THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PLANS AN UNPRECEDENTED SERIES OF EXHIBITIONS EXPLORING THE RICHNESS AND VARIETY OF MODERN ART
17-Month-Long, Multidisciplinary Exhibition to be Presented in Chronological Cycles and Installed throughout the Museum
EXHIBITION
MoMA2000
DATES
October 7, 1999-February 13, 2001
CONTENT
In October 1999, The Museum of Modern Art launches a 17-month-long series of exhibitions that presents well-known and less-familiar art works in unusual juxtapositions and new contexts. An exploration both of the Museum's unparalleled collection and of new ways of displaying it, MoMA2000 provides a provocative look at some of this century's most compelling and powerful art. Conceived as a preliminary laboratory for the reinstallation of the Museum's collection after the completion of our new building project, it offers fresh interpretations of the premises, meanings, and diversity of modern art.
MoMA2000 will present three major exhibition cycles that focus on distinct historical periods: 1880 to 1920, 1920 to 1960, and 1960 to the present. Each historical cycle will be interspersed with works from other periods, creating a dialogue between various historical moments. Installed throughout the entire Museum, works in all mediums will be presented in innovative, multidisciplinary ways.
Cycle I (1880-1920)
The first cycle of MoMA2000, titled Modern Starts, focuses on art created from 1880 through 1920, juxtaposed with examples from later periods. Running from October 1999 through mid-March 2000, it comprises three broad sections: People, Places, and Things. Beginning with the traditional three-part division of subject-matter into the representation of figures, sites, and objects, the exhibitions trace the transformation and mutation of these genres. Each is seen as a form of "resistance" against which modern forms emerge, opening onto new experiments, techniques, and styles, in the pioneering period when many modern starts led to the creation of many different versions of modern art.
Modern Starts: People examines the great period of early modern figurative art, ranging from the figure compositions of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to the photographs of Edward Steichen and Ernest J. Bellocq to the prints of Odilon Redon. Modern Starts: Places considers the geographical sites represented in works of this period, including images of the French landscape by artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne, and of the modern city by Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger. Modern Starts: Things addresses the influence of the object--from Gerrit Rietveld and Frank Lloyd Wright chairs to Marcel Duchamp's readymades to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi--and of the representations of things, from Cubist still-life etchings and collages to advertising posters.
Each floor of this exhibition features an installation work by a contemporary artist. In addition, the installation Making Modern Starts, mounted in the first-floor Garden Hall Gallery, examines, via an in-depth appreciation of selected works, the multiplicity of early modernist visions and innovations.
(For a more detailed description of Modern Starts, please see separate fact sheet.)
Film Programming
As part of each cycle of MoMA2000 there will be an active film exhibition program in the Museum's two theaters. The program mounted by the Department of Film and Video as part of Modern Starts will be the most comprehensive survey of early cinema (1893-1920) ever presented from the Museum's Film Archive. In concert with central themes in Modern Starts, many of these films will deal with issues surrounding the human figure and gestural codes (people) and landscape in early cinema (places), especially in the Western.
These screenings will feature the enormous number of films from the period that the department has restored in the last decade, including many recently restored 35mm copies of previously unseen titles from our Edison and Biograph studios collections. There will also be several shows that highlight core strengths of the Archive, including works by D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Thomas H. Ince, Mary Pickford, William S. Hart, early PathŽ, and early slapstick comedy.
Cycle II (1920-1960)
The second cycle of MoMA2000 (title tbd) will run from March to September 2000. It will focus on the period between 1920 and 1960, when, amid considerable social and political turmoil, original visions of modern art were reconsidered and a variety of competing alternatives put forward. Organized according to principles of juxtaposition or montage of discrete elements, the exhibitions' individual installations will be devoted to particular artistic episodes, disputes, themes, traditions, programs, formal devices, or bodies of work. Some will concentrate on a single medium or moment; others will span the century, drawing on works from virtually every one of the Museum's collections. They will vary widely in scale, principle of selection, and style of display.
Among the installations will be a consideration of the sharp opposition between the utopian visions set forth by Dada and Surrealism, on the one hand, and by the radical abstraction of artists such as Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich, on the other; surveys of art concerned with war and of art that sought to persuade a mass public through political propaganda, social protest, or advertising; an exploration of the formal device of transparency in a wide variety of mediums; an experimental presentation of the photography of Walker Evans together with related work by his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors; displays of furniture and architecture that embodied the domestic ideals that arose in the wake of the two World Wars; and a reconsideration of anti-modernist modern art--vigorous conservative reactions to radical modernist avant-gardes. Several smaller installations will be devoted to such diverse subjects as the etchings of Giorgio Morandi and the tradition of subtly varied series in American idealist photography.
The goal of Cycle II is simultaneously to emphasize the richness and variety of modern art as it is represented in the Museum's collections and to evoke the dissenting goals, philosophies, and traditions that brought these works into being. To this end, an unusually intensive schedule of panels, symposia, and gallery talks featuring contemporary artists is planned.
Cycle III
The third cycle of MoMA2000, with the working title Open Ends, will (1960 to the present)focus on art since 1960, and will run from September 2000 to February 2001. This revelatory series of exhibitions will offer visitors their first sustained opportunity to see the richness and variety of the Museum's contemporary collection in all mediums. In anticipation of the opportunities for increased focus on contemporary art that will be afforded by the Museum's future building, Open Ends will assemble an unprecedented range of objects, images, and installations, from the miniature to the monumental, created and collected in the past few decades.
Established figures of the past forty years--Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, Jean-Luc Godard, and many others--will be represented by masterworks that have already become world renowned, while the Museum's continuing commitment to emerging artists and movements will be powerfully confirmed. Many exciting works by younger artists--such as Rachel Whiteread, Andreas Gursky, Gary Hill, and Mike Kelly, to name only a few--will be shown for the first time at the Museum.
Among the themes explored by this cycle's exhibitions will be questions of boundaries and their breakdowns. This will involve highlighting cross-pollinations between the traditionally separate categories of sculpture, painting, photography, architecture, film, and video, and also examining the tensions between local identities or private autonomies and a global culture, involving shared media imagery. The displays will showcase new materials and processes, and contend with challenges to familiar notions of originality, unique object value, and individual authorship. Contrasts will also be established between creators of new utopian visions, as in radically reform-minded schemes for new architectural environments, and other artists that, often in photography and film, have given trenchant expression to the dysfunctional failings of present society. The fertile new pluralism and diversity of contemporary art and its creators will be amply on view, as will numerous recently acquired works of special distinction, such as Cindy Sherman's influential Film Stills or Gerhard Richter's 1988 series of paintings dealing with the Baader-Meinhof group of radical political activists.
Examining a period in which the demise or viability of the idea of the "modern" and of "modernism" has been most intensely debated, Open Ends will show, with a bounty of acquisitions less familiar or even unknown to the Museum's public, the ongoing edginess of the debates in which modern art was founded, and the continuing engagement of this institution in collecting the art of our time.
ORGANIZATION
Each of the three MoMA2000 exhibition cycles is organized by a core group.
The Modern Starts core group is John Elderfield, Chief Curator at Large; Peter Reed, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design; Mary Chan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings; Maria del Carmen Gonz‡lez, Department of Education; and George Bareford, Administrative Assistant, Office of the Chief Curator at Large.
Cycle II is organized by the core group of Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography; Robert Storr, Curator, Anne Umland, Associate Curator, and Beth Handler, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture; Josiana Bianchi, Public Program Coordinator, Department of Education; and Carina Evangelista, Research Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Open Ends is organized by the core group of Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture; Paola Antonelli, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design; Josh Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video; and Lilian Tone, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
PUBLICATIONS
Illustrated catalogues will accompany each of the exhibitions.
TRAVEL
Selected elements from MoMA2000 will travel to domestic and international venues. Dates and venues to be announced.
