93. MOMA5E_191221_416.JPG: 513 Design for Modern Life Between the world wars, clusters of artists, architects, and designers joined forces to work internationally as agents of economic change and social transformation. Convinced of the underlying unity of all art forms, many groups in the Netherlands, Germany, and the newly established Soviet Union aspired to harness the vast potential of industrial production and new technologies to address modern needs in the home and workplace. At the same time, middle-class women experienced new social and professional freedoms, such as opportunities for art and design education. Broadcast via telephone, radio, film, and an explosion of print media, innovative ideas and products transcended national boundaries. Despite numerous factional disputes and false starts, the utopian experimentation of the interwar years left a powerful legacy in terms of interdisciplinary models of education, the increasing visibility of women as makers and designers, and the international networks through which creativity flowed.
94. MOMA5E_191221_419.JPG: Hans Leistikow The Dwelling for Minimal Existence, 1929 The 1929 conference of the Congrčs International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) focused international attention on Frankfurt's ambitious housing program and on international attempts to define the minimum habitable dwelling. This poster advertised an exhibition of plans that addressed the conference theme, submitted by modernist delegates from many different countries, all drawn to the same scale. Ernst May's minimalist floor plan for houses on Frankfurt's Praunheim estate, which included the standardized, built–in features of a tiny kitchen designed by Grete Schütte–Lihotzky, was selected as an outstanding example.
95. MOMA5E_191221_427.JPG: The Frankfurt Kitchen
96. MOMA5E_191221_440.JPG: Farkas Molnár Project for a single-family house, Der rote Würfel (The red cube), 1923
97. MOMA5E_191221_441.JPG: Grete Lihotzky Frankfurt Kitchen from the Ginnheim-Höhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1926-1927 In the late 1920s, approximately ten thousand kitchens designed by Schütte-Lihotzky were at the core of a far-reaching program to modernize public housing and infrastructure in Frankfurt. Inflation and war had precipitated a housing crisis in all major German cities. Under the direction of chief city architect Ernst May, the so-called New Frankfurt became a testing ground for modern architectural forms, new materials, and innovative construction methods. The Frankfurt Kitchen was designed like a laboratory or factory and in accordance with contemporary theories of efficiency, hygiene, and workflow. Schütte-Lihotzky's primary goal was to reduce the burden of women's labor in the home. In planning the design, she conducted detailed time-motion studies and interviews with housewives and women's groups. Each kitchen came with a revolving stool, a gas stove, built-in storage, a foldaway ironing board, an adjustable ceiling light, and a removable garbage drawer. Labeled aluminum storage bins were provided for staples like sugar and rice, and they were designed with spouts for easy pouring. Careful thought was given to the choice of materials: oak was used for flour containers (to repel mealworms) and beech for cutting surfaces (to resist staining and knife marks). The result is one of modernism's most famous cooking spaces.
98. MOMA5E_191221_456.JPG: Aino Aalto, Alvar Aalto Child's Chair (model 103), Designed 1929 (this example ca. 1936) Marcel Breuer Room Divider / Bookshelf, 1932–1935 Marcel Breuer Nesting Tables (model B9), 1925–1926 Marcel Breuer Club chair (model B3), 1927–1928 The model for this chair is the traditional overstuffed club chair, but all that remains is its mere outline, an elegant composition traced in gleaming steel. The canvas seat, back, and arms seem to float in space; the body of the sitter does not touch the steel framework. Breuer spoke of the chair as his "most extreme work … the least artistic, the most logical, the least ‘cozy' and the most mechanical." It was also his most influential piece of design, taking furniture in a radical new direction. Breuer had designed an earlier version in 1925, while teaching at the Bauhaus, the influential German school of modern art, architecture, and design in Dessau, and within a year designers everywhere were experimenting with tubular steel. Breuer claimed to have drawn inspiration from the tubular-steel handlebars of his bicycle, which were strong, lightweight, and mass-produced. He reasoned that if the material could be bent into handlebars, it could be bent into forms for furniture. The chair was dubbed the "Wassily" after the painter Vasily (or Wassily) Kandinsky, Breuer's friend and fellow Bauhaus instructor, who had praised the design when it was first produced. This example was given to MoMA by another Bauhaus colleague, Herbert Bayer, and was featured in the Museum's landmark exhibition Machine Art in 1934.
99. MOMA5E_191221_461.JPG: Lucia Moholy Bauhaus Workshop Building from Below. Oblique View, September 1926
100. MOMA5E_191221_464.JPG: Gertrud Arndt At the Masters' Houses, 1929–30
101. MOMA5E_191221_467.JPG: Theo H. Ballmer Büro (Office) (Poster for a Basel office design exhibition), 1928
102. MOMA5E_191221_472.JPG: Gustav Klutsis Five Year Plan in Four Years, 1930
103. MOMA5E_191221_474.JPG: Richard Pare Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia, 1998
104. MOMA5E_191221_478.JPG: Aleksandr Rodchenko Dobrolet (Poster for a Russian state airline), 1923
105. MOMA5E_191221_481.JPG: 512 Abstraction and Utopia Envision a new artistic language in stride with a changed world: this ambition was shared by many artists across Europe in the early 20th century. In the context of the Russian Revolution of 1917, artists proclaimed that a revolutionary society demanded forms of art liberated from the past. Rejecting traditional painting's loyalty to recognizable subject matter, they instead promoted nonrepresentational art, exhilarated by its potential to free viewers from the material realm while connecting to radical politics and imagining a more perfect future. In Holland, a group called De Stijl championed abstraction as a model for cultivating the values of universality and connectedness. "If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision," declared the artist Piet Mondrian. "Art must move not only parallel with human progress but must advance ahead of it."
106. MOMA5E_191221_483.JPG: Katarzyna Kobro Spatial Composition (5), 1929
107. MOMA5E_191221_487.JPG: Vasily Ermilov Composition Number 3, 1923
108. MOMA5E_191221_491.JPG: 511 The Vertical City What would a city of towers look like? From its first appearance in the late 19th century, the American skyscraper fundamentally changed the shape and experience of the city. By the early 20th century, Europe's avant-garde architects celebrated America's bold conquest of height, and new building technologies prompted a competition across the Atlantic to innovate structural approaches and ever-greater transparency. But challenging the scale of historic cities also sparked anxiety. These dramatic changes were radical -- what if offices towered over churches? Artists began to represent the transforming urban landscape in new ways, creating a dialogue between the city and art making. Inventive photographers and cinematographers, for example, explored methods of capturing the sensory impact of the modern city's expanded scale, accelerated pace of movement, and vertiginous heights.
109. MOMA5E_191221_494.JPG: Berenice Abbott Rockefeller Center, c. 1936
110. MOMA5E_191221_497.JPG: Berenice Abbott Financial District Rooftops I, Manhattan, May 4, 1938
111. MOMA5E_191221_498.JPG: El Lissitzky Study for cover design for Amerika: Neues Bauen in der Welt, 1929-30
112. MOMA5E_191221_499.JPG: Edward Steichen The Maypole, 1932
113. MOMA5E_191221_505.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright The San Francisco Call Building Project, San Francisco, CA (Model, 1940), 1913
114. MOMA5E_191221_507.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright The San Francisco Call Building Project, San Francisco, CA (Model, 1940), 1913
115. MOMA5E_191221_512.JPG: El Lissitzky Russia. The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union [New Ways of Building in the World, vol. 1]), 1930
116. MOMA5E_191221_516.JPG: Underwood and Underwood Above Fifth Avenue, Looking North, 1905
117. MOMA5E_191221_520.JPG: Alfred Stieglitz Old and New New York, 1910
118. MOMA5E_191221_525.JPG: Hugh Ferriss Buildings in the Modeling Project (Aerial perspective), 1924 Hugh Ferriss was the most prominent urban portraitist in the American architecture world of the 1920s and ‘30s. Working as a delineator for architects such as Cass Gilbert and Raymond Hood, he rendered the evolution of both the real and the ideal metropolis. Ferriss claimed that his role as an architectural delineator was "to tell the truth about a building", which meant capturing not only its form and mass but also its mood and personality. His favorite subject was the skyscraper. When the New York Zoning Law of 1916 limited the bulk of skyscrapers by requiring setbacks and height restrictions, Ferriss rendered the extraordinary effects of these regulations on architectural form, working sometimes on commissions dealing with actual buildings, sometimes on more visionary studies for the metropolis. Both of these kinds of drawing, including Buildings in the Modeling, were compiled in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow. Specifically, Buildings in the Modeling offered an image of how buildings could be shaped or "modeled" in order to retain the maximum mass while remaining within the Zoning Law. The chiseled towers, drawn with a Conté crayon to create a soft, chiaroscuro effect, appear simultaneously dense and transparent; they also suggest a dramatic vision of the city center. Rejecting the deurbanized American landscape advocated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ferriss promoted the idea of a concentrated metropolis, a major center of commerce, art, science, and technology. Although the buildings in his vision of the metropolis are simple, unadorned masses, each dramatically captures the psychological impact of the soaring skyscraper on twentieth-century Americans.
119. MOMA5E_191221_528.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright National Life Insurance Company Building, Chicago, Project, 1924-25
120. MOMA5E_191221_532.JPG: Hans Richter, Werner Graeff, Frederick Kiesler, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung (Journal for Elementary Construction) no.3, June 1924, 1924
121. MOMA5E_191221_535.JPG: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project, Berlin-Mitte, Germany (Exterior perspective from north), 1921 In 1921 this design for a fully glass-sheathed skyscraper was unprecedented. It was based on the untried idea that a supporting steel skeleton could free the structure's exterior walls from their load-bearing function, allowing a building to have a surface more translucent than solid. Mies van der Rohe referred to this concept as an architecture of "skin and bones." Inspired by the exposed structures of the American towers then being built, he argued that "only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts, and then the impression of the high-reaching steel skeletons is overpowering." Mies van der Rohe developed this radical proposal in response to an architectural competition for Berlin's first skyscraper, intended for a triangular site bounded by the Spree River, the busy shopping street Friedrichstrasse, and the train station of the same name. Submitted under the title "Honeycomb," his entry was distinguished by its crystalline plan, the daring use of glass, and an expressive silhouette that seemed to owe nothing to history. Conceived only a few years after the end of World War I, this seminal project presented a bold vision of the skyscraper as a new architectural typology for the modern metropolis, anticipating the proliferation of the tall steel-and-glass buildings that have since become ubiquitous in cities worldwide.
122. MOMA5E_191221_538.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright St. Mark's Tower project, New York, NY (Model), 1927–1929
123. MOMA5E_191221_549.JPG: Frank Lloyd Wright St. Mark's Tower project, New York, NY (Aerial perspective), 1927–1931 The design of these apartment towers for St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie in New York City stemmed from Wright's vision for Usonia, a new American culture based on the synthesis of architecture and landscape. The organic "tap-root" structural system resembles a tree, with a central concrete and steel load-bearing core rooted in the earth, from which floor plates are cantilevered like branches. This system frees the building of load-bearing interior partitions and supports a modulated glass curtain wall for increased natural illumination. Floor plates are rotated axially to generate variation from one level to the next and to distinguish between living and sleeping spaces in the duplex apartments. The three towers on the triangular park site are positioned apart from other tall buildings to avoid creating the dark urban canyons that Wright detested. Although the St. Mark's project was never realized, its concepts were materialized thirty years later in Wright's H. C. Price Company Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
124. MOMA5E_191221_554.JPG: Bodo Rasch, Heinz Rasch Suspension Houses Project (Perspective sketch), 1927-1928
125. MOMA5E_191221_555.JPG: Bodo Rasch, Heinz Rasch Suspension Houses Project (Perspective), 1927-1928
126. MOMA5E_191221_557.JPG: 509 Florine Stettheimer and Company New York artist Florine Stettheimer was a painter, poet, and playwright; a designer of highly original furniture, picture frames, stage sets, and costumes; and a celebrated salon host. The parties she threw in her eccentrically decorated studio brought together luminaries from the worlds of art, dance, literature, music, and theater. Such figures, along with Stettheimer's own immediate family, often appear in her elaborately detailed portraits, which blur distinctions between private life and public performance, domestic settings and theatrical stages. One of Stettheimer's closest friends from the mid-1910s to early 1920s was the artist Marcel Duchamp, represented in this gallery with Fresh Widow (1920), a work he attributed to his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Works by other contemporaries, as well as like-minded artists working today, extend Stettheimer's interests in accessorizing and ornamentation, design and decoration.
127. MOMA5E_191221_561.JPG: Sophie Taeuber-Arp Head, 1920 Taeuber-Arp, a pioneering abstract artist, was trained in the applied and fine arts and ascribed equal importance to both. In 1920, at the time Head was made, she was best known for her arts-and-crafts creations, including textile designs, turned-wood containers, beaded necklaces, notebook covers, and bags. Head combines mechanically produced turned-wood pieces and beaded ornaments typically associated with domestic handicrafts to create a sculpture that challenges the boundaries separating craft from fine art. The work strongly resembles Study for a Marionette (Portrait of H.A.) (1918), an abstract depiction of the artist Jean (Hans) Arp, whom Taeuber-Arp would marry in 1922. Both works have bobbin-shaped bases, trapezoidal noses, oval heads, and cylindrical necks, and they have similar dimensions. This suggests that Head is a counterpart to the earlier work, and a stylized self-portrait. Taeuber-Arp made this sculpture in Zurich, where she had become associated with Dada, a cultural movement that embraced absurdity and abstraction as avenues to a radical rethinking of contemporary social, political, and aesthetic conventions.
128. MOMA5E_191221_565.JPG: Florine Stettheimer Costume design (Procession: Zizim of Persia, Agnes of Bourganeuf, the Unicorn, and Pierre d'Aubusson) for artist's ballet Orphée of the Quat-z-arts, c. 1912
129. MOMA5E_191221_568.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Fresh Widow New York, 1920 Constructed by a carpenter in accordance with Duchamp's instructions, Fresh Widow is a reduced scale version of the traditional floor-length French window. Duchamp covered the glass panes with panels of black leather, obstructing the metaphorical view through the window that is associated with illusionistic painting. With the change of three letters, Duchamp transforms "French window" into the title "Fresh Widow," a pun that points to the recent war and the bawdy tradition of amorous (or "fresh") widows of soldiers. The inscription at the base, "COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920," is the first time the name of Duchamp's female alter ego appears on one of his works.
130. MOMA5E_191221_571.JPG: Jutta Koether Bitches Brew, 2010
131. MOMA5E_191221_574.JPG: Florine Stettheimer Costume design (Georgette) for artist's ballet Orphée of the Quat-z-arts, c. 1912
132. MOMA5E_191221_578.JPG: Florine Stettheimer Costume design (Euridice and the Snake) for the artist's ballet Orphée of the Quat-z-arts, c. 1912
133. MOMA5E_191221_582.JPG: Arch Connelly Self-Portrait, 1981
134. MOMA5E_191221_586.JPG: 508 Readymade in Paris and New York The term "readymade" first appeared in a letter Marcel Duchamp wrote in 1915 to his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, herself an artist. He was living in New York; she was in Paris. He invited her to collaborate in creating a "Readymade, remotely," by inscribing and signing a metal bottle rack he had left behind in his Paris studio "après Marcel Duchamp" ("after Marcel Duchamp"). By designating mass-produced, utilitarian objects such as bottle racks, bicycle wheels, or snow shovels as readymade art, Marcel Duchamp challenged centuries of thinking about the artist's role as a skilled creator of original handmade works. The Duchamps were joined by like-minded artists -- including Man Ray and Francis Picabia -- who all upended conventional notions of what art can be. Animated by a finely honed sense of the absurd, these artists both embraced and critiqued modernity, filling their works with references to the industrial technologies, mass-produced objects, and machines that increasingly defined contemporary life.
135. MOMA5E_191221_590.JPG: Richard Boix Da-Da (New York Dada Group), 1921
136. MOMA5E_191221_597.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Bicycle Wheel New York, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913) Though Bicycle Wheel predates Duchamp's use of the word "readymade" -- a term he coined after moving from Paris to New York in 1915 -- it is the earliest example of this class of groundbreaking artworks. Like most of Duchamp's existing readymades, MoMA's Bicycle Wheel is a later version of an earlier creation, made for a 1951 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. As was his penchant at that point in his career, Duchamp found others to do much of the work for him: Sidney Janis, the gallery's owner, selected the bicycle wheel while in Paris and found the stool in Brooklyn, and Duchamp put the two together. What mattered to Duchamp was the transmission of a readymade's concept, not its exact physical appearance. Bicycle Wheel distinguishes itself from all of the artist's subsequent readymades by virtue of its central object's implicit movement, a quality Duchamp appreciated for its calming effects. "To see that wheel turning," he once remarked, "was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio."
137. MOMA5E_191221_602.JPG: Man Ray Rayograph, 1923
138. MOMA5E_191221_604.JPG: Man Ray Rayograph, 1923
139. MOMA5E_191221_607.JPG: Man Ray Rayograph, 1923
140. MOMA5E_191221_610.JPG: Marcel Duchamp To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour Buenos Aires, 1918 The words forming this work's title are inscribed (in the original French) on a strip of metal glued across the approximate center of the composition -- seemingly inviting viewers to look through the lens haloed by concentric circles and mounted between two panes of glass. Peering through the convex lens "for almost an hour" is supposed to have a hallucinatory effect, as the view is dwarfed, flipped, and otherwise distorted. Duchamp delighted in the fact that the glass shattered while being transported, welcoming the mechanics of chance into the work.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Museum of Modern Art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.

MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses an award-winning fine dining restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther.

History:

The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.

Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr Jr., a promising young protege. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat.

First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Abby's husband was adamantly opposed to the museum (as well as to modern art itself) and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location. Nevertheless, he eventually donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, and thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors.

During that time it initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented sixty-six oils and fifty drawings from the Netherlands, and poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".

The museum also gained international prominence with the hugely successful and now famous Picasso retrospective of 1939-40, held in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago. In its range of presented works, it represented a significant reinterpretation of Picasso for future art scholars and historians. This was wholly masterminded by Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, and the exhibition lionized Picasso as the greatest artist of the time, setting the model for all the museum's retrospectives that were to follow.

When Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity, acquisitions and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller, also joined the museum's board of trustees, in 1948, and took over the presidency when Nelson took up position as Governor of New York in 1958.

David subsequently employed the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. He and the Rockefeller family in general have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller, Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller (wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller) currently sit on the board of trustees.

In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, and with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Artworks:

Considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces in addition to approximately 22,000 films and 4 million film stills. The collection houses such important and familiar works as the following:
La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy – Zingara che dorme) by Henri Rousseau, 1897

* The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau
* The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
* Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
* The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
* Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian
* Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol
* The Seed of the Areoi by Paul Gauguin
* Water Lilies triptych by Claude Monet
* The Dance by Henri Matisse
* The Bather by Paul Cézanne
* The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni
* Love Song by Giorgio De Chirico
* Number 31, 1950 by Jackson Pollock
* Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman
* Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth
* Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair by Frida Kahlo
* Painting (1946) by Francis Bacon
* Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale by Max Ernst

It also holds works by a wide range of influential American artists including Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Chuck Close, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ralph Bakshi.

MoMA developed a world-renowned art photography collection, first under Edward Steichen and then John Szarkowski, as well as an important film collection under The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video. The film collection owns prints of many familiar feature-length movies, including Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but the department's holdings also contains many less-traditional pieces, including Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire and Chris Cunningham's music video for Björk's All Is Full of Love. MoMA also has an important design collection, which includes works from such legendary designers as Paul László, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. The design collection also contains many industrial and manufactured pieces, ranging from a self-aligning ball bearing to an entire Bell 47D1 helicopter.

Exhibition houses:

At various points in its history, MoMA has sponsored and hosted temporary exhibition houses, which have reflected seminal ideas in architectural history.

* 1949: exhibition house by Marcel Breuer
* 1950: exhibition house by Gregory Ain
* 1955: Japanese exhibition house
* 2008: Prefabricated houses planned by:
o Kieran Timberlake Architects
o Lawrence Sass
o Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier
o Leo Kaufmann Architects
o Richard Horden

Renovation:

MoMA's midtown location underwent extensive renovations in the early 2000s, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening to the public in a building redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, on November 20, 2004. From June 29, 2002 until September 27, 2004, a portion of its collection was on display in what was dubbed MoMA QNS, a former Swingline staple factory in the Long Island City section of Queens.

The renovation project nearly doubled the space for MoMA's exhibitions and programs and features 630,000 square feet (59,000 m2) of new and redesigned space. The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building on the western portion of the site houses the main exhibition galleries, and The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building on the eastern portion provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the museum's expanded Library and Archives. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

MoMA's reopening brought controversy as its admission cost increased from US$12 to US$20, making it one of the most expensive museums in the city; however it has free entry on Fridays after 4pm, thanks to sponsorship from Target Stores. The architecture of the renovation is controversial. At its opening, some critics thought that Taniguchi's design was a fine example of contemporary architecture, while many others were extremely displeased with certain aspects of the design, such as the flow of the space.

MoMA has seen its average number of visitors rise to 2.5 million from about 1.5 million a year before its new granite and glass renovation. The museum's director, Glenn D. Lowry, expects average visitor numbers eventually to settle in at around 2.1 million.

Financial Situation:

Before the economic crisis of late 2008, the MoMA’s board of trustees had Glenn Lowry sell its equities in order to move into an all-cash position. This move is not credited to one specific person, but the board includes banker David Rockefeller, Leon Black, a top person in private-equity, and former PaineWebber CEO Donald Marron.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].