Installation view of entrance to Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde at The Museum of Modern Art, November 19, 2012–February 25, 2013. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
Fluxus currents flow throughout the exhibition Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, not only in the graphic scores discussed in my last blog post, but also in a section devoted to the experimental art collective Hi Red Center.
Piet Mondrian. Chrysanthemum. 1906. Charcoal on paper, 14 1/4 x 9 5/8″ (36.2 x 24.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Bartos
Among the groundbreaking artists included in the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, currently on view in MoMA’s sixth-floor galleries, are František Kupka (Czech, 1871–1957) and Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944). Like the other luminaries represented in the show, beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, Kupka and Mondrian jettisoned figuration and pioneered an art of pure form.
Noriko Ambe. Current—A Private Atlas: Gerhard Richter. 2009. Artist’s book. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2013 Noriko Ambe
Spider theme page on MoMA.org/bourgeoisprints
Untitled, plate 8, from the illustrated book, Ode à ma mère. 1995. Drypoint. Plate: 9 3/8 x 7 7/16” (23.8 x 18.9 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust
The Museum of Modern Art has launched Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books, a major website documenting Bourgeois’s extensive work in the printmaking medium. This site offers a range of innovative, interactive approaches to the artist’s work, including the ability to examine her creative process, and to place her prints and illustrated books within the broader context of her sculpture and drawings. When discussing the various mediums, Bourgeois said: “There is no rivalry…they say the same things in different ways.” All of these works explore her fundamental themes of loneliness, anxiety, fear, jealousy, anger, and pain.
In 1990, Bourgeois decided to donate a full archive of her printed work to MoMA. This includes all completed compositions, as well as the many states and variations leading up to them. Numbering some 3,500 sheets, this unique collection makes it possible to reconstruct the artist’s step-by-step working methods. The website presents, diagrammatically, all the stages of Bourgeois’s evolving compositions and reveals the myriad ways in which she altered shapes, added tiny scratched lines, or experimented with vivid color, all in pursuit of a final vision. In addition, individual works can be examined at close range through a “Zoom” feature—particularly useful for studying prints—or compared and contrasted with a pioneering “Compare Works” mode.
Spider Woman. 2004. Drypoint on fabric, sheet: 13 1/8 x 13 ¾” (33.3 x 34.9 cm). © 2013 Louise Bourgeois Trust
The Louise Bourgeois: The Complete Prints & Books website is the work of an integrated team of contributors, including MoMA’s curatorial, digital media, and collection and exhibition technologies staffs, as well as independent web designers and programmers and the staff of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. My own involvement with Bourgeois began when we met in 1976. I have been a committed scholar of her work ever since, and a friend until her death in 2010. The launch of what will be the definitive scholarly resource on Bourgeois’s prints—aimed also at the general art public—is a source of great pride and a sense of accomplishment for me, as well as for the entire Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA.
Please visit MoMA.org/bourgeoisprints to learn more about Louise Bourgeois’s prints and illustrated books, and her creative process.
One: Number 31, 1950 before treatment
It’s a good time to be studying and working on Jackson Pollock’s paintings. With projects also underway at the Seattle Art Museum and The J. Paul Getty Museum
Unité d’Habitation, Boulevard Michelet, Marseilles, France
In the fall of 2011, we traveled to a leafy suburb of Munich, Germany, to examine a kitchen that the Department of Architecture and Design hoped to purchase. When we arrived, there in the garage of a collector we found an assembled kitchen from Unité d’Habitation, Le Corbusier’s famous apartment building in Marseille.
Installation view of Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets. August 12, 2012–January 7, 2013. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Thomas Griesel
Polaroid Sunglasses. c. 1946. Plastic, l. 6 1/8″ (15.6 cm). Manufactured by American Optical Corp., Southbridge, MA. Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.
A favorite childhood pastime of mine was digging for buried artifacts of the Leni Lenape in my backyard. Another was making maps of the neighborhood. Neither pursuit was entirely productive in any real sense
We covered a lot of territory in our last post, documenting Echo’s condition and treating the discolored canvas. Our efforts have produced satisfying results.
In the Making alumnus and artist Sean Vegezzi interviewed at MoMA
In teen programming these days, it’s becoming pretty common for groups of museum-based teens to sit down with a big-name artist and conduct an interview with them about their work. And the reason that this is becoming a common technique is simple—these interviews almost always turn out to be pretty great. They give artists a chance to talk about their work in a new way with a new audience, and it allows the teens conducting the interview to gain first-hand knowledge about what it actually means to create art for a living. (You can check out our two-part MoMA Teens interview with Laurel Nakadate here and here.) The teen/artist interviews are more casual than most, more honest in some ways, and they tend to broach subjects that a curator or a critic might never raise in a more formal type of environment.
For the two videos below, we decided to flip things around a bit: Rather than bringing a group of our MoMA teens in to interview an older, more established artist, we brought in ex-MoMA teen (and 22-year-old artist), Sean Vegezzi, and interviewed him about his work. We wanted to shine some light onto the artistic projects that our In the Making alumni are working on these days, and to create a platform that increases the visibility of vibrant, gutsy, emerging artists like Sean. As you can see from the video, the philosophies surrounding his work and his artistic process are just as complex and well thought out as those of his older, more established peers and his recent book of photography, I Don’t Warna Grow Up, holds its own against anything else that’s being released these days.
In Part 1 of the video, we talk to Sean about his experiences growing up in NYC and his time spent exploring the city’s underbelly with the group of young men whose nocturnal (and mostly illegal) adventures make up the artistic core of his work. He discusses his experiences growing up, the strange situations that creative adolescents can find themselves in, and the factors that led him to take his first MoMA In the Making workshop while attending public high school. Throughout it all, sprinkled between images of his art, Sean speaks candidly about the transgressive nature of his work, and how his multifaceted relationship with New York City has led him to create the art that he does in the ways that he does. (More info on Sean and his work can be found in a previous Inside/Out blog post here.)
In Part 2, Sean walks us through a selection of images from his book—sharing the stories behind the pictures, and filling us in on the adventures that characterize his practice and the characters who populate his world. It’s a fascinating look at a broad cross-section of New York City youth, all of whom come off as both completely normal and yet absolutely unique—perfect examples of the type of self-motivated, artistic teens who find their way to MoMA’s free arts programming year after year.
Check out these videos and let us know what you think, and please find a way to support emerging young artists in any way that you can.
A special party for In the Making + MoMA Teens alumni will be taking place in the Louis B. & Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Center the night of Friday, December 14, with food, drink, raffle prizes, interactive art by Babycastles, a live musical performance by SUPERCUTE!, and a special screening of John Favreau’s Elf. For more information, e-mail [email protected] Spring 2013 In the Making course applications are available now.
Special thanks to Sean Vegezzi for sitting down with us and talking about his life, Fourteen-Nineteen, and Ratking for supplying the music.
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