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.

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.

Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Archino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Constantin Brancusi

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.

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.

Sabri, Atta (1912–1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Renee Floyd
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
National Museum ◽  
World War ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Plastic Arts ◽  
Modern Artists

Born in Kirkuk, Iraq, Atta Sabri was among the pioneer generation of Iraqi modern artists with careers peaking in the mid-20th century. He was an active exhibitor and participant in several burgeoning art groups. After being educated and employed as a teacher in Baghdad, Sabri joined many of his peers in studying art abroad, first in Rome at the Accademia di Belle Arti and then, after World War II, in London at Goldsmith College and the Slade School. During the years of the war, Sabri held a job at the Department of Antiquities in Baghdad. After completing his studies, the artists again took up teaching this time at the Baghdadi Institute of Fine Art. Over the course of his career, Sabri became a founding member of the Society of the Friends of Art and a member of the Society of Iraqi Plastic Arts. His exhibition record includes the seminal Industrial and Agricultural Fair in 1931 and the 1950 First Iraqi Art Show in London. Sabri also exhibited extensively at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad and in 1979 the museum held a retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document