How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works from MoMA’s collection—all currently on view throughout the Museum—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers next month (on Friday, November 14).

My favorite part of Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris is the moment when actress Marion Cotillard reveals her preferred moment from Paris’s illustrious past. Instead of being magically transported to the roaring 1920s of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein, she prefers the glamour of the Belle Époque—the riotous 1890s when the City of Lights basked in all its outrageous fin-de-siècle glory.

How does an artist approach the grand tradition of history painting in the era of late capitalism, a time marked not by great heroes and legendary victories but by systemic inequity and unrelenting violence? With Flying Carpet with Magic Mirrors for a Distorted Nation, part of a group of three “flying carpet” paintings that was the centerpiece of his 2013 exhibition From a Late Western Impaerium, Lari Pittman considers the heavy psychological toll of life under a declining empire.

The centerpiece of the exhibition Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, Matisse’s remarkable room-size cut-out The Swimming Pool returns to the MoMA galleries for the first time in more than 20 years. In this video, MoMA’s Department of Conservation shares a behind-the-scenes look at the process of conserving this beloved artwork, and in the text below conservator Laura Neufeld provides background on the project.

This week we’re gearing up for the highly anticipated opening of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs on Sunday, October 12. It’s not too late to become a member and “see it first” during Member Previews, which run from October 8–11.

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.

As a native of New England, I wasn’t aware there was such a thing as “leaf peeping” until I moved to New York about a dozen years ago. I guess I took for granted the fact that I didn’t have to go somewhere to see the leaves change color. Since I’m unable to get out of the city this weekend—which the Internet confirms is the peak of the “leaf peeping” season—I decided to round up some foliage from MoMA’s collection…

“From the branches of a mango tree, in its spreading shade on a hot May morning in a north Indian village, the bodies of two teenaged women hang”—Nivedita Menon

“Every three seconds, somewhere on this planet, a person is forced to flee his or her home”—António Guterres

“Violence begets violence”—Judge Shira Scheindlin

Design and Violence, an online curatorial experiment that explores the manifestations of violence in contemporary society, is a year old.

How do artists seek, find, or create inspiration?

As an artist/educator, I often find myself gathering inspiration for my own work from my experiences teaching in the galleries. Recently I have been thinking a lot about the nature of collaboration, and looking back to art historical examples to inform my own thinking.

Thinking back, I realized that the exhibition Dada at MoMA in 2006 was one of the first times this idea clicked for me. I remember being intrigued by how many of the exercises these artists were playing with over 100 years ago are still so relevant to the kind of teaching experiences I develop today. And after putting those techniques to use in my classes, I was also struck by how inspired I was as an adult to replicate and try out some of those same devices that had brought artists like Jean Arp, Man Ray, and Duchamp such a wealth of creative potential. I was impressed by how human these games made these distant “Artist” figures seem; by humanizing them their work became easier to understand and allowed me to layer some of their creative thinking and processes onto my own.

In my own work, I find it most inspiring to create constraints—mostly with materials, some self-imposed, some borne out of necessity —and work within them. How can I use what I have at hand, or can find for cheap, to realize a vision? Or when I find myself without vision, sometimes just playing with materials and making something– anything– in the studio can generate an exciting idea that then grows into larger concept and artwork later on.

 

When I was asked to come up with a Studio Immersion course for MoMA, I knew I wanted to explore these ideas with other adults, and experiment with how these forced collaborations, set criteria, and new materials might create an interesting dynamic within the class and inspire participants to expand their own practice outside the classroom. For one example, I love the Niki de Saint Phalle piece that was recently on view, Shooting Painting American Embassy (1961)—which the artist created by arranging packets of paint and food on a canvas, covering them with layers of plaster, and then asking collaborators to shoot at the canvas and release the paint—and that work prompted me to research other forms of playful, performative processes artists before and after her have employed.

The Dadaists and Surrealists fit in exactly with this theme of playful processes. Of course I knew about exquisite corpse drawings and automatic poetry, but, as I researched more, I was pleasantly surprised by the range of materials and techniques they implemented. Paint-based techniques were also used, such as Bulletism—a technique where ink is shot at a blank piece of paper and the artist then develops images based on the marks left behind. I can’t wait to get some willing experimenters involved with this!

This is just one example of many historical processes I’ve dug up for this course, and a few that I’ve created for us to play around with. So for those of you who might be thinking, “I’m not an artist,” or “I can’t draw,” or any other number of doubting thoughts, Mind Games will give you the chance to think like a Surrealist and let your subconscious be your guide. Break some rules and come draw outside the lines with me!

Class starts October 22. For more information, please visit MoMA.org/courses.

With its fully furnished interior space fitted-out in overstuffed cowhide, and an exterior clad in poly-carbonate panels Jimenez Lai’s White Elephant  (Privately Soft)  operates as both a free standing mini-building and as maxi-furniture.

Fall is in full swing this week as we kick off a new film series, restart our seasonal education programs, and open a major new exhibition. Check it out: