Displaying items by tag: Museum of Modern Art

Billionaire Ken Griffin donated $40 million to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one of the largest gifts in the institution’s 85-year history.

The unrestricted gift from the founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel will help provide education and exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, the museum said Tuesday in a statement. In recognition of the gift, MoMA will name its 1964 Philip Johnson-designed East Wing after Griffin.

Within the Museum of Modern Art’s announcement on Tuesday of coming exhibitions were signs of a seismic shift underway in how it collects and displays modern and contemporary art — changes that are expected to have a powerful impact on the museum’s renovation.

While curatorial activities used to be highly segregated by department, with paintings and sculpture considered the most important, the museum has gradually been upending that traditional hierarchy, organizing exhibitions in a more fluid fashion across disciplinary lines and redefining its practice of showing art from a linear historical perspective.

The Museum of Modern Art is planning its biggest masterpiece yet, not that you’ll get it.

The museum is moving ahead with plans for an estimated $93 million expansion at the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, according to an application filed with the New York City Department of Buildings Tuesday.

The plans for an adjacent lot, at 45 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, call for 32,842 square feet of new space, which will include theaters, a library/lounge, classrooms, exhibit space and gardens, the application indicates.

The decadelong quest included archive detectives, location mix-ups, vintage postcards and a coveted art collection torn apart by war. When it was done, the Museum of Modern Art decided to return an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner landscape to the heirs of its original, Jewish owner.

The museum announced Monday that the German expressionist painter’s 1917-18 canvas “Sand Hills (By Grünau)” rightly belongs to the heirs of a Berlin writer, Max Fischer, who had to leave his art behind when he fled Germany for the U.S. in late 1935.

Kim Conaty has been appointed curator for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Conaty comes to the Rose from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she was the Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr., Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints. In her new position, Conaty will play a key role in planning exhibitions and interpreting the Rose’s exceptional collection of post-war art, undertake significant research, and evaluate potential acquisitions. Conaty will join the Rose staff in December 2015. 

“I am delighted to welcome Kim as a creative partner during an historic period of ambitious growth for the Rose," said Christopher Bedford, Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose.

If you’ve been meaning to make it to MoMA to check out “Picasso Sculpture,” you’ll need to plan ahead starting next week. Beginning November 10, MoMA is requiring visitors to purchase timed entrance tickets for the five-month exhibit, which opened September 14.

This isn’t the first time MoMA has implemented timed ticketing. Over the past seven years, the Tim Burton, Van Gogh, Bjork and two Matisse exhibits have also required viewers to enter at a particular time.

In the almost 70 years since the term was first coined, “outsider art” — a somewhat dismissive designation for the work of self-taught artists — has been steadily finding its way inside the mainstream art world. These days, it is no longer unusual to see pieces by artists with no formal training displayed in even the most prestigious venues; just the past two years have seen such works included in exhibitions mounted by the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

For much of the past half-century, though, the significance of self-taught art was largely recognized only by a few enthusiasts.

While New York's Museum of Modern Art has settled its union dispute, the ongoing staffing crisis at London's National Gallery of Art seems poised to continue, with a strike involving all union workers set to begin on August 17.

The Public and Commercial Services union has informed the museum of its plans, which include four additional days of strikes on August 4, 5, 6, and 12. The union voted overwhelmingly in favor of an all-out strike.

He is one of the great draftsmen of the impressionist era, acclaimed for strongly structured compositions and a masterful use of line. But when Edgar Degas discovered the printmaking technique known as monotype, everything changed.

As a major exhibition due to open at the Museum of Modern Art next spring reveals, he became much looser and more improvisational in his working methods. He regularly mixed printmaking with other media, like pastel. And he expanded past the subjects for which he is best known—dancers and scenes of modern life—to include risqué brothel scenes and landscapes verging on abstraction.

Museums have traditionally been spaces of contemplation, refuges from the outside world where visitors can bask in front of masterpieces in quiet serenity.

Well, that's if you don't live in New York City.

In the Big Apple, even art museums can be crushed with crowds and airport security-style lines. These are massive buildings with some of the best collections of art in the world—it's natural. The Metropolitan Museum's attendance stood at a near-record 6.16 million people in 2014; the Museum of Modern Art's was more than 3 million, and if recent visits to the packed new Whitney are any indication, it will blow the old Breuer building's attendance out of the water.