Reich, Lilly (1885–1947)

Author(s):  
Carla Cesare

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.

Leonardo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Eskilson

The most successful early-20th-century artist of colored light in the United States was undoubtedly Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968). In the 1920s, his “Lumia” compositions were praised by art critics and performed throughout the U.S. After initially embracing a musical analogy to explain Lumia, in the early 1930s he shifted to an analogy based on painting. In pursuit of this new context, Wilfred sought to legitimize Lumia through a relationship with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His career is emblematic of the difficulties inherent in the creation of art using technology early in the 20th century, years before the postmodern embrace of pluralism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caterina Albano

The analogy of the exhibition as an experiment suggests innovative curatorial approaches that challenge institutional practices. This analogy has however a historical precedence in modernism when it became paradigmatic of the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1940s, defining the curatorial approach of its founding director Alfred J Barr. This article considers this early use of the analogy of the exhibition as an experiment and further reflects on its redefinition at the turn of the 20th century by examining how both the notions of the exhibition and of the experiment have changed over time. In particular, the article examines the different meanings and practices inferred by the concepts of the exhibition and the experiment in the first decades of the 20th century and in the present. It outlines how correspondences between cultural and scientific paradigms can be deployed to tease unacknowledged synergies between two modes of knowledge production (i.e. the art exhibition and the experiment) and address questions of presentness, authority and legitimacy that they imply.


Author(s):  
Carlos Montes Serrano ◽  
David Durántez Stolle

<div>Between 16 September 1947 and 25 January 1948 the Museum of Modern Art of New York hosted a Mies van der Rohe exhibition. This exhibition was made up of photo-murals, collages, drawings and photographs of his buildings. In addition; five scale models of commissions received in the United States and some of his pieces of furniture were on display. This article will study the graphical works selected by Mies and how they were laid out in the exhibition area, so as to enable the reproduction in the form of computer recreations of the spatial impressions received by visitors going around the site.</div>


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 277-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Powers

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.


2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-44
Author(s):  
Simon Ford

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Jacqueline H. Rider

Organized in 1887 by religious, financial, and social leaders in Manhattan, the Church Club of New York holds a library of some 1,500 volumes. It documents the religious roots and theological framework of New York’s financial elite, the birth of the Episcopal Church, and mainline American Protestantism’s reaction to the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century. This essay discusses how titles illustrate the challenges these gentlemen confronted to their roles and their church’s identity in a rapidly changing society. Industrialization, modernization, immigration were all affecting their personal, professional, and spiritual lives.  It also reflects on how the collection as a whole mirrors the evolution of one sector of 20th century American culture.


Author(s):  
Maya Bielinski

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.


Author(s):  
James King

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.


Author(s):  
Allan R. Ellenberger

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.


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