Tag Archive | Museum of Modern Art

Modern Art Monday Presents: Francis Bacon, Painting

Jan13

Painting By Francis Bacon
Photo By Gail

Created in the aftermath of World War II, Painting (1946) is likely a veiled portrait of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who often carried an umbrella and has gone down in history for his policy of accommodation of the Nazi regime. His dark suit is punctuated by a bright yellow boutonniere, yet his bared teeth and concealed gaze suggest brutality. This sense of menace is accentuated by the cow carcasses suspended behind him. The drawn window shades evoke those found in a widely circulated photograph of Hitler’s bunker, an image that Francis Bacon included in mulipleworks. Bacon claimed that this work was an accident; he had originally set out to paint a bird descending onto a field.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Jacques Villegle, 122 Rue Du Temple

Jan6

122 Rue Du Temple
Photo By Gail

122 Rue Du Temple is the Paris address from which artist Jacques Villegle detached many of the movie posters and political notices that he used to make this work in 1968. After tearing fragments of the original images, he pasted these passages of color, text, and image into a chance composition. Many of the fliers used here announced the city’s May 1968 student and worker demonstrations, and the artist considered the people who had posted them to be his collaborators, understanding their use of advertising billboards as a precursor for his process.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC

Modern Art Monday Presents: Antonieta Sosa, Visual Chess

Dec30

Visual Chess
Photo By Gail

For Venezuelan artist Antonieta Sosa, Ajedrez Visual(Visual Chess), 1965, was “like my spinal column or my umbilical cord, uniting me to painting.” Scattered pops of color interrupt the regularity of the black grid, animating it with the playful movement suggested by the work’s title.

At times, these contrasting hues prompt an optical flickering or afterimage. To Sosa, such retinal effects underscore vision as a dynamic physiological process. Thus, Visual Chess foreshadows her eventual decisions to “come down from the wall” to engage with real space and bodies in the form of sculpture, performance and installations.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Expansion in Four Directions By Max Bill

Jul22

Expansion in Four Directions
Photo By Gail

This painting, Expansion in Four Directions (1961 – 62), shares its lozenge shape and geometric divisions of color with many paintings by Piet Mondrian, whose work Max Bill (1908 – 1994) collected and in whom he was greatly interested. Bill trained at the Bauhaus in the 1920s under Josef Albers and was an architect and graphic designer as well as an artist. In his work, he aimed to transcend personal artistic expression to achieve universal communication, and to this end he used mathematics as a neutralizing compositional device.

The subject of an exhibition at the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo in 1950 and winner of the grands prize for sculpture at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1951, he helped to introduce a generation of Latin American artists to European geometric abstraction. Bill designed the catalogue for a 1955 Mondrian exhibition at the Zurich Kusthaus and lent to it three Mondrian paintings in his collection.

Photographed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Josh Kline’s Skittles Offers A Selection of Unorthodox Smoothie Drinks For Modern Times!

Jul16

Josh Kline Skittles
All Photos By Gail

If you think the ‘Green Juice’ smoothie that your coworker gets from the juice truck is disgusting — because it is — wait until you check out some of the ingredients inside the crazy concoctions comprising Josh Kline’s refrigerator-case sculpture, Skittles (2014).

Minimum Wage
Minimum Wage

Fifteen different smoothie flavors line the shelves of Kline’s light box-encased commercial refrigerator. Each bottle lists the unorthodox ingredients contained within, including inedible items such as latex gloves, duct tape, Ritalin and fragments of Google Glass eyewear.

Big Data
Big Data

These high-tech materials, synthetic chemicals, and organic substances evoke specific locations as well as contemporary lifestyles, industries and brands. With varieties like Big Data and Supplements, the indigestible ‘drinks’ inside this glowing cooler clearly illustrate the ways in which our bodies have been engineered, chemically altered, and transformed by technologies of consumption.

Supplements
Supplements

Which ‘Flavor’ is your favorite? Take closer look, below!

Crowd Control
Crowd Control

Clear
Clear

Mixed Greens
Mixed Greens

Designer
Designer

Williamsburg
Williamsburg

Tourism
Tourism

Condo
Condo

Nightlife
Nightlife

Bottle Service
Bottle Service

Anarchy

Anarchy

Anarchy
Plastic 

Sick Day
Sick Day

Josh Kline Skittles

Drink Up!

Eye On Design: Landi Chair By Hans Corey

May22

Landi Chair
All Photos By Gail

The Landi Chair (1938) was among the examples of international design in the exhibition Die Gute Form (Good Form), which the designer Max Bill curated  on behalf of the Swiss Werkbund — an organization established in 1913 to promote good design — and which travelled to venues in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and The Netherlands from 1941–51.

Landi Chair

Landi Chair was designed by Hans Corey and manufacured from bent and pressed aluminum.

Landi Chair Installation View
Landi Chair Installation View With Kitchen Clock (1953) and Sun Lamp By Max Bill (1951)

Landi Chair

“We’ve tried in this exhibition to dispense as much as possible with ‘appearance’ and focus instead on what is modest, true [and] even good,” Bill wrote in the exhibition catalogue.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, The Value of Good Design, on View at The Museum of Modern Art Through June 15th, 2019.

Eye On Design: Royal Festival Hall Chair By Robin Day

Apr24

Royal Festival Hall Chair
All Photos By Gail

Robin Day’s prizewinning design for the Royal Festival Hall chair, created for entry into MoMA’s 1948 International Low-Cost Furniture Competition, helped to launch his career as an industrial designer. Day enjoyed a long-term consultancy with Hille, the chair’s manufacturer, as well as the establishment of a studio with his future wife, Lucienne.

Royal Festival Hall Chair

Epitomizing  the contemporary style and technological innovation of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the chair was featured in the couple’s Home and Gardens pavilion as well as in the lounge of the new Royal Festival. The chair also appeared in that year’s Milan Triennale and was soon put into production for an international market. Robin Day’s radical molded plywood seating design appears on the point of taking flight, as if lifted off its slender steel legs by the surge of energy and hope also expressed in the Festival of Britain that year. The lemon-yellow upholstery and copper-plated legs add to the extraordinary visual vitality of this sculptural piece.

Royal Festival Hall Chair

The fabric hung in the background (left) is by Austrian-born textile designer Marian Mahler, a contemporary of Robin and Lucienne Day. The yellow textile on the right is a length of Lucienne’s 1958 design Mezzanine, which was presented to the Museum by Denver-based Lucienne Day collectors Jill A. Wiltse and Kirk H. Brown III.

Robin Day Chair

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, The Value of Good Design, on View at The Museum of Modern Art Through June 15th, 2019.

Robin Day Chair

Modern Art Monday Presents: Ouro Preto: St. John’s Eve By Alberto da Veiga Guignard

Apr8

Ouro Preto St Johns Eve
Photo By Gail

This painting depicts a St. John’s Day eve in the Brazilian town of Ouro Preto, whose central plaza is illuminated with colored lanterns to mark the end of the winter solstice. Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Guignard to make the painting after seeing a drawing of the same subject. His description of the artist’s work — “tight and detailed’– characterizes much of the art that Kirstein favored. Guignard’s meticulous craftsmanship and attention to particulars are visible in this works finely rendered architectural features, tiny revelers, and distinctive indigenous flora.

Ouro Preto: St. John’s Eve (1942) by Alberto da Veiga Guignard was photographed as part of the exhibit Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, on View at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art Through June 15th, 2019.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Joan Miró, Woman (Opera Singer)

Apr1

Woman Opera Singer
Photo By Gail

In a series of pastels made in the fall of 1934, Joan Miró pursued what he called “aggressiveness” through color. Rendered in acidic, highly saturated and dissonant hues of thickly applied pastel, the isolated figure of Woman (Opera Singer) appears to protrude from the paper’s surface, Her asymmetrical head, twisted open mouth, overinflated genitalia, and single toenail resist the corporeal ideals embraced by the various fascist parties that were gaining power across Europe at the time.

Photographed as part of the Exhibit Joan Miró, Birth of the World, on View at The Museum of Modern Art Through June 15th, 2019.

Eye On Design: Inflatable Chair By William H. Miller Jr.

Mar27

Inflatable Chair
All Photos By Gail

Composed of Vinylite and manufactured by a chemical company (Gallowhur Chemical Corp. of Windsor, VT) this Inflatable Chair (1944) typifies the application of innovative materials and production techniques — heightened during wartime — to domestic products. Designer William H. Miller was an employee of Gallowhur Chemical.

Inflatable Chair

During World War II, Miller collaborated with a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt to design a pocket-sized water-desalination device that became standard equipment for Army and Navy Fliers.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit The Value of Good Design, On View Through June 15th, 2019 at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Inflatable Chair Installation View
Installation View