Tag Archives: museum of modern art

Pop Culture, Toys and Collectibles

MoMA and LEGO Collaborate to Release New Starry Night Set

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starry night lego set
All Images Courtesy of MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art is set to launch a new LEGO® Ideas set inspired by one of the most iconic works in MoMA’s collection, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889). The three-dimensional set reimagines the renowned painting — which has been in MoMA’s collection since 1935 — in LEGO form, emphasizing the artist’s striking brush strokes and color choices. The set will be available on June 1st for the general public at store.moma.org, at MoMA Design Stores in New York, and at LEGO locations globally.
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Edward Hopper, Gas

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edward hopper gas photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Edward Hopper’s 1940 painting, Gas, depicts an American gas station at the end of a highway — the subject being a composite of several gas stations Hopper had visited. According to his wife, the gas station motif was something he had wanted to paint for a long time. Hopper struggled with the painting, since he had begun to produce new paintings at a slower rate than before, and had trouble finding suitable gas stations to paint. The artist wanted to paint a station with the lights lit above the pumps, but the stations in his area only turned the lights on when it was pitch dark outside, to save energy.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Dorothea Tanning, Notes For An Apocalypse

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dorothea tanning notes for an apocalypse photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

In Notes For An Apocalypse (1978), Dorothea Tanning returned to themes she had explored in the late 1930s after being introduced to surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art’s  1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition. As she later explained, “I’ve always been drawn towards esoteric phenomena: the illogical, the inexpressible , the impossible.”

Here, the notion of domestic order, symbolized by the white table cloth, creased in a grid pattern, which Tanning has recalled from her Lutheran childhood in rural Illinois, is turned on its head. Bodies and limbs are so contorted that they are difficult to distinguish and, at times, nearly dissolve into the tablecloth.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Design and Innovation

Eye On Design: Penguin Donkey Bookcase By Egon Riss

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penguin donkey bookcase with breuer chaise photo by gail worley
All Photos By Gail

Founded in 1929, Isokon became one of the most progressive modern furnishings companies in the United Kingdom. Several former members of the Bauhaus were tapped as designers, including Marcel Breuer, whose chase lounge is on view above, and Egon Riss, who designed several zoomorphic pieces for the company, including this molded-ply bookcase (1939) that resembles a Donkey with its upturned ears.

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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Sonja Sekula, The Town of The Poor

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the town of the poor photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

The ghostly scaffolding, swooping calligraphic lines, and blue and yellow washes of The Town Of The Poor (1951) most likely depict the view from Sonya Sekula’s downtown New York studio, which she shared with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. “Looking outside my window,” wrote this Swiss painter in poet, an immigrant to the United States, “I think of all the contemporary American poets and artists who represent their outlook on this strange country and I find myself beginning to realize that I saw in one of them. I should begin to speak of … a future that we begin to feel underneath the current of war and strife and uncertainty.”

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.