MoMA
Posts tagged ‘Kazimir Malevich’
January 30, 2014  |  Collection & Exhibitions
New in the Galleries: The Russian Avant-Garde
A view of Russian avant-garde works in MoMA's fifth-floor Painting and Sculpture Galleries

Installation view of the fifth-floor Alfred H. Barr Painting and Sculpture Galleries, The Museum of Modern Art, summer 2013. Pictured are works by from left to right Kazimir Malevich, [at far left], El Lissitzky, Vasily Ermilov, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Photo: John Wronn]

MoMA’s collection galleries are always changing. When the Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly exhibition closed this past summer in one of the fifth-floor galleries, the Department of Painting and Sculpture had a chance to use that space to conceive a new installation of Russian art from the Museum’s collection.

Frustrated? Confused? Have More Questions than Answers? Great!

A MoMA visitor examines Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. (New York, 1951 [third version, after lost original of 1913]. Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp)

Looking at modern and contemporary art can provoke a lot of questions. Struggling to understand or relate to it is not unusual, and in fact many artists view those reactions as part of the art. Marcel Duchamp famously said that “the creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”