FIVE FOR FRIDAY: THE APPEAL OF THE UNAPPEALING

With our own New York Giants headed to Super Bowl XLVI (that’s “46″ for the non-Romans out there), many of us MoMA staffers have an especially severe case of [American] football fever. Hey, did you just roll our eyes at me? Look, buddy, you can be an art nerd and still know your Xs and Os. Read more

I bore myself (and many others, I’m sure) with how often I mention that I grew up in New York City and how much it’s changed over the years—also, did you happen to know about A and have you gone to B yet or eaten at C—and OMG don’t ever D at E because insert lengthy anecdote here. Read more

Halloween is my favorite holiday…by a wide margin. If we’re being honest, I might be a little too excited about October 31. Chalk it up to the influence of too many horror movies Read more

When I was an art major in high school, Paul Klee was my favorite artist—especially the fishy phase he went through in the 1920s. Postcards of Around the Fish, with its straight-up fish-on-a-platter composition Read more

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

Like every good New Englander, I eagerly await the start of the fall season and the bounty it brings. Read more

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection. Read more

By the time you read this I will be roughly 36 hours away from getting married. Not that I’m counting. Needless to say, I have weddings on the brain. To call it a momentous occasion is something of an understatement; recent political and ideological debates over the very definition of marriage attest to the concept’s enduring impact. And it certainly seems like a big deal to me. Read more

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

Even though there are advantages to living in this day and age—not dying of consumption or syphilis, transporting money in a wallet, rather than a wheelbarrow—I still fantasize about living in interwar Germany. Maybe it was far too many viewings of Cabaret as a child, but I’ve always carried an imagined nostalgia for the Weimar Republic (1919–1933): its loose social mores, the competing senses of optimism and doom, the passionate political struggles, and of course the edgy art and design. With MoMA’s German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse exhibition closing July 11, I thought we should have a look back at some of the great Weimar-era works in MoMA’s rich collection. This post is dedicated to Paul Jaskot, the professor who inspired my love of German art and design.

1. Unknown artist. Poster for Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin, Symphony of the Metropolis). 1927
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) lent a soundtrack to the Weimar Republic. This film, which MoMA screened in December 2010, portrays the life of a city mainly through visual effects and music, not narrative content. The impression it conveys of daily life in Berlin is dynamic, anxiety-ridden, cacophonous—and a helluva lot of fun!

2. Rudi Feld. The Danger of Bolshevism (Die Gefahr des Bolschewismus). 1919
This lithograph, included in German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, features a terrifying Death figure gripping a dagger in his teeth. The work reflects a common fear in the aftermath of the First World War—that the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia might spread to Germany, like a plague.

3. Marianne Brandt. Ashtray. 1924
The liberal Weimar Republic inspired a surge of radical experimentation in all the arts. Marianne Brandt was the head of the metal workshop at the German Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1929. The Bauhaus was a school, founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, famous for its visionary integration of technology, art, and design. This elegant ashtray from 1924 was based on pure geometrical forms, cylinder and spheres.

4. George Grosz. .a (recto): Circe .b (verso): Untitled. 1927
In this watercolor, also included in the German Expressionism exhibition, George Grosz critiques the ongoing economic disparities of Weimar society, in which the bourgeoisie could afford every pleasure—even the bodies of the lower classes. The unsentimental style of New Objectivity, pioneered by the likes of Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann, emerged in Germany in the 1920s to rival the utopian and romanticized sensibility of Expressionism.

5. Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932
Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway, an oil painting on canvas, depicts the interior of the Bauhaus. Schlemmer painted this work just one year before Hitler assumed power and the Nazis closed the visionary school. Schlemmer was among many Weimar-era artists persecuted by the Nazis for producing so-called “degenerate” art.

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

I’m no artist. For Father’s Day, I typically buy my dad a funny card, we go out to dinner, and I make sure to get in a hug. Not the most creative, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, right? Read more

Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.

Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of the summer season, and fiiiiiinally the weather around here seems to be cooperating. It also marks the resurgence of my recurring fantasy of uprooting my cube (yes, we work in white cubes, too) and dragging it out to The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where I’d be happy to work among the gurgling fountains, rustling trees, and beautiful sculptures. I’d be productive, I swear! [Boss reads blog post, rolls eyes.] Read more