Displaying items by tag: Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has named Martino Stierli its new Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Stierli, who currently teaches the history of  modern architecture at the University of Zurich, will begin at MoMA in March 2015. His duties will include overseeing the Department of Architecture and Design’s special exhibitions, installations from the collection, and acquisitions. Stierli succeeds Barry Bergdoll, who stepped down in 2013. Now a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, Bergdoll continues to be a part-time curator at MoMA. 

Stierli’s scholarly research has focused on a range of topics, including architecture and media, the photographic and cinematic portrayal of architecture, the intersection of art and architecture, the transatlantic exchange in postwar and postmodern architecture, and the role of travel in architectural education.

A nicely suited man slips a hand into a trouser pocket and tilts his head toward the gramophone. His coat is slung over a nearby chair beside a suitcase. He seems to be savoring a few final bars before taking his leave, an exit that seems unrushed.

Beyond his view, two bowler-hatted men lie in wait, one with a net, the other a club. Just behind him, a woman lies naked, eyes closed and blood raining from her mouth. There it is — the inevitable bit of bloodletting in the otherwise bloodless, tidy paintings of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte.

This is the potency of Magritte's popular, endlessly reproduced and much underestimated works, enigmatic paintings that inspired the green apple on the Beatles' record label, the bottle-filled sea in the title credits for HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" and any number of book covers on psychology, among many other pop culture riffs.

Since it opened this spring at the Tate Modern in London, “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" has been a blockbuster, with lines forming most mornings despite timed tickets. Once the show ends on Sept. 7, officials there estimate it will have been seen by well over 460,000 people, the same number of visitors who attended “Matisse Picasso” in 2002, the Tate Modern’s most popular show ever.

Next it will head to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it will be on view from Oct. 12 through Feb. 8. The museum is bracing for crowds and it too will offer timed tickets, which go on sale Friday on moma.org. Members do not need timed tickets and may attend anytime. (Unlike the Tate, which is free but charges £18.00 — about $30.50 — for the special exhibition, MoMA does not charge for special exhibitions but admission to the museum is $25, $18 for 65+ and $14 for students.)

Is the Whitney set to supplant MoMA as New York’s go-to modern art museum? The institution will begin moving into its new Renzo Piano building later this year, with the Meatpacking District location opening to the public about one year from now. It’s hard to say how exactly the new building and location will change the dynamic among New York’s top tier of art museums, but a look at the numbers makes it clear that the Whitney’s move is literally and symbolically huge, and will put it in more direct competition with the Museum of Modern Art.

The Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue is much smaller than most people realize. At just 85,000 square feet, it is markedly smaller, for instance, than the new 100,000-square-foot Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery in Los Angeles—which, to be fair, is an exceptionally huge gallery.

Sotheby’s London is offering as a highlight of the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on Monday 23rd June 2014 Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (Water Lilies) of 1906, estimated at £20-30 million/ $33-50 million. Instantly recognisable and revered the world over, Claude Monet’s Nymphéas are among the most iconic and celebrated paintings of turn of the century. The profound impact the series has made on the evolution of modern art marks them out as Monet’s greatest achievement.

This painting was selected by the artist to be exhibited at his seminal exhibition held at the Galerie Durand- Ruel, Paris, in 1909 to unveil his Water Lily paintings in a show dedicated purely to this subject. It had also been singled out and acquired by Paul Durand-Ruel - the legendary art dealer who championed the Impressionists and represented Monet, among many other of the greatest artists of his time – and it remained in his personal collection throughout his lifetime. The painting has since been widely exhibited at some of the world’s most prestigious international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and since 2011 has been on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It is this painting, together with the others in this series, that eventually led to Monet’s Les Grandes décorations which were painted between 1914-26, now in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.

The title of this exhibition is adapted from the phrase “the sight of a reason,” a line in Gertrude Stein's groundbreaking prose work Tender Buttons (1914). In her collection of “portraits” of everyday phenomena, Stein employed experimental syntax to free language from established usage and to “create a word relationship between the word and the things seen.” Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions begins with an ongoing work by the Los Angeles–based artist Eve Fowler (American, b. 1964), which appropriates phrases from Tender Buttons and Stein's How to Write (1931) in commercially printed posters originally intended for public display—for instance, stapled to telephone poles or fences. Stein’s probing of the correlation between language and the physical world—and Fowler’s act of recontextualization—exemplify a set of concerns shared by the works presented here.

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

Situated prominently at the eastern end of The Hague—not the city in the Netherlands, but a crescent-shaped inlet that feeds into the Elizabeth River as it passes through Norfolk, Virginia—the Chrysler Museum of Art’s newly renovated and expanded Italianate pile opened to the public again last week after 17 months of construction. Local firm H&A Architects designed identical, two-story porticoed gallery wings that flank the main entrance and added 10,000 square feet of exhibition space for American and European painting and sculpture and the museum’s renowned glass collection. The addition—which brings the total programmable space to 220,000 square feet—mimics the classical style of the original 1933 structure and a 1989 building project that unified the exteriors by removing asymmetrical and Brutalist additions completed in 1965 and 1974. “We wanted to maintain the balanced, palazzo house quality of the exterior,” explains museum director Bill Hennessey.

While the architecture may be conservative, not much else about the institution is, starting with its namesake, Walter Chrysler, Jr. The eldest son of the auto tycoon, Chrysler began amassing what would become a world-class art collection while still a student at Dartmouth in the early 1930s. Controversial dealings would eventually run the scion out of New York City, where he once served as the first chairman of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art’s library committee, and later the artists’ colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he maintained a museum in a former church building during the 1960s.

As it approaches its 25th anniversary, the Wexner Center for the Arts is set to feature a variety of works this fall, as well as give visitors a peek into the personal gallery of Les Wexner and his wife, Abigail.

Beginning Sept. 21 and running through Dec. 31, the Wexner Center is set to celebrate its 25th anniversary with “Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection,” displaying works from the art collection of the businessman and Ohio State alumnus.

Pieces to be on view include original masterworks of artists Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet, who are known virtuosos in their respective art movements, including cubism, expressionism, surrealism and modernism.

By the time Art Basel Hong Kong opened to VIPs on May 14, Edouard Malingue had already sold out his entire inventory of paintings. He spent the rest of the fair fending off disappointed would-be buyers.

“Some of my clients got really upset with my staff and I had to intervene,” said Hong-Kong-based Malingue, after all seven works by Chinese painter Yuan Yuan were sold in advance of the fair. “I explained that we’ve been selling to new collectors and the artist isn’t a factory.”