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.

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

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.

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.

Post-War Blues (1945–1947)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James King
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
York City ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
Similar Kind ◽  
At Home

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1945 to 1947. Lee and Roland flew to New York City on 19 May 1946. Roland was elated to have the opportunity to rekindle his relationship with the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA) director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who likely warned him about the dangers he would face if he backed any kind of proposal to open a museum of modern art in London. Roland was taken with MOMA's collection: ‘Realizing that it was on a far greater scale that anything that could be dreamt of in London, consistently indifferent to all matters concerning the visual arts and still enfeebled by the war, this achievement nevertheless roused in me a longing to attempt some similar kind of folly at home’. Barr would also have expressed his gratitude to Roland for allowing his Picassos to be sent to MOMA during the war.

“If I Had to Do It Over Again”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan R. Ellenberger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Medical Center ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Seventieth Birthday ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Sixtieth Anniversary

Although in ill health, Hopkins is convinced to attend a film retrospective of Paramount’s sixtieth anniversary at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a showing of The Story of Temple Drake. Also that month, she gives her last interview to historian and writer John Kobal. A few weeks later, she collapses in her hotel suite and is admitted to the Harkness Medical Center. Later, she returns to the Alrae Hotel, spending time with her sister, Ruby, and friend Becky Morehouse. She dies alone at the hotel, shortly before her seventieth birthday. The reactions from her friends and family are documented, recounting her funeral in New York and memorials in Bainbridge and Hollywood.

Machine-Age Exposition (New York, 1927)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoniette M. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Industrial Arts ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Commercial Space ◽  
Machine Art

The Machine-AgeExposition took place from 16–28 May 1927 at 119 West 57th Street in Steinway Hall, a commercial space in Manhattan, New York. It exposed the American public to the machine-age aesthetic: a modernist style based upon a belief in technological progress. The style emphasized the qualities of mass production, streamlined design, functionality, dynamism, and force. Jane Heap (1883–1964) of the Little Review Gallery was the main organizer, bringing together engineers and artists to rally momentum for this strain of modernist art. The installation juxtaposed works of architecture, engineering, industrial arts, high-modernist painting, and sculpture in order to emphasize their "inter-relation and inter-influence," as advertised on the exposition flyer. The Machine-Age Exposition highlighted a commonality among these disciplines in their exaltation of the beauty of machinery and celebration of innovation and progress. The exposition celebrated the machine-age aesthetic, as did other exhibitions, most notably Machine Art (1929) at the Museum of Modern Art.

Douglas, Aaron (1899–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Tribal Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist and educator often referred to as the father of "Black Art." He was a leading figure of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas is best known for his work of the 1920s and 1930s, which featured abstracted silhouettes combined with African tribal art and ancient Egyptian profile heads. European artists like Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso had been influenced by African tribal art for decades, but Douglas was among the first African American artists to blend African art with modern abstraction. Douglas produced illustrations for such magazines as The Crisis, Survey Graphic and Opportunity along with co-founding the short-lived Fire!! A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. He also illustrated books by several well-known literary figures, including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He is recognized for several public murals, including the Birth o’ the Blues at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Evolution of Negro Dance at the Harlem YMCA, and Aspects of Negro Life at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. As a professor of fine art Douglas encouraged generations of African American artists to create their own modern Black aesthetic.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document