Erich Consemüller, Untitled (Woman in B3 club chair by Marcel Breuer wearing a mask by Oskar Schlemmer and a dress in fabric designed by Lis Beyer). c. 1926, Gelatin silver print, 5 x 6-3/4", Private collection. © Estate of Erich Consemüller.

Herbert Bayer, Design for a cinema. 1924-25, Gouache, cut-and-pasted photomechanical and print elements, ink, and pencil on paper. 18 x 24”, Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Gift of the artist, Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Walter Gropius, Törten housing estate, Dessau. 1926-28, Row houses, isometric. 1926-28, Ink, spatter paint, and gouache, on paperboard. 34 15/16 x 42 1/4”, Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Gift of Walter Gropius, Photo: Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Marcel Breuer, Wassily Chair, 1927 28, 28-1/4 x 30-3/4 x 28", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Herbert Bayer.

Paul Klee, Fire in the Evening, 1929, 13-3/8 x 13-1/4", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Joachim Jean Aberbach Fund, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Eberhard Schrammen, Maskottchen (Mascot). c. 1924, Oak and miscellaneous exotic woods, turned, coated in places with colored and gold lacquer, Height: 14-9/16”, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski, © Estate Eberhard Schrammen.

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932, 63-7/8 x 45", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson.

Anni Albers, Wall hanging. 1926, Silk (three-ply weave). 70-3/8 x 46-3/8", Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Association Fund, Photo: Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College, © 2009 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, sixth floor
Bauhaus 1919-1933:
Workshops for Modernity
November 8, 2009-
January 25, 2010

The Bauhaus school in Germany — the most famous and influential school of avant-garde art in the twentieth century — brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the modern age. Aiming to rethink the very form of contemporary life, the students and faculty of the Bauhaus made the school the venue for a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that had a transformative effect on the 1920s and 1930s and profoundly shaped our contemporary visual world. The exhibition brings together over 400 works that reflect the extraordinarily broad range of the school’s productions, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting, and sculpture. It includes works by famous faculty members and well-known students including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, and Gunta Stölzl, as well as less well-known, but equally innovative, artists.

The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with a cross-departmental group of MoMA colleagues, in the spirit of the Bauhaus. It is also organized in collaboration with a consortium of the three Bauhaus collections in Germany: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar, a partnership that has only been possible since the reunification of Germany. A version of the show was presented at The Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin from July 22 to October 4, 2009. The New York and Berlin exhibitions share a core group of loans, but have distinct curatorial perspectives. In New York, a rich group of approximately 150 rarely seen works of art from the three German Bauhaus collections join over 80 works from MoMA’s own collection to form the foundation of the exhibition. In addition, major loans come from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle; the Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and numerous other public and private collections in the United States and Europe.

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity opens 80 years after the founding of MoMA, and 90 years after the establishment of the Bauhaus. This exhibition is the first comprehensive treatment by MoMA of the Bauhaus since 1938. That early exhibition, titled Bauhaus 1919-1928, was organized by the founder and first director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and was designed by former Bauhaus student and instructor Herbert Bayer, and it excluded the final five years of the school under Gropius’s successors, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For many years, the exhibition’s catalogue was the vehicle by which Americans learned about the Bauhaus. No museum was more influenced by the Bauhaus than The Museum of Modern Art itself, whose collections were organized to include an unprecedented range of mediums in both art and design. "I regard the three days which I spent at the Bauhaus in 1928 as one of the most important incidents in my own education," recalled MoMA founding director Alfred Barr, Jr. in a letter to Gropius.

MoMA’s second major Bauhaus exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity for a new generational perspective on this influential school. In popular discussion, the Bauhaus is often used as shorthand for a timeless style of international modernism. In contrast, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity looks at the Bauhaus in its historical moment from 1919 to 1933 — the exact years of the tumultuous tenure of the Weimar Republic — and considers it as a vibrant school rather than as an artistic movement. The school was led by three different directors — Walter Gropius (1919-1928), Hannes Meyer (1928-1930), and Mies van der Rohe (1930-1933) — each the century’s most important architectural minds, but each quite different in outlook and philosophy. The school also occupied homes in three cities with distinct cultural and political climates: founded in 1919 in Weimar, the birthplace of Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, the school was later forced by local political opposition to depart for the industrialized city of Dessau in 1925, where it moved into the internationally acclaimed buildings Gropius designed for the school. In 1932, after the Nazis closed the school in Dessau, a small core of students and faculty tried to hold on in an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin, but the institution was closed in less than a year.

A full range of historical work is presented in the exhibition, including such Bauhaus icons as Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture and László Moholy-Nagy’s oblique angle photographs, as well as works that counter expectations, like Lothar Schreyer’s design for a coffin (1920) or Kurt Kranz’s project for an abstract cinema (c. 1930). Also included is the "African" Chair (1921), created by Marcel Breuer in collaboration with the weaver Gunta Stölzl. Made of painted wood with a colorful textile weave, this chair embodies the spirit of the early Bauhaus in its romantic experimentalism. The chair was presumed lost for the past 80 years — the only documentation available was a black-and-white photograph — until 2004, when its owners offered the chair to the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin. This is the chair’s first appearance outside of Germany. This historical grounding demonstrates the degree to which the school functioned as a cultural think tank for trying times; its diverse faculty of prominent artists, designs, and architecture engaged in a 14-year conversation about the nature of art in the age of technology, industrial production, and global communication.

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity is accompanied by a major publication. Featuring over 400 full-color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, it includes two essays by curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman that offer new critical perspectives on the Bauhaus. Thirty shorter essays by over 20 leading scholars discuss specific objects in the exhibition. An illustrated narrative chronology provides a lively glimpse of the Bauhaus’s history, and guides readers though important events, exhibitions, and publications.

The exhibition also is accompanied by a series of workshops, lectures, a music program, and a scholarly symposium. Bauhaus Lab, an interactive classroom space in the Museum’s Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, offers audiences of all ages the opportunity to participate in hands-on workshops on color theory, graphic design, photography, drawing, and other creative processes that were integral to Bauhaus practice. Ati Gropius Johansen, daughter of Walter Gropius and disciple of Josef Albers, conducts two special workshops on January 14 and 15 using Albers’ color and 3-D curriculum. A series of three evening lectures (November 18, December 9, and January 13) highlights the contributions of some of the women artists who worked at the Bauhaus, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Lilly Reich, and Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. The interdisciplinary innovations in design, movement, and performance at the Bauhaus had a great impact on the era’s musical vanguard. Several significant composers had ties to the Bauhaus and many others were represented in Bauhaus performances, forging a new language that meshed with the Bauhaus ethos. A concert on December 1 at MoMA features pieces by George Antheil, Ferrucio Busoni, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Arnold Schoenberg, and Oskar Schlemmer. On January 22, 2010, a closing symposium brings important scholars to MoMA and offers new perspectives on the international legacy of the Bauhaus. An additional symposium dedicated to Hungarians at the Bauhaus organized by Juliet Kinchin and Barry Bergdoll of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design in collaboration with the Hungarian Cultural Center is a part of the 2009 Extremely Hungary festival on November 20, 2009.

László Moholy Nagy, Nickel Construction, 1921, 14-1/8 x 6-7/8 x 9-3/8", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Oskar Schlemmer, Study for The Triadic Ballet (Das Triadische Ballett), c. 1924, 22-5/8 x 14-5/8", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lily Auchincloss.

Herbert Bayer, Wall-painting design for the stairwell of the Weimar Bauhaus building on the occasion of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition. 1923, Gouache, pencil, and cut paper on paper. 22-7/8 x 10-3/8", Collection Merrill C. Berman. Photo: Jim Frank, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Dessau, 1929, Overall 6-3/4 x 16-7/16", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc., © 2009 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Paul Sietsema. Ship drawing, 2009. Ink on paper. Two sheets, 50-3/4 x 70", each, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Paul Sietsema. Still from film Figure 3, 2008. 16mm film (black and white and color, silent), 16 min., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Paul Sietsema. Still from film Figure 3, 2008. 16mm film (black and white and color, silent), 16 min., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Paul Sietsema. Still from film Figure 3, 2008. 16mm film (black and white and color, silent), 16 min., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Paul Sietsema. Still from film Figure 3, 2008. 16mm film (black and white and color, silent), 16 min., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Paul Sietsema. Still from film Figure 3, 2008. 16mm film (black and white and color, silent), 16 min., The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Paul J. Sachs Drawing Galleries, third floor
Paul Sietsema
September 30, 2009-
February 15, 2010

The Museum of Modern Art presents Paul Sietsema, the first New York exhibition of the artist’s most recent body of work. Sietsema’s films, drawings, and sculptures engage moments in art history and various genres of visual cataloguing. Out-of-print midcentury exhibition catalogues, archaeological manuals, and explorers’ diaries all provide visual source material for direct appropriation and a more subtle gleaning of editing, framing, and presentation styles. This exhibition features his third film, Figure 3 (2008), and drawings related to the film, including new works from the series on view for the first time, and selected works from MoMA’s collection. Paul Sietsema is organized by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art.

Figure 3 grew out of Sietsema's collection of images documenting ethnographic objects from Africa, Indo-Asia, and the South Pacific region of Oceania. It reflects his particular interest in the ways these objects have been represented in different contexts, including anthropological photographs and museum displays. For the film, the artist reimagined various historical artifacts from diverse cultures and time periods as sculptures, then captured the handmade objects on 16mm film. The result is mostly black-and-white moving images that slip between abstraction and representation.

Sietsema’s Figure 3 drawings (2005-09), part of the same conceptual project as the film, create a similar tension between their physicality and the traces of their making. Many of the drawings were made with techniques adopted from predigital photo retouching and inkjet printing. The drawings capture a range of subjects, illustrating the marred surfaces of the artist’s workspace as well as carefully selected newspapers disrupted by paint splatters from the studio. Considered together, the drawings and film are an examination of the ways in which certain images are constructed and taken up into history.

Sietsema (American, b. 1968) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BA from University of California, Berkeley (1992) and MFA from UCLA (1999). He has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2008), de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2008), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003). He has also been included in a number of group exhibitions including Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2008), 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008), and Le Mouvement des images at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005) and a DAAD Artists-in-Residence Fellowship (2008).

The accompanying publication Paul Sietsema: Figure 3 situates the artist’s latest project in the broader context of his work of the past ten years and is illustrated with stills from Figure 3 and related drawings and objects. An essay by Connie Butler and an interview with the artist by Bruce Hainley, a contributing editor of Artforum. explore Sietsema’s unique approach to looking as well as the relationships between his drawings, object making, and film. Paul Sietsema: Figure 3 is published by The Museum of Modern Art and is distributed to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P) in the United States and Canada, and through Thames + Hudson outside North America. It is available at the MoMA Stores and online at MoMAstore.org. Paperback. 8 x 10 in.; 80 pp.; 50 ills. Price: $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-87070-776-6.

Paul Sietsema. Letter to a Young Painter, 2008. Ink on paper. 72-1/4 x 50-1/2", Collection Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Chicago. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Paul Sietsema. Untitled figure ground study (Credit Suisse), 2008. Ink on paper. 22 x 30", The Speyer Family Collection, New York. © 2009 Paul Sietsema.

Leslie Hewitt (American, born 1977), Untitled (Epiphany of Circumstance). 2006-08, Two chromogenic color prints, each 30 x 40”, Courtesy the Studio Museum in Harlem, Museum, Purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee, 08.22.1a-b, Image courtesy the artist and D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York., © 2009 Leslie Hewitt.

Daniel Gordon (American, born 1980), Nude Portrait. 2008, Chromogenic color print, 49 x 62 7/8", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fund for the Twenty-First Century, Image courtesy the artist. © 2009 Daniel Gordon.

Daniel Gordon (American, born 1980), Red Headed Woman. 2008, Chromogenic color print, 37 x 5/16 x 29 7/8”, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century, Image courtesy the artist, © 2009 Daniel Gordon.

Leslie Hewitt (American, born 1977), Riffs on Real Time. 2002-05, Chromogenic color print, 30 x 24", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fund for the Twenty-First Century, © 2009 Leslie Hewitt.

Sterling Ruby (American, born Germany, 1972), Artaud. 2007, Chromogenic color print, 64 x 48", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century, © 2009 Sterling Ruby.

Carter Mull (American, born 1977), Los Angeles Times Tuesday, August 5, 2008. 2008-09, Chromogenic process print, 49 x 37", Courtesy the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, © 2009 Carter Mull.

Sara VanDerBeek (American, born 1976), Composition for Detroit (detail). 2009, Chromogenic color prints, left to right, panel 1: 65 x 48", panel 2: 65 x 43 1/2", panel 3: 65 x 48", panel 4: 65 x 47 1/2", Courtesy the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York, © 2009 Sara VanDerBeek.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, third floor
New Photography 2009:
Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, Sara VanDerBeek
September 30, 2009-January 11, 2010

The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2009: Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, Sara VanDerBeek is this year’s installment of MoMA's annual fall showcase of significant recent work in contemporary photography. Each fall, the exhibition has presented significant bodies of contemporary work of two to four artists. This year, New Photography has expanded to highlight the work of six artists, with some 20 works of photography. It is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Since its inception in 1985, the New Photography series has introduced the work of over 68 artists from 15 countries. The series continues to highlight the Museum’s commitment to the work of less familiar artists and seeks to represent the most interesting accomplishments in contemporary photography. New Photography has featured such influential artists as Robin Rhode (2005), Olafur Eliasson (1998), Rineke Dijkstra (1997), Thomas Demand (1996), and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (1986), among many others.

Explains Ms. Respini, “As the photographic medium is rapidly transforming, the artists included in this exhibition question what it means to make a photograph in the twenty-first century. Diverse in their points of view, these artists collectively examine and expand the conventional definitions of the medium of photography.”

Although each artist in the exhibition represents different working methods and pictorial modes ranging from abstract to representational, their pictures all begin in the studio or the darkroom and result from processes involving collection, assembly, and manipulation. Many of the works are made with everyday materials and objects, and use images culled from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, and books. In addition, most of these artists are active in other disciplines, and their photographs relate to drawing, sculpture, video, and installation.

Among the separate bodies of work shown here, relationships and contrasts inevitably suggest themselves. For example, Leslie Hewitt and Sterling Ruby make pictures from other pictures to examine the ways that cultural values and meaning are imbedded in photographs. Daniel Gordon and Sara VanDerBeek build temporary sculptures using found images, which exist only to be photographed. Walead Beshty and Carter Mull experiment with the process of making pictures to reflect on the fundamental characteristics of the medium.

Walead Beshty
(American,
b. United Kingdom, 1976)
Beshty’s monumental photograms are made in a chemical darkroom entirely without the use of a camera. The artist rolls portions of a single piece of color photographic paper and exposes it multiple times to colors of light (cyan, magenta, and yellow). Since the exposure process must occur in total darkness, he works blind within a set of chance operations to create brilliantly colored and patterned pictures. Building on the long tradition of darkroom experimentation in photography, Beshty reflects on the nature of the medium at a time when chemical photography is facing obsolescence.

Daniel Gordon (American, b. 1980)
Gordon creates temporary sculptures made from cut paper and photographs, usually found on the Internet. He cuts apart, fractures, and reunites fragments of completely unrelated images to create bizarre, whimsical, and sometimes disturbing new images, which take on a different meaning from their original counterparts. After photographing the constructed figurative tableaus, he promptly dismantles and re-fashions them into new structures. The strange and unnatural aspect of the works stimulates both attraction and repulsion. The hybrid figures are a deliberate de-canonization of feminine beauty and reconstruct the subject of portraiture. With these pictures, Gordon “misuses” photographic materials as a representational medium to question the parameters of traditional photography.

Leslie Hewitt (American, b. 1977)
Hewitt repurposes domestic and personal objects, such as plants, family snapshots, a Thelonious Monk album, and the 30th anniversary issue of Ebony, to create still lifes that intertwine personal and historical narratives. Although it appears as if Hewitt came across the arrangements by chance, each one is meticulously composed, revealing a sculptural approach to image making. In two works included here, Hewitt turns the orientation of the images upside down, subverting the illusion of a photograph as a window into a pictorial world. The play of meaning between the items in her photographs is sometimes deeply personal and other times political, often questioning the nostalgia that is evoked through family mementos and relics of the civil rights era.

Carter Mull (American, b. 1977)
Mull creates pictures through a process of rephotographing and altering existing images. The artist’s local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, serves as the starting point for the body of work featured in the exhibition. Mull makes a picture of the front cover of the newspaper, and at least two photographs that respond to that page, which reveal subtle connections upon close examination. Employing both digital and analog techniques, his resulting images burst with lush color and vibrating patterns, and draw parallels between the radical transformation of photography and print media in the digital age. Mull examines the language and meaning of photography in our increasingly image-saturated world by proposing new ways to imagine its future.

Sterling Ruby
(American, b. Germany, 1972)
Ruby collects, reuses, and manipulates existing images to make digitally constructed photographic collages. He addresses ideas of violence, aggression, and social control through a diverse artistic practice that includes sculpture, painting, and drawing. His works often incorporate graffiti and elements of urban decay to evoke transgressive environments and activities. Artaud (2007) and Animal (2009) are based on graffiti found in the walkways of the Cinque Terre region of Italy, and in Venice, respectively. To execute these richly layered pictures, the artist photographed existing graffiti and digitally manipulated the images by adding his own drips and spray-painted forms with Photoshop. With a growing reputation for distinctive and complex work, Ruby mutates traditional forms and mediums to create new hybrids.

Sara VanDerBeek
(American, b. 1976)
VanDerBeek culls photographs from various sources — such as newspapers, magazines, and exhibition catalogues — and incorporates them into temporary structures that she photographs. A Composition for Detroit (2009), a four-part ode to Motor City, reflects on the country’s current financial state and the disintegrating fabric of postindustrial cities. The work incorporates a variety of appropriated images, from media photographs of the divisive 1967 Detroit riots to Walker Evans’s Depression-era photograph of a deteriorating Southern plantation house, reminiscent of Detroit’s abandoned factories. References embedded in VanDerBeek’s photographs explore not only the symbolism of the depicted images, but also the physical and cultural connections between them.

Sterling Ruby (American, born Germany, 1972), Animal. 2009, Chromogenic color print, 72 x 48", Private Collection, Image courtesy the artist. © 2009 Sterling Ruby.

Walead Beshty (American, born England, 1976), Three Color Curl (CMY: Irvine, California, August 24th 2008, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C). 2008, Color photographic paper, 50 x 97", Collection of Mara and Javier Mendez, Puerto Rico, Image courtesy the artist and Wallspace, New York, © 2009 Walead Beshty.

Meret Oppenheim, Swiss, 1913-1985, Object. Paris 1936, Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon. Cup 4-3/8" in diameter; saucer 9-3/8" in diameter; spoon 8" long, overall height 2-7/8", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pro Litteris, Zurich.

Alberto Giacometti, Swiss, 1901-1966, Woman with Her Throat Cut. 1932 (cast 1949), Bronze. 8 x 34-1/2 x 25", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Joseph Cornell, American, 1903-1972, Untitled (Bébé Marie), early 1940s, Papered and painted wood box, with painted corrugated cardboard floor, containing doll in cloth dress and straw hat with cloth flowers, dried flowers, and twigs, flecked with paint. 23-1/2 x 12-3/8 x 5-1/4", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.

Marcel Jean, French, 1900-1993, Specter of the Gardenia. 1936, Plaster head with painted black cloth, zippers, and strip of film on velvet-covered wood base. 13-7/8 x 7 x 9-7/8" including base 3" high x 7"diameter, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. D. and J. de Menil Fund.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery, Fourth Floor
The Erotic Object:
Surrealist Sculpture
from the Collection
June 24, 2009-January 4, 2010

The Erotic Object: Surrealist Sculpture from the Collection, showcases 20 sculptures from the Museum’s collection. Works by 11 artists are shown, including Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, and Man Ray. Drawing upon the strength of MoMA’s collection, the exhibition includes a number of Surrealism’s most celebrated objects, including Dalí’s bread-and-inkwell-crowned Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) and Oppenheim’s notorious fur-lined teacup (1936). While primarily featuring works made in Paris, the exhibition also includes sculptures from the 1940s and 1950s by New York–based artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Cornell, who redefined the Surrealist practice of object making on their own terms. In addition, the installation includes periodicals from the Museum Library’s collection that document Surrealism’s fascination with the object. The exhibition is organized by Anne Umland, Curator, with Veronica Roberts, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

The poets, writers, and visual artists of the Surrealist movement placed persistent emphasis on the power of the imagination to transform the everyday. Beginning in the early 1930s in Paris, many Surrealists turned to object making with particular vigor, creating sculptures with a tactile dimension that are often explicitly or subtly erotic. Their practice was driven by their interests in such divergent subjects as the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the politics of Karl Marx, and the talismanic power of the tribal artifacts many of them collected.

The works are presented on pedestals of mostly uniform height in a regular grid pattern, emphasizing the rich visual variety of the individual objects. The word “Eros,” painted on the exhibition’s exterior wall, is visible from various vantage points, including the Museum’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. It is borrowed from the title of one of the last great group exhibitions staged by the Surrealists—the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, or EROS — which opened on December 15, 1959, at the Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris.

Alberto Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object (1931) is among the earliest works featured. This carved-wood sculpture is one of several key works by Giacometti that catalyzed the Surrealist vogue for object making. Its smooth surface seems to invite touch, while its threatening spikes render the object “disagreeable”—a characteristic typical of many Surrealist objects, which simultaneously promise and thwart pleasure. Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), a sculpture originally intended to be positioned directly on the floor, is another important Giacometti sculpture in the exhibition. With its hybrid animal, insect, and human form, the figure’s body appears to be simultaneously in the throes of sexual ecstasy and in the spasms of death. The drama and violence conveyed by this work, in which a woman appears to be sadistically punished, is a powerfully disturbing example of the misogynistic imagery frequently present in Surrealist works.

In contrast to Giacometti’s carved and cast works, other Surrealist sculptures frequently relied on uncanny combinations of found items and materials to create erotically charged encounters. One such example is Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, a centerpiece of the MoMA exhibition and a quintessential Surrealist object. The work was inspired by a conversation in a Paris café between Oppenheim and Pablo Picasso, who, admiring her fur-covered bracelet, remarked that one could cover anything with fur. Oppenheim replied, “even this cup and saucer.” When the Surrealist leader André Breton later asked her to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. In addition to its inclusion in the important Surrealist exhibition held at Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, in May of 1936, Oppenheim’s Object was one of the most controversial works of the landmark 1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, organized by the Museum’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Many other Surrealist objects in the exhibition include fragmented female forms, taken from dismantled mannequins and other sources. Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) presents a woman not only as an object, but explicitly as one to be consumed. A long, phallic baguette crowns her head, cobs of corn dangle around her neck, and ants swarm along her forehead as if gathering crumbs. Hans Bellmer’s Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace (1937) features a more violent fragmentation of the figure. Disparate body parts are connected mechanically by ball joints, which suggest the potential for endless perverse recombinations — made all the more unsettling as they suggest the physical traits of both a mature woman and prepubescent girl. As the exhibition demonstrates, the Surrealists rendered the sensory experience of their objects as much tactile as visual, and by tapping into the power of found materials they helped to redefine sculpture as a combinatory practice, a revolution in art making that continues to resonate in contemporary art.

Alberto Giacometti, Swiss, 1901-1966, Disagreeable Object. 1931, Wood. 6-1/8 x 19-5/16 x 4-5/16", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Private Collection, promised gift in honor of Kirk Varnedoe, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, Water Lilies, 1914-1926, Oil on canvas. 51-1/4 x 79", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Louise Reinhardt Smith, 1983, Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, The Japanese Footbridge, c. 1920-22, Oil on canvas. 35-1/4 x 45-7/8", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Grace Rainey Rogers Fund.

Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, Agapanthus, 1914-26, Oil on canvas. 6' 6 x 70-1/4", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Sylvia Slifka in memory of Joseph Slifka.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Michael H. Dunn Gallery,
second floor
Monet’s Water Lilies
September 13, 2009-April 12, 2010

Monet’s Water Lilies features the full group of late paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926) in the collection for the first time since the Museum's reopening in 2004.  The four MoMA paintings are a mural-sized triptych (Water Lilies, 1914-26); a single panel painting of the water lilies in the Japanese-style pond that Monet cultivated on his property in Giverny, France (Water Lilies, 1914-26); The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920-22); and Agapanthus (1914-26), the majestic plants in the pond’s vicinity.  These works are complemented by two loans of closely related paintings —Water Lilies (1914-26), from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Water-Lilies, Reflections of Weeping Willows (c. 1918), from a private collection on extended loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Monet’s Water Lilies is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

Monet devoted the last 25 years of his life to the portrayal of the pond and its surroundings in Giverny.  By the 1910s, his work centered on the creation of large-scale panels of the water lilies, a group of which he would donate to the French state for permanent installation in the Orangerie in Paris. After Monet's death, many of these last works remained in his studio, left under the care of the artist's son.  But for two decades art historians and collectors reserved their interest for his earlier Impressionist work.  The work of the 1910s and 1920s was regarded as far too unstructured, and much of the work left in the studio was considered unfinished.

After the end of World War II, a sudden turnabout occurred, and keen attention was focused on Monet's last paintings.  In a quintessential case of contemporary art transforming attitudes toward earlier art history, the large scale and gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism illuminated the late Monet as a predecessor of great relevance. In 1955 MoMA became the first public collection in the United States to acquire one of Monet's large-scale Water Lilies compositions.  Since then, the history of their reception has been intertwined with the history of the Museum, both because of the water lilies' importance for scores of contemporary artists, and for the beloved position they hold for the general audience.

The exhibition is accompanied by a small publication by Ann Temkin, with Nora Lawrence, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, that recounts the history of Monet's late works at MoMA, and focuses on their resonance with the art and artists of our time. Claude Monet: Water Lilies is published by The Museum of Modern Art and will be available at MoMA Stores and online at www.momastore.org. It is distributed to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P) in the United States and Canada, and through Thames + Hudson outside North America. Paperback, 6” x 8” / 52 pages / 40 illustrations. Price: $12.95.

Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926, Water Lilies, 1914-1926, Oil on canvas. 6' 6-1/2 x 19' 7-1/2", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.