Tag Archive | Whitney Museum

Modern Art Monday Presents: Mao (1972), Andy Warhol

Feb4

Mao
Photo By Gail

Andy Warhol based his Mao paintings, drawings, lithographs, photocopy prints, and wallpaper on the same image: a painting by Zhang Zhenshi that served as the frontispiece for Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (known in the “West as The Little Red Book”) and was then thought to be the most widely reproduced artwork in the world. Warhol chose the image of Mao — then chairman of the Chinese Communist Party — after reading news coverage of President Richard Nixon’s trip to the People’s Republic of China in February of 1972, an unprecedented act of cold war diplomacy that marked the first act by a sitting American president to the nation, which at the tie was considered an enemy of the state.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, at the Whitney Museum of American Art Through March 31st, 2019.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Rockwell Kent, Moonlight, Winter

Jan28

Moonlight Winter
Photo By Gail

Rockwell Kent (1882 – 1971) was a self-proclaimed wanderer who felt most at home in the wilderness. His artistic and philosophical devotion to nature lead him to explore far-reaching places that served as inspiration for his rugged landscape paintings, as well as several published travelogues.

Moonlight, Winter (1940) depicts the farm in New York’s Adirondack mountains, where Kent eventually settled in 1927. The scene conjures the artist’s vision of a certain — if somewhat distant — harmony between there vastness of the night sky and the quaint shelter of human life.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Portrait of Pat Whalen By Alice Neel

Jan7

Pat Whalen
Photo By Gail

Over the course of a career that stretched from the 1920s to the 1980s, Alice Neel painted portraits of hundreds of friends, family members, lovers, artists art historians, writers, and political activists, believing that “people are the greatest and profoundest key to an era.” Seeking to express psychology above absolute physical likeness, she often used exaggerated colors and expressive brushstrokes and eliminated extraneous details in order to capture the inner lives of her subjects.

Neel was a longtime supporter of leftist causes. In the painting of Pat Whalen (1935), she depicts the Communist activist and union organizer for the longshoremen of Baltimore as a paragon of social justice. Whalen’s creased face and expression — along with a copy of the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, resting beneath his large, clenched — suggest both a noble archetype of the blue-collar worker and an all-consuming commitment to the working man’s cause.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Nam June Paik, Magnet TV

Dec17

Magnet TV
Photos By Gail

Magnet TV (1965) is an early example of Nam June Paik’s “Prepared Televisions,” works in which he altered the television’s image or its physical casing. This work consists of a seventeen-inch, black and white set with an industrial-size magnet resting on top of it. The magnetic field interferes with the television’s reception of electronic signals, distorting the picture into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved.

Magnet TV

Paik’s radical action undermines the seemingly inviolable power of broadcast television by transforming the TV set into sculpture, one whose moving image is created by chance, and can be manipulated at will. Through his alteration of the television image, Paik challenged the notion of the art object as a self-contained entity and established a process of instant feedback, whereby the viewer’s actions have a direct effect on the form and meaning of the work.

Photographed in The Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Rafaël Rozendaal, Abstract Browsing 17 03 05 (Google)

Dec10

Abstract Bowsing
Photo By Gail

Abstract Browsing 17 03 05 (Google) (2017) is a machine woven tapestry depicting an abstract version of the Google browser’s interface. To produce his Abstract Browsing series, Rafaël Rozendaal created a plug-in for Google’s Chrome Browser. Available to anyone online, it reduces images and text on any website visited to colored rectangles. The artist surfs the web every day using his plug-in and compiles thousands of screenshots, which he then narrows down to a small selection to be produced as tapestries

The tapestries are created at the Textile Museum in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where Rozendaal’s screenshots are converted into a file for output by a weaving machine. His project connects layers of machine abstraction: the initial transformation of the webpage exposes a composition optimized to grab our attention, while the tapestry references the roots of computing in nineteenth-century weaving machines that automated the creation of patterns.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum on NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Andy Warhol, Mylar and Plexiglass Construction

Dec3

Mylar and Plexiglass Construction
All Photos By Gail

A hybrid of Pop and Minimalist aesthetics, this stacked sculpture, Mylar and Plexiglass Construction (1970) relates to Andy Warhol’s Mylar Silver Clouds from 1966 and extends his interest in seriality, color and the readymade into three-dimensional space.

Mylar and Plexiglass Construction Detail

Mylar Rolls, Detail

Mylar and Plexiglass Construction Detail

Comprised of six rolls of colored mylar on cardboard tubes, mounted in a Plexiglass case, the work offers a rare glimpse into a mode of artistic production that, for whatever reason, Warhol chose not to pursue further.

Mylar and Plexiglass Construction

Photographed as Part Of the Exhibit, Andy Warhol: From A to B And Back Again, at The Whitney Museum in NYC Through March 31, 2019.

Psychedelic Christmas Tree Forest at The Standard Hotel

Nov27

Colored Christmas Trees
All Photos By Gail

If you happen to be planning an outing to the Whitney Museum to see the new Andy Warhol exhibit, From A to B And Back Again, why not make a day of it: do some shopping, walk the High Line, enjoy a delicious lunch at Bubby’s, and stop by the outdoor Plaza at the Standard Hotel to check out their amazing Psychedelic Christmas Tree Forest!

Colored Christmas Trees

Colored Christmas Trees

As you can see, these trees are decorated with oversize sweets such as  Gummy Bears, Candy Canes and Gum Drops! Fun!

Colored Christmas Trees

Colored Christmas Trees

While you stroll among the trees and take assloads of selfies for your Instagram feed, you can also enjoy a hot beverage!

Find This Forest of Colorful Holiday Trees at The Standard Hotel Plaza, Located at 848 Washington at 13th Street, New York 10014

Colored Christmas Trees