Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona

Chief film curator Rajendra Roy and I attended the 69th congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), in Barcelona, Spain, April 21–27. Each year the member and associate film archives convene in a city where the annual congress is hosted by a local FIAF institution

Taking monumental frescos to a multitouch screen, MoMA’s eBook Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Josè Clemente Orozco offers a fresh exploration of three great figures in the revival of mural painting that brought modern Mexican art to international attention after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20.

The Cousins. 1959. France. Directed by Claude Chabrol

These notes accompany screenings of Claude Chabrol’s </em>The Cousins</a> on May 15, 16, and 17 in Theater 3.</p>

When Andrew Sarris published Interviews with Film Directors in 1967, he could already write that Claude Chabrol (1930–2010) had “quickly become one of the forgotten figures of the nouvelle vague.”

I used to take dance classes as a kid, and I remember the first time I walked into MoMA I was struck by the gallery floors—perfect for dancing.

Installation shots of students’ Dan Flavin–inspired post-visit project

After seven years of working at MoMA as a school programs educator, I still treated Gallery 20 as a glorified hallway. As we scurried through on the way to the more crowd-pleasing Pop art in Gallery 19, I virtually shielded my eyes

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 Painting and Sculpture Galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers next month (on Friday, June 7).

In the March of 2012, conservators in MoMA’s sculpture conservation lab undertook a yearlong treatment of an original kitchen by Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier from the seminal urban construction the Unite d’Habitation. All of the kitchen components (including the drain!) were transported from Marseilles, France, to our lab in New York City, and reassembled for research and treatment.

After exhaustive research prior to conserving Untitled (Piano), it was time for reflection. MoMA curators and conservators discussed the difficult decisions ahead. We knew that Nam June Paik playfully changed his works with each installation, and often incorporated new audio and video technologies into his older video sculptures. Should we continue this tradition, or freeze the existing technologies at the moment of his death?

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light, published by The Museum of Modern Art

French architect Henri Labrouste (1801–1875) may not be an instantly recognizable name, yet he is one of the most influential precursors of modern architecture. Most well known for two luminous library reading rooms built in Paris in the 1800s, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (1838–50) and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1859–75), Labrouste has been long admired by both modernists and postmodernists for his innovative embrace of then-new technologies, like cast iron and gas lighting.