The Jackknife Man. 1920. USA. Directed by King Vidor

These notes accompany the screening of More Competition: Neilan and Vidor on December 9, 10, and 11 in Theater 3.

Marshall “Mickey” Neilan (1891–1958) was an archetypal example of a squandered talent, managing to cling to a twenty-plus-year directorial career before finally giving in to the allures of alcohol. (Many of the great directors suffered from this problem, but only John Ford seemed to control it by generally restricting his benders to between-film breaks.) Blanche Sweet, who had the “honor” of being married to Neilan, and whom he directed in The Sporting Venus (1925), told me a horror story about coming home to her brand new house and finding Mickey, John Barrymore, and other pals competing to see who could spit the most tobacco onto the ceiling. The “boy wonder” was essentially unemployable for the last twenty years of his life.

A young participant in an educational program at MoMA, 1951

Is a museum solely a place to revere the creative work of artists included in exhibitions, or can it be a nexus for exploring and fostering personal creativity by participating in art making? This is a question I ponder often, and a salient question in light of MoMA’s early history.

When I began as deputy director for education at MoMA three years ago, I was amazed by the number of people who would regale me with stories about their early experiences making art at MoMA. The stories were filled with passion and detail that spoke of a deep and abiding sense of kinship with MoMA as a place of personal learning and inspiration.

Visitors Jeff Hnilicka and Sarah Sandman talk about the importance of creativity exercises at a recent Bauhaus Lab workshop.

We recently paid a visit to MoMA’s Bauhaus Lab as one of the free art-making workshops was concluding. There, we met two stragglers, Jeff and Sarah, who spoke to us as they continued tinkering with their creative constructions. Two young artists, they were exploring form, texture, color and improvisation in this workshop based on the practices of Paul Klee and Johannes Itten.

What brings you to this workshop today?

Jeff: Well, we’re actually artists. We’re part of a collective called Hit Factorie. There’s about twenty of us working collaboratively in Brooklyn. They [the Bauhaus artists] were masters of collaboration, and we wanted to learn from that. We’re really interested in these ideas of collectivism and immediacy.

A holiday card created by Robert Indiana (from his LOVE screenprint) was popular in the late 1960s.

Every year since 1954, we have introduced a new line of holiday cards created by artists and designers from around the world. MoMA’s holiday card program was initiated by the Museum’s Junior Council affiliate group, which was founded five years earlier as a way to “bring together a group of younger people who have…a desire to see the [arts] fostered soundly and liberally.” (The Junior Council subsequently evolved into MoMA’s Contemporary Arts Council.)

A couple weeks back we previewed the Tim Burton exhibition site. Now that you’ve seen the initial directions that Big Spaceship proposed for the site, let’s see how they created the final product.

Process sketch from Big Spaceship

Frida Kahlo. Fulang-Chang and I. 1937

When curators Leah Dickerman, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and I began to discuss our plans for creating a new gallery dedicated to Mexican Modernist art made in the 1930s and 1940s—which opened in May of this year—Frida Kahlo’s Fulang-Chang and I was one of the works we were determined to include. We were intent not only to show the painting, but also to display it alongside the mirror that Kahlo made to accompany it, for reasons I’ll elaborate on a bit later.

Sleepy Hollow. 1999. USA. Directed by Tim Burton. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Whenever Ron (Magliozzi, my co-organizer) recounts his “eureka” moment that spurred him to curate an exhibition on the work of Tim Burton—while watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on a Sunday in 2005, as described in Ron’s first Burton post—it always takes me back to that Monday, when he excitedly approached my desk to chat about his weekend. The first thing he said to me that morning was, “You know who we should do next? Tim Burton!”

Like many of the works in New Photography 2009, Sara VanDerBeek’s photographs are made entirely in the studio. She collects pictures from various sources, including art history books, archives, magazines, and newspapers, and incorporates them into sculptures that are made only to be photographed. After Sara photographs her sculptures, they are immediately dismantled, and her picture is the only remaining evidence of the temporary structure.

A back-to-school energy is percolating through the hallways of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the historic public school building that serves as home to the interdisciplinary architecture-in-residence teams working on MoMA’s Rising Currents workshop and exhibition. In just two weeks the galleries have been transformed into research laboratories, and design strategies are quickly emerging amidst studio work, model building, site visits, collaborative consultations, visiting lectures, and pinup reviews. Below, each team weighs in on their site work to date.

These notes accompany the screening of D. W. Griffith’s Competitors: Ince and DeMille on December 2, 3, and 4 in Theater 3.

By the early 1910s there was a general awareness among film people that D. W. Griffith had brought something new to the medium and broadened the playing field. Rather than be intimidated, many ambitious young men who aspired to be directors followed Griffith’s lead—but also set out on their own path toward success. Thomas Ince (1882–1924) was one of the least intimidated. He shared Griffith’s experience as a not-very-successful stage actor who accidentally stumbled into the medium from which he would make his fortune. Unlike Griffith, however, Ince was highly organized and had a strong business sense. Twice he constructed his own studio, and he gradually fudged the lines between directing and producing, although he seems to have been highly adept at both. The early French film critic Louis Delluc made the distinction succinctly: “Griffith is cinema’s first director. Ince is its first prophet.”