Visual Music after Cage: Robert Breer, expanded cinema and Stockhausen's Originals (1964)

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-169
Author(s):  
Andrew V. Uroskie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Aesthetic

Within William Seitz's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art's exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer's film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen's Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer's three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen's aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.

The Cuban Avant-Garde and the International Art Community

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-97
Author(s):  
Ramón Cernuda
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Art Market ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
The Core ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Art Community ◽  
Modern Artists

Art collector Ramón Cernuda discusses how Cuban art was consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century, especially after the emergence of two generations of modern artists that are now considered the core of the vanguardia (also known as the Havana School). Cernuda notes that the international art market increasingly valued the work of Cuban artists such as Amelia Peláez, Víctor Manuel García, René Portocarrero, and Wifredo Lam. These artists appeared in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in major museums and private galleries, as well as in specialized art magazines and books. As Cernuda underlines, Cuban vanguardia painters reached a broad audience with Alfred Barr Jr.’s 1944 exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Ironically, the wide success of Cuban artists abroad led Cuban collectors to pay attention to them.

Introduction to Twentieth Century Design from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art New York

Art Education ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
John B. Mitchell ◽  
Arthur Drexler ◽  
Greta Daniel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art

de Zayas, Marius (1880–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiola Martinez-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Aesthetic

Marius de Zayas was a Mexican caricaturist, writer, collector, dealer, and curator who formed part of the New York avant-garde, and did much to promote European modernism in the United States. Through his writings, curatorial, and creative work, de Zayas helped to lay the foundations of American modernism, and to assert the centrality of primitive art to the modernist aesthetic. Exhibited for the first time in 1913, de Zayas’ abstract portraits are some of the earliest examples of avant-garde production the United States. These drawings reflect his engagement with the aesthetic explorations of the European avant-gardes, and the challenges posed by photography to the tradition of Naturalism in Western art. Marius de Zayas’ work was instrumental in promoting a transnational exchange of art and ideas between Europe and the Americas. In his conception of modernism, primitive art was the source of formal experimentation, but also of spirituality and transcendence. His contribution to the history of modern art in the United States remains to be appropriately acknowledged, but it is there for anyone who cares to read his How, When and Why Modern Art Came to New York written for Alfred Barr towards the end of his life.

Reconstructing Cold War Cultural Diplomacy Exhibitions

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer McComas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Degenerate Art ◽  
Armory Show

As museum and exhibition histories have become significant subjects of art historical investigation in recent decades, museums themselves have subjected some of the most groundbreaking and controversial exhibitions of the twentieth century to reevaluation through elaborate reconstructions. These restaged exhibitions can shed new light on the shifting boundaries of the canon, question long-accepted art historical interpretations, and provide insight into the intersection of art and politics. Restaged exhibitions, however, are not simply exercises in historical research, but often serve as commentary on contemporary issues. A relevant example is the 1991–1992 exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, a reconstruction of the 1937 Nazi propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art.[1] Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the restaged exhibition introduced late-twentieth-century American audiences to the cultural censorship practiced by the Third Reich at a time when the withholding of federal funding for controversial art was being hotly debated in the United States.[2] It also helped to revive interest in the issue of Nazi art looting, which is now a major subject of research within European and North American museums. Reconstructed exhibitions also focus attention on how and why certain art forms have become canonical. This was the case with the New-York Historical Society’s 2013 exhibition The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution, a partial reconstruction of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.[3] Better known as the Armory Show, this exhibition, held in New York City in February and March 1913, is lauded for introducing European avant-garde art to American audiences and setting the stage for its eventual entry into the canon in the United States. The majority of critics in 1913, however, condemned the Armory Show, perceiving the fauvist and cubist works on display as anarchic, ugly, and even immoral. Revisiting the exhibition a century later allowed for reflection on our changing artistic preferences as new forms of art transition from shock-inducing to canonical. As Ken Johnson of the New York Times noted in his exhibition review of October 10, 2013, “now that the Cubists and the Fauves are museum-certified old masters, it takes some imagination to comprehend what made the Armory Show such a controversial sensation.”

Contingency and Constraint

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 142-145
Author(s):  
Deborah Breen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
American Poet ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
First Time

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019 http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/ Admission: USD 25/18/14 “I pick up my life, / And take it with me, / And I put it down in Chicago, Detroit, / Buff alo, Scranton, / Any place that is / North and East, / And not Dixie.” Th ese are the opening lines from “One-Way Ticket,” by African-American poet, Langston Hughes (1902–1967). Th e poem provides the emotional and historical core of the “Migration” paintings by Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), a series that depicts the extraordinary internal migration of African Americans in the twentieth century. Not coincidentally, the poem also provides the title of the current exhibition of the sixty paintings in Lawrence’s series, on display at MoMA, New York, from 3 April to 7 September 2015.1 Shown together for the first time in over twenty years, the paintings are surrounded by works that provide context for the “great migration”: additional paintings by Lawrence, as well as paintings, drawings, photographs, texts, and musical recordings by other African-American artists, writers, and performers of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, Museum of Modern Art, 1937

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 277-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Powers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
New Yorkers

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, held between 10 February and 7 March 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was a notable event. Amidst claims that ‘England leads the world in modern architectural activity’, the exhibition ‘amazed New Yorkers’ and equally surprised English commentators. However, it has not subsequently received any extended investigation. The present purpose is to look at it as a multiple sequence of events, involving other exhibitions, associated publications and the trajectories of individuals and institutions, through which tensions came to the surface about the definition and direction of Modernism in England and elsewhere. Such an analysis throws new light on issues such as the motives for staging the exhibition, the personnel involved and associated questions relating to the role of émigré architects in Britain and the USA, some of which have been misinterpreted in recent commentaries.Hitchcock's unequivocal claim for the importance of English Modernism at this point still arouses disbelief, and raises a question whether it can be accepted at face value or requires explaining in terms of some other hidden intention.

Eat yourself fitter: John Latham and Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture

2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-44
Author(s):  
Simon Ford
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Suitable Condition ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
History Of

In 1966 John Latham and some friends began chewing Clement Greenberg’s book Art and culture: collected essays. The resulting art work, entitled Art and Culture (1966-1969), is now recognised as a seminal conceptual art work and is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latham, however, had borrowed the book from St. Martin’s School of Art library and when he was unable to return it in a suitable condition his teaching contract was not renewed. This essay looks at the history of the work, the ideas behind its creation, and the issues it raises for the culture of the book today.

Steeped in Modernism: The Teapot as Manifesto in Early 20th Century Art

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Bielinski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Window ◽  
Time Period ◽  
20Th Century Art

The art manifesto, a written political, social, and artistic proclamation of an artistic movement, surged in popularity among avant‐garde art groups in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the manifestos featured declarations for the synthesis of art and life as well as a call for social and political power for artists of both 'high' and 'low' art forms. Concurrently, new artistic interpretations of the humble teapot became suddenly ubiquitous. This inquiry explores how the teapot emerged as a dominant symbol for the goals of Modern Art movements, and includes an analysis of the teapot's socio‐political history, its ambiguous status between high and low art, and its role in the commercial sphere. By examining the teapots of Suprematism's Kazimir Malevich, Constructivism's Mariane Brandt,and Surrealism's Meret Oppenheim, this presentation will track ideas of functionality, the teapot as symbol, and aesthetics from 1923 to 1936. This small window in time offers an analysis of the extraordinary developments in teapots, and perhaps a glimpse of the paralleled momentum that occurred more generally in design, architecture, and the other arts in this time period.

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