How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Museum’s fifth-floor Painting and Sculpture Galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, September 24), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.
ANSWERS TO THE AUGUST 27 CHALLENGE:
Over the course of the past few months the conservation of Floor Cake has been completed. We would like to use the next posts to describe our treatment and the results.
Before cleaning we consolidated any areas of flaking paint with Lascaux Acrylic Adhesive.
Lascaux was chosen for its low viscosity or ability to wick under paint and mattness upon drying.
We then found that a combination of cleaning techniques yielded the safest and best results. We first vacuumed the entire surface of the cake with a variable-suction vacuum set to very low suction. Then we began with dry cleaning to see just how much dirt and grime we could remove without moisture. Of all of our methods, we found rubber soot sponges to be very gentle and highly effective. We cut the sponges into small, manageable wedges and then lightly rubbed and patted the entire surface overall, including the drop and sprinkle, to remove an initial layer of grime.
View of the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum as seen from the Maquinho, the Museum’s Community Art Center. Photo: Pablo Helguera
In this age of facile and constant communication—when you can Google and search anything you need to know, and e-mail or Skype with any one of your colleagues globally—the question arises: Why travel abroad to research?
On a recent research trip to Brazil, I was reminded of the reason by the astute Luiz [Guilherme] Vergara, former director of the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum and professor of art at the Federal University of Niterói: “Geography is everything.” This he noted as we looked out from a community center high up on a mountain at the base of a favela, overlooking a breathtaking view of a bay and the Niteroi Museum, a superb Niemeyer-designed spaceship-like form. The museum and the center work closely in tandem in the community.
In this video interview, Franklin Evans discusses his installation timecompressionmachine (2010), in which he covered the floor and walls of the gallery with unstretched canvas, screens made of painted strips of tape, and old newsprint and press releases from gallery exhibitions. Composed of numerous overlapping parts, the installation gives the sense of a work in progress. Additionally, the ephemeral nature of the installation, which exists solely for the duration of Greater New York 2010, is highlighted by Evans’s use of materials that are typically considered disposable. As the artist puts it, his environments suggest “the not-quite-finished, the in-transition, the nearly-emerging, the slowly-evolving, the near-end, and the move-towards-erasure.”
Tabu. 1931. USA. Directed by F. W. Murnau
These notes accompany screenings of F. W. Murnau’s </i>Tabu, September 8, 9, and 10 in Theater 3.</p>
F. W. Murnau (1888–1931) made six or seven great or near-great films in his all-too-brief career. All save his last film were tightly controlled, studio-stylized works that (although they were beautiful and often moving) were thoroughly planned artifice. One might even use the contemporary expression “tight-assed” in describing them. His final film, Tabu (1931), however, seems almost the complete antithesis. Tabu is one of cinema’s simplest, most lyrical and masterful expressions of a despairing romanticism succumbing to the realities of a world from which none of us can escape.
Joel Sternfeld. Little Talbot Beach, Florida. September 1980. Chromogenic color print, printed 1980, 13 9/16 x 16 15/16\
INSIDE/OUT is bidding summer a fond farewell by taking advantage of the long holiday weekend. We’ll be back, rested and refreshed, on Tuesday, September 7.
From the entire INSIDE/OUT team, have a wonderful holiday!
Photo (and all subsequent photos) by Ben Prosky
“YES,” I replied, without delay, to the e-mail announcing MoMA and the AIA Center for Architecture’s last boat tour of the New York harbor in August. Having missed several tours earlier in the summer, I could not let this opportunity pass. Through Rising Currents, MoMA had not only invited architects and landscape designers into their galleries to present works responding to a real-world dilemma, but was now taking the public out of its galleries and into the areas examined as well.
City Lights. 1931. USA. Written, directed, and music by Charles Chaplin
These notes accompany screenings of Charles Chaplin’s </i>City Lights, September 1, 2, and 3 in Theater 3.</p>
City Lights is Charles Chaplin’s most perfectly accomplished and balanced work. It would certainly be on the short list of films with which I would care to be stranded on a desert island.
By 1931 the silent cinema was effectively dead. It took considerable courage to lavish two years of rather expensive production on a silent film (and even more courage with Modern Times five years later), but Chaplin felt he had very little choice. He correctly perceived that the Tramp would lose his poetry and grace if he were coerced into the leveling mundanity of human speech. He foresaw that sound would force him to sacrifice the “pace and tempo” he had so laboriously perfected.
Clement Greenberg speaking in New Delhi in 1967 at a presentation of the MoMA exhibition Two Decades of American Painting
In 1952, The Museum of Modern Art established the International Program of Circulating Exhibitions, which was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with the aim of sending exhibitions to museums around the world. The following year, the International Council was organized to provide long-term financial support to the program.
Amy Horschak: In light of MoMA’s upcoming installation Abstract Expressionist New York and the exhibition of many of the “AbEx” artists abroad by the International Program (IP) in the 1950s, can you comment on the often-made claims that the IP was, at that time, part of a CIA project?
How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Museum’s fifth-floor Painting and Sculpture Galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, September 10), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.
ANSWERS TO THE AUGUST 13 CHALLENGE:
If you are interested in reproducing images from The Museum of Modern Art web site, please visit the Image Permissions page (www.moma.org/permissions). For additional information about using content from MoMA.org, please visit About this Site (www.moma.org/site).
© Copyright 2016 The Museum of Modern Art