Dome 2 at the end of the day. Photo by Pamela Popeson
If you can picture that moment in an adventure movie when the adventurers come crawling up to the crest of a hill to scope out what’s next on their horizon, then you can imagine the scene in Rockaway Beach as the MoMAPS1 VW Dome 2 first appeared on our horizon, which is to say on Shorefront Parkway and Beach 94th and 95th Streets, just a stone’s throw from the ocean and the former boardwalk.
Vincent van Gogh. The Starry Night. 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4″ (73.7 x 92.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
There is hardly an introduction that does Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) justice. It is one of the most recognizable and beloved artworks in the world, and for many MoMA visitors, it is the artwork to see—a celebrity perhaps signifying modern art itself. Yet despite its fame, few viewers are likely familiar with the story behind this unlikely masterpiece, one of the many nighttime paintings Van Gogh produced during his stay at a mental hospital in Saint-Rémy, in the south of France.
Now available for the iPad, MoMA’s One on One series offers a sustained meditation on The Starry Night by art historian Richard Thomson that sheds light on the painting and transports readers to the environment in which it was created. In Thomson’s engaging essay filled with vivid visual references and snippets of Van Gogh’s personal correspondences, readers can catch a glimpse of the artist’s complex inner workings and the thought processes that went into creating the nighttime scene.
Screenshots from Van Gogh: The Starry Night
What’s more, Thomson examines the physical circumstances behind The Starry Night, taking readers to the actual place where Van Gogh focused his attentions to the night sky, and highlighting the artist’s technique and style. Thomson also considers other artwork that Van Gogh may have seen at the time, placing The Starry Night in a broader historical context.
For more on The Starry Night, visit the iBookstore to download a free sample, and check out the other One on One series book available for the iPad, Rousseau: The Dream, in which MoMA curator Ann Temkin illuminates Henri Rousseau’s last major painting.
Completed window at the MoMA Design Store midtown Manhattan location
The MoMA Stores have devoted our New York retail windows to feature a very special little product, a product “big enough” to be included in the Museum’s own design collection. The windows include larger than life-size objects that flicker, move, and spin through the technology of littleBits, tiny circuit boards with specific functions engineered to snap together with magnets.
Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday. 1960. Greece. Directed by Jules Dassin
These notes accompany screenings of Jules Dassin’s </em>Never on Sunday</a> on April 10, 11, and 12 in Theater 3.</p>
Jules Dassin (1911–2008) had a circuitous journey from the Bronx to Broadway, then to Hollywood (starting as an apprentice to Alfred Hitchcock) in his twenties, and then being exiled from both America and Greece, accused of wanting to overthrow their governments. He had already made seven films before he scored a big success in 1947 with the prison film Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster. (It is noteworthy, I think, that Lancaster was so central to the early careers of such hard-bitten directors as Dassin, Robert Aldrich, and John Frankenheimer.) Following on the heels of Henry Hathaway’s 1945 anti-Nazi thriller The House on 92nd Street with The Naked City in 1948, Dassin re-established a genre dating back to D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley in 1912: the crime film shot on the mean streets of New York—in this case using over 100 different shooting locations. Dassin thus paved the way for directors like Don Siegel (Coogan’s Bluff), Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets), and Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City), not to mention countless television series like Cagney and Lacy. As critic Rob Edelman has pointed out, Dassin’s style at this time had roots in Italian Neorealism. Sadly, just as Dassin had brought the Mediterranean to America, he would soon be forced by politics to travel in the opposite direction. Dassin’s life would make a fascinating movie. While an aspiring actor in the Yiddish theater, Dassin briefly belonged to the Communist Party, resigning in 1939 following the Nazi-Soviet pact. This came to light in 1948, during the House Committee on Un-American Activities witch-hunt. Like Joseph Losey and Robert Aldrich, Dassin was forced to go to Europe, but he never fully regained the standing they did after things blew over. His 1955 French film, Rififi, provided a kind of role model for heist movies, as The Naked City had done for New York film noir. With Melina Mercouri, whom he married in 1966, he made Never on Sunday, Phaedra, the award-winning Topkapi, and three lesser films. The Fascist coup in Greece in 1967 caused the couple to move to New York, but they eventually moved back to Athens, where Mercouri became an M.P. and Minister of Culture. How authentic a vision of modern Greece is Never on Sunday? Could a Jewish boy who grew up in the Bronx do it justice? Perhaps one should look no further than the acclaimed Zorba the Greek, made four years later by the most famous of Greek-born directors, Michael Cacoyannis, and adapted from the classic novel by Nicholas Kazantzakis. Zorba was, after all, played by the Mexican American Anthony Quinn, whose career included virtually every ethnicity on the planet—though rarely Mexican American. You couldn’t get more authentically Greek than Mercouri, and it’s obvious that Dassin loves her and has come to love the laissez-faire attitude toward Greek culture embodied by her prostitute character. Movies have often been burdened with austere visions of the ancient world. The Rome of M-G-M, however, has given way to Fellini Satyricon and to television series like I Claudius and Rome which, while showing the otherness of the past, still show links to our contemporary decadence. Greece is still envisioned by some as old guys in sheets wandering around the Acropolis spouting wisdom before somebody pours hemlock in their ear, but my guess is that, for a reasonable price, they might shut up and allow Mercouri’s Ilya to do her stuff. Jules Dassin’s career took some odd turns for a political guy who started out as one of the fathers of film noir. One would have guessed it unlikely that he would make a sexy comedy with an Oscar-winning song. As Andrew Sarris put it, Dassin’s career “verges on the grotesque.”
Although there are a million typefaces to choose from, MoMA Design Studio chose to only use one typeface for the majority of The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition identities. Why?
MoMA Gothic typeface. Typeface designed by Matthew Carter
At MoMA, we are tasked to design roughly 40 different title walls each year to accompany a wide variety of exhibitions. To manage workload, we made the decision four years ago to have two-thirds of the workload “templatized” by sticking to one typeface—our house font, MoMA Gothic (which is based on Franklin Gothic)—for all collection rotations.
Left to right, top row: Nate Longcope, ashcan orchestra, Heath Iverson; middle row: STALKR, Toban Nichols, Maxwell Sørensen; bottom row: Yuge Zhou, Lawrence Lek, Alphachannel
Just one month ago, the PopRally Committee sent out a call for one-minute abstract videos, and we were astounded to receive over 800 submissions from participants all over the world! All the submissions will be screened this Sunday at the special Poprally event Abstract Currents, which is held in conjunction with the exhibitions Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 and Abstract Generation: Now in Print currently on view at MoMA.
As soon as the Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation kitchen arrived in MoMA’s sculpture conservation lab, we began assembling the various components to assess and document their condition.
The Young Stranger. 1957. USA. Directed by John Frankenheimer
These notes accompany screenings of John Frankenheimer’s </em>The Young Stranger</a> on April 3, 4, and 5 in Theater 3.</p>
John Frankenheimer’s The Young Stranger was very much a product of the 1950s.
MoMA’s celebration of the landmark year 1913 continues with the eighth in a series of videos highlighting important works from 1913 in the Museum’s collection.
Without question, one of the most popular works in the Dieter Roth exhibition Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing, is the seasonally appropriate Bunny-dropping-bunny (Karnickelköttelkarnickel). With Easter just around the corner, jelly bean eggs and chocolate bunnies seem to be everywhere, including here in the galleries at MoMA.
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