Lam, Wifredo (1902–1982)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hartman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Trojan Horse ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The 1950S

The work of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam is internationally recognized for its blending of European modernism, especially cubism and surrealism, with the visual culture of Africa and the Caribbean. Lam is most famous for his paintings of mask-like figures and animal–human hybrids arranged in geometrized tropical spaces. These figures often suggest the spirit of orishas, divine beings associated with Santería, a Cuban religion that fuses Catholic saint imagery with the sacred practices of the Yoruba in West Africa. Lam’s hybrid figures engaged and subverted the modernist technique of primitivism—a technique that entails the appropriation of non-Western visual forms regardless of cultural meaning, as in the African mask-like faces of Picasso’s famous painting Les Demoiselles D’ Avignon (1907). With an intimate knowledge of Afro-Cuban cosmologies, Lam asserted that his appropriations embodied a kind of "Trojan Horse"—recombinant visual forms that challenged bourgeois tastes based on Western stereotypes. Lam’s most famous work comes from his time in Cuba, before he settled in Paris in the 1950s. The Jungle, created in 1943 and currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is considered Lam’s masterpiece.

scholarly journals Portrait of a state : an examination of The face of Minnesota by John Szarkowski

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica S. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1950S

John Szarkowski was a photographer for nearly two decades before accepting his influential curatorial post at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. He published two books of his photographs in the 1950s, The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956), and The Face of Minnesota (1958). Szarkowski's second book became a best seller in the months after its publication, but has received little critical attention in recent discussions of his photographic oeuvre. An examination of early correspondence, publishing records, and Szarkowski's own writings provides a framework for re-considering the significance of The Face of Minnesota, placing it within a period of innovation in the expanding field of photographically-illustrated books. The book is analyzed in terms of its roles as both celebration of the state and platform for the author's personal expression. The book's legacy is considered in terms of its reception since 1958.

scholarly journals Portrait of a state : an examination of The face of Minnesota by John Szarkowski

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica S. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1950S

John Szarkowski was a photographer for nearly two decades before accepting his influential curatorial post at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. He published two books of his photographs in the 1950s, The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956), and The Face of Minnesota (1958). Szarkowski's second book became a best seller in the months after its publication, but has received little critical attention in recent discussions of his photographic oeuvre. An examination of early correspondence, publishing records, and Szarkowski's own writings provides a framework for re-considering the significance of The Face of Minnesota, placing it within a period of innovation in the expanding field of photographically-illustrated books. The book is analyzed in terms of its roles as both celebration of the state and platform for the author's personal expression. The book's legacy is considered in terms of its reception since 1958.

Alive Still

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Village Voice

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

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.

Reich, Lilly (1885–1947)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Cesare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Set Design ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe

Lilly Reich was a German-born designer who created interiors, displays, and exhibitions in the early to mid-20th century. She was active in the Deutscher Werkbund and in the Bauhaus, and was the first female architect to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Reich’s career as a female designer has been said by critic Beatriz Colomina to be an example of the collaborative nature of architecture in which women have often played an unspoken role. Reich was one of the few female designers to have played a leading role in the early 20th century, yet she has gained little academic renown. As is common for female designers of the time they are often known in relation to their work with more prominent male architects or designers; for Reich, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was both a personal and professional partner. Reich, who came from a wealthy manufacturing family, studied in 1908 at the Wiener Werkstätte and then in 1910 at the Höhere Fachschule für Dekorationskunst in Berlin. Like many women of the period she focused on textiles, needlework, and fashion as well as set design and display.

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