Philip Guston. Head – Double View. 1958. Ink on paper. The Museum of Modern Art. Purchase. © 2011 The Estate of Philip Guston

The 1958 Philip Guston drawing Head – Double View is currently on view in The Big Picture, the fourth-floor installment of MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition. One floor down, in the complementary show Ideas Not Theories: Artists and the Club, 1942-1962, the black-on-white composition appears again, this time on the cover of an album by the American composer Morton Feldman. Feldman—who was friends with many of the artists associated with the New York School, Guston in particular—featured the drawing on the jacket of his 1959 Columbia Masterworks release New Directions in Music 2.

Monika Grzymala’s work always pushes the viewer—it forces us to question how we categorize artworks, what they’re made of, and where they can be installed. Monika has worked with adhesive tape, handmade washi paper, and a diverse range of other materials to create large scale drawings-in-space— works that are grounded in the idea of drawing and the artist’s direct engagement with materials, but that expand into three dimensions, filling and shaping the viewer’s own space.

With negotiations for Mad Men season five underway and the return date still unknown, I’m getting antsy for a little Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in my life. One of the many reasons this arty gal has sparked to the show is the impeccable art direction. And I’m not talking about the advertising, though the show’s pretty good at that, too. No, I’m talking about those gorgeous design objects that define the modern work space of the 1950s and 60s. So on this Friday, I thought I’d take a step into the corner office of Don Draper with some of the works from our architecture and design collection.

FROM THE DESK OF DON DRAPER

Gyula Kosice. Escultura Movil Articulada (Mobile Articulated Sculpture). 1948

Next Wednesday, February 2, MoMA will present another iteration of Modern Poets, our long-running series of readings and performances in which poets and writers reflect upon modern and contemporary art and culture. This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century</a>, which explores the transformation of drawing, the potential of mark making, and line and gesture through diverse mediums. Taking the concept of the political line as a point of departure, we have invited a group of international poets selected by Chilean-born poet Cecilia Vicuña—who will also read from her own collection of poems—to share their reflections on this extended notion, as it relates to them personally or to the world more universally.

From left: Radford’s Details of Building Construction, 1911; Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926-27; Architectural Graphic Standards, 1941; Architectural Graphic Standards, 1951

It’s 1926 and, like Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, you want to design a functional kitchen. If you’re in the U.S. or Great Britain, you might then turn to a standards manual. At the time, there was Radford’s Details of Building Construction (1911). Then, five years after Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen, two underemployed architects created an expanded manual more suited to 20th-century life. Their Architectural Graphic Standards (1932) has been continuously revised ever since.

George Maciunas. One Year. 1973–74. Various empty containers and packaging. Above: Alison Knowles. Selections from The Identical Lunch. 1969. Screenprints on canvas. Installation view of both works at MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Photo: Jason Mandella

This week MoMA launches Instruction Lab in the mezzanine of the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, inspired by the Fluxus works included in the current Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition.

A scene from Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927)

These notes accompany the Abel Gance program on January 26, 27, and 28 in Theater 3.

Over the course of film history, there have been directors who chafed at the restrictions the medium seemed to impose on itself. D. W. Griffith established a revolutionary but enduring film grammar and enjoyed enormous success, albeit tainted by its subject matter, with The Birth of a Nation (1915). This encouraged him to envision the film fugue Intolerance (1916), which was too advanced for its time, too far outside the envelope for audiences to comfortably comprehend.

Matthew Carter's Walker

MoMA has just acquired 23 digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design Collection. Some are of everyday use, like Verdana; others are familiar characters in our world, like Gotham, which was used in President Obama’s election campaign, or OCR-A, which we can find at the bottom of any product’s bar code; and others are still less common, but exquisitely resonant, like Walker or Template Gothic.

Larry Rivers. Springtemps, from Stones. Print executed 1958. 1 from illustrated book with 13 lithographs, composition (irreg.). page: 19. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. E. Powis Jones. © 2011 Estate of Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

As a writer, more specifically a poet, I like to turn to art as a source of inspiration. The relationship between the written and the visual presents itself best in the form of collaboration, where both mediums can share the same space. Collaborations between writers and artists can range from artist books and performances to publications and series of prints. The current Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition shines a light on one of my favorite poets and well-known collaborators: Frank O’Hara.