Photos By Gail
Giant Soft Fan (1966 – 67) by Claes Oldenburg is an iconic piece of Pop Art that reflects the artist’s fascination with transforming everyday objects into playful, large-scale sculptures. This piece is part of his broader exploration of soft sculptures, a form he pioneered in the 1960s.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Soft Fan
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“To be a visionary designer, I want to design products for myself first,” designer Kazuo Kawasaki has admitted. After a car accident left him partially paralyzed at age 27, Kawasaki created the Carna Folding Wheelchair for himself in 1989. Rather than resembling a piece of medical equipment, his vision was for it to become part of his wardrobe. Continue reading Eye On Design: Kazuo Kawasaki, Carna Folding Wheelchair
Photo By Gail
In this monumental canvas that Fernand Leger worked on from 1921–22, three seemingly self-possessed women, flanked by a black cat, lounge in an interior decorated with modern furnishings. Their bodies – modeled so that they seem to reflect the light – appear as metallic as the stylized furniture that surrounds them. Leger orchestrated the interlocking components of this busy composition as if it were a machine, imparting an industrial sensibility into the domestic sphere.
Photographed in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Photo By Gail
Robert Indiana (1928 – 2918) aspired to become “an American painter of signs,“ noting that “for the last five years I have lived and worked on the Slip and the waterfront, where signs are much more profuse than trees.“
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Robert Indiana, The American Dream
Photo By Gail
In this large painting of pulsating, interpenetrating pistons, orifices, and circuitry, Francis Picabia fuses the mechanical with the biological. The work evidences his predilection for machines, which intensified during a 1913 visit to New York. As one reviewer noted, “Picabia admits to having put all former things behind him, and having grasped the genius of American machinery as the new medium through which his art may be expressed.” The artist also associated this 1914 painting, I See Again . . . with dancer, Stacia Napierkowska, whom he witnessed rehearsing while on board the ocean liner that took him from France to New York.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City