Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014 

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC 
March 13 - June 3, 2015

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of the celebrated Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1924). In recognition of a lengthy career, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 focuses on the faceted mirror sculptures and corresponding geometric drawings Monir has produced over the past forty years. The majority of the selected works in this exhibition are from the artist’s own collection, and many have never been shown to the public.

MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN 

Untitled, 2012. 

Felt-tip pen on paper, 70 x 100 cm. 

Collection of the artist, courtesy The Third Line, Dubai 

© Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. 

Photo: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

Monir’s rich body of work references Persian architectural and decorative tradition, the mathematical basis of geometric forms in Islamic pattern, and Sufi cosmology. When considered along with the Guggenheim’s historical commitment to abstraction and internationalism, the exhibition offers a timely opportunity to examine Monir’s rich body of work in its own right and as part of an increasingly transnational perspective on artistic production and its reception.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal, where it was on view in fall 2014 before traveling to New York. The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and former Curator, Abu Dhabi Project, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, with assistance from Karole Vail, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for its New York presentation.

The Leadership Committee for Infinite Possibility is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Simin N. Allison, Maryam Eisler, The Soudavar Memorial Foundation, Mohammed Afkhami, Patricia and Alexander Farman-Farmaian, Haines Gallery, Yasmine Nainzadeh and Sara Nainzadeh, Nazgol and Kambiz Shahbazi, and The Third Line.

MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

Mirror Ball, 1973

Mirror on plaster ball, 19 x 19 x 19 cm

Collection of Nima Isham, Montana

© Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Photo: Filipe Braga 

© Fundação de Serralves–Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 includes early wood, plaster, and mirror reliefs, a series of large-scale geometric mirror sculptures, and an impressive body of works on paper, focusing on a sculptural and graphic oeuvre developed over a period of more than forty years. The presentation reveals how the compositional principles used by the artist during this period were translated into large-scale commissions, including a series of etched glass doors created for a New York townhouse in the early 1980s. A selection of previously unseen abstract works on paper produced between 1974 and 2014 reveals the central role of drawing as a conceptual foundation for Monir’s sculptural practice. The artist’s ambitious mirror sculptures, known as “geometric families,” which she produced in the last decade since reinstating her studio in Tehran, will also be on view. Monir’s prolific body of work is characterized by the merging of visual and spatial experience and a distinctive approach to abstraction, coupled with the aesthetic tradition of Islamic architecture and decoration, allowing for, in the artist’s own words, “infinite possibility.”

MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN 

Untitled, 1980

Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on paper, 63 x 44.5 cm

Collection of the artist

© Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1924, MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN attended the Fine Arts College of Tehran before moving to New York in 1945, where she studied at Cornell University and at Parsons School of Design and worked as a freelance illustrator for Vogue and as a graphic designer. These formative years in New York served as a sort of apprenticeship for Monir, who spent time alongside fellow artists Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and later Andy Warhol, among others. Notably, during her time in New York, Monir visited the Guggenheim in its founding locations and was present at the 1956 groundbreaking for the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed museum building on Fifth Avenue. She returned to Iran in 1957 and journeyed across the country, further developing her artistic sensibility through encounters with traditional craftsmanship. Indigenous art forms such as Turkoman jewelry and clothing, coffee house paintings (a popular form of Iranian narrative paintings), and the technique of reverse-glass painting influenced her work, resulting in a productive period of artistic discovery and breakthrough that culminated in a series of commissions in Iran and exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including presentations at Galerie Denise René in Paris and New York. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 marked the beginning of Monir’s twenty-six-year exile in New York, during which she focused on drawing, collage, and a few commissions, and also returned to carpet and textile design. In 2004, when she finally returned to Iran, she reestablished her studio there and resumed working with some of the same craftsmen she had collaborated with in the 1970s.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in her studio working on Heptagon Star, Tehran, 1975

Photo: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Italian Institute, Tehran (1968); Jack Kaplan Gallery, New York (1975); the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. (1976); the Iran American Society, Tehran (1976); Galerie Denise René, New York and Paris (1977); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2007); and Leighton House Museum, London (2008). Her work has also been featured in a number of group exhibitions, including the first Tehran Biennial (1958); the Venice Biennale (1958, 1964, 1966, and 2009); Gold, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978–79); Living Traditions: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, Queen’s Palace, Bagh-e Babur, Kabul (2008); The Power of Ornament, Lower Belvedere, Orangery, Vienna (2009); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2009–10); There is always a cup of sea to sail in, São Paulo Biennial (2010); and Jef Guys/Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: The world as seen through a Pelican in Plexi, Wiels, Brussels (2013).

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s works are found in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Several of the artist’s extant works from the 1970s are in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Major commissions include installations at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Dag Hammarskjöld Tower in New York, and the Niavaran Cultural Center in Tehran

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY

www.guggenheim.org

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, MoMA, NYC

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New 

MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC 

Through April 21, 2014

The Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to the legacy of the legendary gallerist and collector Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) with an exhibition of works reflecting the activities of her galleries in Paris and New York from the 1960s through the 1980s, revealing her remarkably prescient selection of the art of her time. Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, on view through April 21, 2014, celebrates the Sonnabend family’s generous 2012 gift of Robert Rauschenberg's Combine Canyon (1959) to MoMA, and salutes Sonnabend’s commitment to introducing groundbreaking art to the public. Some 50 works by 41 artists, including Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Mario Merz, Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner, John Baldessari, and Jeff Koons, are drawn from MoMA’s holdings and from other public and private collections, spanning a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and live performance. The exhibition is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture. 

During a career spanning half a century, Sonnabend helped to shape the course of postwar art in Europe and North America, championing some of the most significant artists of her time. Opening her first gallery in Paris in 1962 and her second in New York in 1970, Sonnabend displayed a steadfast commitment to exhibiting demanding new art. This interest stemmed from a deep curiosity. Sonnabend once noted, “I like what I do not at first understand,” and she was instinctively drawn to art that she considered “difficult to classify on the basis of things already known.” Embracing an ambassadorial role, Sonnabend was instrumental in bringing new art across the Atlantic, helping to introduce American Pop art and Minimalism to Europe in the 1960s and Italian Arte Povera to the United States in the early 1970s. In the ensuing decades, she continued to seek out and support work that reinvented the notion of what art could be. 

The exhibition includes works from important exhibitions held at Sonnabend’s galleries in Paris and New York, such as Jasper Johns’s Device (1962), which was part of the inaugural show at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. Also featured are major works by American Pop artists whose European solo gallery debuts took place at Sonnabend: Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Aloha (1962); Claes Oldenburg’s Tartines (1964); James Rosenquist’s Volunteer (1963–64); Andy Warhol’s 1947 White (1963); and Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #75 (1965). 

Artist Michelangelo Pistoletto helped introduce Sonnabend to many of the Arte Povera artists in Italy whose work she presented in Paris and the U.S. Pistoletto’s early mirror painting Due Persone (Two People) (1963–64) is included in the installation, as is Igloo Fibonacci (1970) by Mario Merz, which was featured in the artist’s American debut at her New York gallery. In the late 1960s, Sonnabend brought the first wave of American Minimalism across the Atlantic to European audiences, represented in the exhibition with works by Robert Morris, Larry Bell, and John McCracken. 

In the 1970s, Sonnabend sought out and supported some of the most noncommercial Conceptual, new-media, and performance-based art of the day. She grasped very early that photography and video were being used as tools in Conceptual artists’ practices. The exhibition includes Winding Towers (1966–97) by Bernd and Hilla Becher, a German artist duo she brought to America for their first solo gallery show in 1972. The following year she began showing work by John Baldessari, whose Throwing Balls in the Air to Get a Square (1972–73) is also featured in the exhibition. 

Live performance was a key element of the Sonnabend Gallery’s program in the 1970s. The exhibition includes Da inventare sul posto (To Invent on the Spot) (1972), a work by Jannis Kounellis that encompasses both a painting and a performance featuring a violinist and a ballerina, which was shown in Kounellis’s first North American solo show at Sonnabend’s New York gallery. Film documentation of Vito Acconci’s provocative 1972 exhibition, at which he debuted Seedbed and two other performances, is also featured. A selection of films and videos from Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films, which Sonnabend founded with Leo Castelli in 1973, provides a glimpse into this groundbreaking initiative to distribute moving-image works produced by artists associated with the duo's respective galleries. 

In the 1980s, the diversity of Sonnabend’s taste encompassed an array of innovations. She promoted the work of artists such as Terry Winters and Carroll Dunham and helped introduce German Neo-Expressionist painters to American audiences, giving A. R. Penck his American solo debut. She also took on a group of artists who would become synonymous with the Neo-Geo movement, represented in this exhibition by works including Ashley Bickerton’s Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) (1987–88) and Jeff Koons’s Pink Panther (1988). 

ILEANA SONNABEND BIOGRAPHY: 

Ileana Schapira was born in Bucharest, Romania, on October 28, 1914, the daughter of a prominent Jewish industrialist. She met Leo Castelli when she was 17 and married him the next year. After the outbreak of World War II, the couple escaped Europe and settled in New York City, where Castelli opened a gallery in their home in 1957. They divorced in 1959, and Ileana went on to establish her own career in the art world. She married Michael Sonnabend, a Dante scholar, in 1960, and in 1962 they opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, later opening another gallery in Manhattan in 1970. A voracious collector and pioneering gallerist, Sonnabend’s 50-year career helped shape the course of art in the 20th century. 

ILEANA SONNABEND - CATALOGUE:

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring the work of 41 artists who exhibited in Sonnabend’s eponymous galleries in Paris and New York from the early 1960s through the late 1980s. A biographical essay by Leslie Camhi, artists’ recollections of working with Sonnabend, and individual entries on the featured works provide further reflection on the legendary gallerist's taste and lasting influence. 172 pages, 56 color and 54 black-and-white illustrations. Hardcover, $29.95. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and available in December at MoMA Stores and online at MoMAStore.org. Distributed to the trade through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada, and through Thames & Hudson outside the United States and Canada.

The exhibition is supported by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund. 

MOMA

Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor

www.moma.org

Debanjan Roy, Aicon Gallery, New York - The Altar of Convenience

Debanjan Roy: The Altar of Convenience 
Aicon Gallery, New York 
Through February 1st, 2014

Aicon Gallery, New York,  presents The Altar of Convenience, an exhibition of new sculptures by DEBANJAN ROY. The exhibition is comprised of more than twenty masterfully hand-carved wooden sculptures of oversized everyday objects, all of which will inevitably find themselves consigned to the trash-heap of modern living. Alternately playfully irreverent and hauntingly solemn, these sculptures all ultimately speak to the ongoing social and ecological crises that continue to unfold not only in increasingly commodifying consumer societies such as India and China but on a global scale. 

DEBANJAN ROY 

Toothpaste and Toothbrush, 2013  

Wood, 30 x 12 x 4 in.

Courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery, New York

Debanjan Roy’s sculptural practice is first and foremost engaged in an ongoing process of articulating the changing social realities of day-to-day India. His previous cycle of works – the India Shining series – juxtaposed Gandhi as a central signifier of India’s modern history with incommensurably contemporary objects such as laptops and iPods to ask ‘how do we square India’s past with its present and future?’ In the current exhibition, Debanjan Roy builds upon these themes by using the traditions and techniques of pre-industrial woodworking to create a host of meticulously hand-carved sculptures of modern-day consumer products and their detritus - bulging refuse bags and discarded water bottles for example. The works raise questions not only about the ramifications of disappearing traditional craftsmanship and production at the local level but also about the environmental consequences, both regional and global, of the ever increasing mass-production of "easy-to-buy/easy-to-bin" products in societies with rampantly increasing consumer demands and little industry oversight. 

DEBANJAN ROY 

Garbage Bags, 2013  

Wood, Dimensions variable 

Courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery, New York

Aesthetically, Roy Debanjan’s work has its origins firmly rooted in Pop Art, taking cues from Claes Oldenburg’s impossibly outsized soft-sculptures of 1950s American popular culture and Andy Warhol’s uncanny knack for elevating everyday consumer imagery to the realm of fine art and high commerce. Contemporaneously, the works call to mind British artist Gavin Turk’s life-sized crumpled garbage bags cast in bronze, with whom Roy shares a desire to unearth the monumental in the mundane. However where Turk associates his commercially produced sculpted refuse with the discarding of personal histories, Roy’s hand-made objects channel the casting-off of traditional means of production while acting simultaneously as literal 

representations and metaphorical vessels for the ecological consequences of hyper-consumerism and mass production in still-developing regions. 

The exhibition’s title, a shortened form of the phrase ‘sacrificed on the altar of convenience’, clearly encapsulates these themes but also conveys the sense of ironic reverence one feels when confronted with these lovingly crafted depictions of broken and abandoned products, here given a second life as objects of art. In this way, the exhibition not only warns of the potential social and environmental disasters looming on the horizon but, through the resurrection of refuse to the realm of human appreciation, hints at the hope that things need not end in crisis, if half as much care and ingenuity could be dedicated to the end of an object’s existence as to its beginnings. 

DEBANJAN ROY was born in 1975 and trained in Visual Arts at the Rabindra Bharti University, Santiniketan and subsequently at the same institution for his MA. He is part of a generation of artists that has witnessed India’s transformation into a nascent global superpower and like many, is keen to interrogate this process. He has had solo exhibitions at Gandhara Gallery, Kolkata and Gallery Akar Prakar, Kolkata as well as Aicon Gallery, New York. Recent group shows have included Artifact at Gensler, San Francisco, Shapeshifters at Aicon Gallery, London and The Human Animal at Gallery Threshold, New Delhi. The artist lives and works in Kolkata, India. This is his second solo exhibition with Aicon Gallery, New York. 

Aicon Gallery, NewYork 
35 Great Jones St., New York NY 10012
Gallery's website: www.aicongallery.com

Robert Mapplethorpe, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Robert Mapplethorpe

Saints and Sinners 
Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 
Through January 25, 2014

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, Christopher Holly, 1980 

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

This December marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the landmark exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. On the occasion of the anniversary of that defining juncture, not just in Mapplethorpe’s career, but also in the larger dialogue regarding freedom of expression in the arts, Sean Kelly brings together twenty-seven pairings of Mapplethorpe images exploring the theme of Saints and Sinners.

While some pairings in the exhibition may have more obvious connections, others are more ambiguous in their associations. The fifty-four images that comprise Saints and Sinners, some of which have rarely been exhibited, afford the viewer an opportunity to find personally meaningful connections in the work. Mapplethorpe himself deftly subverted any moral implications by presenting his subject matter in an objective, even classical manner, putting the onus on the viewer to draw their own conclusions. 

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, Bruce Mailman, 1981

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait (1980) in drag is paired with a portrait of the french singer and actress, Amanda Lear (1976) – two unique depictions of female sexuality. The profile of a marble sculpture of Ermes (1988) is shown next to a vanitas-like composition of a human skull (1988); the former perhaps represents an ideal of physical perfection whilst the latter reminds one of the realities of mortal existence. Bruce Mailman (1981) and Christopher Holly (1980) are, in different guises, potentially perceived as either playful or nefarious – in each case the viewer is called upon to decide the implications for themselves.

Together, the photographic pairings in Saints and Sinners offer the possibility of seemingly endless personal interpretations of the work and a fresh perspective on Mapplethorpe’s practice and his fearless contribution to contemporary photography. 

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE was born in 1946 in New York. He earned a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media, mainly collage. The shift to photography as Mapplethorpe’s sole means of expression happened gradually during the mid-1970s. He took his first photographs using a Polaroid camera, and later became known for his portraits of artists, architects, socialites, stars of pornographic films, members of the S&M community and an array of other characters many of whom were personal friends. During the early 1980s, his photographs shifted to emphasize classical formal beauty, concentrating on statuesque male and female nudes, flowers, still lifes and formal portraits. Mapplethorpe died from AIDS on March 9, 1989, in Boston, at age 42. Since that time, his work has been the subject of innumerable exhibitions throughout the world, including major museum traveling retrospectives.

Sean Kelly represents the Robert Mapplethorpe Estate in the Americas.

SEAN KELLY GALLERY
475 Tenth Avenue - New York, NY 10018
www.skny.com

Tony Feher, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Tony Feher 
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York 
Through January 18, 2014 

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Encore, a solo exhibition of work by TONY FEHER. The show marks twenty years since the gallery, then called Wooster Gardens, first presented Tony Feher’s work in his premier solo exhibition in New York.

Over a career that spans more than twenty-five years, Tony Feher has defined a unique place in contemporary art by creating elegant and poetic sculptures and installations using familiar, everyday objects. Imposing order on these materials is an artistic gesture—one of collecting, stacking, arranging—that mirrors basic human impulses and long-standing art historical traditions. Feher’s post-minimalist, serial constructions are rooted in Robert Irwin’s reductive vocabulary, Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” and Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, which elevated objects of mass production to the status of art objects.

The artworks’ aesthetic character is dictated by the essential form, color, texture and weight of the original material as evident in Tony Feher’s shelves of bottles partly filled with dyed water. When glowing light filters through the colored water, the sculpture adopts the significance of stained glass despite its modest material quality.  Pairing an original sense of humor and wit with a controlled minimalist aesthetic, Feher accentuates and exploits these material characteristics to alter our understanding and appreciation of these simple objects and thus also altering our world view.

TONY FEHER was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1956, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, with early stops in Florida and Virginia. He received a BA from The University of Texas, and currently resides in New York City. Feher’s work can be found in important international public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

An in-depth retrospective organized by Claudia Schmuckli, Director and Chief Curator of the Blaffer Art Museum at the university of Houston, premiered at the Des Moines Art Center in 2012, and traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. The exhibition is currently on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through February 16, 2014, before traveling to the Akron Art Museum from April 16 through August 17. A fully illustrated monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. was published to accompany the survey.

Upcoming exhibition: Josephine Halvorson, January 23 - March 1, 2014

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. 
530 W 22nd Street - New York, NY 10011
www.sikkemajenkinsco.com

Barbara Bloom, The Jewish Museum, NYC - The museum collection in dialogue with the artist

As it were … So to speak. A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom
The Jewish Museum, New York, USA 
Through August 4, 2013

BARBARA BLOOM has devoted her career to questioning the ways we perceive and value objects. With a light touch and subtle wit, she divines the meanings encoded in the things with which we surround ourselves. The Jewish Museum invited Barbara Bloom to create an installation drawn from its 25,000 works of ceremonial, decorative, and fine art. The artist presentation sets a selection of 276 pieces in unconventional contexts, and offers visitors new ways to view the Museum and its holdings. 

The exhibition materializes the idea of people in dialogue across time and space, inspired in part by Barbara Bloom reflections on Talmudic discourse, which takes place over centuries. Integrating the former Warburg mansion’s historic rooms into her concept, the artist envisions the space as both museum and home filled with imagined historical guests from diverse times – Nefertiti, Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Marcel Proust, Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein and others – engaged in discourse and argument. The subjects are wide-ranging and reflect ideas that have long interested the artist: inferring a whole from surviving remnants, navigating the intricacies of bestowing gifts, representing the unspeakable.

Furniture-like display cases contain collection objects that the artist finds intriguing or appealing. For example, Torah pointers with their delicate hands and extended forefingers stand in for strings inside a piano; a cigar box owned by Sigmund Freud is displayed in a psychoanalyst’s consultation space; and a Dreyfus Affair game board sits on a table with ancient Roman dice. Each tableau is accompanied by written passages suggesting conversations between people. These evocative juxtapositions of found texts, Barbara Bloom’s writings, artworks and cases, create unexpected associations and spark dialogue.

While the artist offers clues on how to read these tableaux, it is up to the individual to draw their own connections among the different elements. In Barbara Bloom’s vision, the objects at the core of the installation often transcend their traditional functions and stimulate new ideas. 

As she searched for a metaphorical structure within which to understand the collection, and sought to envision it in the museum’s historic rooms, Barbara Bloom became fascinated with the Talmud (a collection of Jewish law and lore) and its unique design. On each page, an original text is framed by centuries of rabbinical debates and commentaries that reach across time and space, as if the writers were conversing in the same room. In choosing works from the collection, the artist passed over familiar masterpieces and instead discovered value and beauty in those that she found peculiar in shape, historically resonant, or marked with traces of past lives. She was inspired by the architecture of the galleries, which still resemble the rooms in which Felix and Frieda Warburg once led a lively family and social life.

Barbara Bloom writes: “What if we were to consider objects not for their symbolic or metaphoric qualities, but as intermediaries, or carriers of meaning. Perhaps they could be considered as ambassadors.” She adds, “These rooms are filled with objects. And we are offered an opportunity not only to concentrate on the singular, but to observe the relationships between these many entities, and the meanings implicit in their positioning and combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other.”

The exhibition opens with recorded voices engaged in debate and argument. Six pairs of portraits – masked so only the sitters’ eyes are visible – are placed at the entrance to each gallery, standing in for the guests in this imagined home. They remind us of the dialogues taking place within. 

Highlights include the shell of a piano with Torah pointers in place of strings that explores the friendship of two great composers: George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg enjoyed playing tennis weekly at Gershwin’s Beverly Hills home. As composer Albert Sendrey observed: “Two contrasting giants of modern music…united in one common thought: to make a little ball scale the top of a net, as though nothing else mattered.”

Another tableau suggests the different stages of romantic relationships. Beginning with the sensuality of courtship, singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen and early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé are envisioned singing Solomon’s Song of Songs. Love is seen to run its course through legal consummation and dissolution as represented in Jewish marriage and divorce contracts. A section devoted to ideas of a library includes miniature books, some with microscopic writing, nestled inside hollow books. These evoke the layering of text within text that is an important part of Talmudic discourse. An intricate cycle of gift-giving and its Freudian implications are explored through Sigmund Freud’s silver cigar box, a Roman ring from his antiquities collection, and his daughter Anna’s ivory letter opener, all donated to The Jewish Museum by an anonymous analyst. Four players – Nefertiti, Emile Zola, Amy Winehouse, and Jesus of Nazareth – are imagined seated at a table filled with games from different eras. Many temporalities are superimposed on each other, collapsed into a single game. 

BARBARA BLOOM Installation View of As it Were... So to Speak - The Jewish Museum, NY

Photograph © David Heald

As you can see on this Barbara Bloom Installation view by photographer David Heald, in the former dining room of the Warburg mansion visitors can see a table set with twelve glasses from the collection, dating from ancient to modern. Above them hangs a chandelier whose design includes copies of the glasses, upside down, mirroring and illuminating the conversation below. This work was commissioned by The Jewish Museum especially for the exhibition. Further reverberations among works in the gallery begin with the painting Friday Evening, by Isidor Kaufmann, in which a lone woman is seated beside a table prepared for the inauguration of the Sabbath. The chandelier in the painting inspired the commissioned work. Above the fireplace, across from Friday Evening, hangs a reproduction of the mirror from the painting, reflecting what is in Isidor Kaufmann’s scene rather than what is in the gallery. There are many opportunities for takes and double takes.

Chris Mann, a writer and performer, worked with Sepand Ansari to create a new website, www.010011.net, in correspondence with the exhibition. It was launched on February 20, 2013. Initially loaded with a library of 1,000 texts representing a wide range of disciplines, the site enables users to search for an idea and make rich and ever deeper associations among the works that contain it. In contrast to Google, which provides a prepared answer if you ask the right question, 010011.net is a celebration of the question you are trying to learn how to ask. 

As it were … So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom has been coordinated by Susan L. Braunstein, Henry J. Leir Curator at The Jewish Museum. The exhibition designer, Ken Saylor of Saylor + Sirola, worked collaboratively on the visualization and realization of this project.

BARBARA BLOOM was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and lives in New York. She studied with John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts and is often associated with the postmodern “Pictures Generation” that includes Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger. The Reign of Narcissism (1989), perhaps Bloom’s most celebrated piece, recreates a Neoclassical period room in an imaginary museum dedicated to the artist’s self-image. She is also widely known for her 1994 permanent installation of Thonet bentwood chairs at the Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna. In 2008, an extensive survey of her work, The Collections of Barbara Bloom, was shown at the International Center for Photography, New York and at Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin. The artist’s recent installation, Present (2010), addresses the intimacy of gift-giving and explores how other aspects of a gift - its wrapping, its anticipation, its transfer from giver to recipient – can become just as important as the object itself. 

Support: This exhibition As it were … So to speak. A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom is made possible with endowment support from The Skirball Fund for American Jewish Life Exhibitions. Additional support is provided by the Alfred J. Grunebaum Memorial Fund, the Leir Charitable Foundations, and the Leon Levy Foundation.

Also on view at the museum is the first exhibition by designers Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh. Upcoming exhibition: Jack Goldstein x 10,000.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM, NY
www.thejewishmuseum.org

Henry Leutwyler Photographs of Michael Jackson’s items at Foley Gallery, NYC

Exhibition: Henry Leutwyler
Neverland Lost: A Portrait of Michael Jackson
Foley Gallery, New York
Through April 2, 2011

Neverland Lost: A Portrait of Michael Jackson, on view at Foley Gallery in New York, is an exhibition of color photographs by HENRY LEUTWYLER featuring the personal belongings of the late Michael Jackson.

As a portrait photographer, Leutwyler has always been interested in investigating the stories told by the artifacts that make up people’s lives. In 2009, Neverland Ranch was packed and crated in preparation for a public auction of Michael Jackson’s possessions. Leutwyler was sent to California to photograph the iconic studded white glove and spent three days sifting through more than a thousand items. In the end it took a second trip back to the warehouse in April 2009 to complete the entire story.

The photographs, many of which are staged on a simple black background, range from bejeweled costumes to a storage box lid filled with small Wizard of Oz figurines. It’s the simplicity of his artifacts that capture the life of the King of Pop the public never saw. As Leutwyler puts it: "It is said that the Pharaohs built tombs to reveal their lives to future generations. Michael Jackson sacrificed his childhood to the calling of his musical gift. Neverland was the pyramid he constructed to a lost childhood."

Swiss born, HENRY LEUTWYLER is an internationally acclaimed and award winning photographer. A creative force in Paris for a decade, he moved to New York City in 1996, where he lives with his wife and two children. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Esquire.

 

 

HENRY LEUTWYLER
NEVERLAND LOST:
A PORTRAIT OF MICHAEL JACKSON
Published by Steidl, 2010
Hardcover, 8 x 11 inches, 96 pages

FOLEY GALLERY
548 W 28th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001

2011 Season at Foley Gallery

Brian Ormond, IIIII, January 11 - February 19, 2011
Henry Leutwyler, Neverland Lost:  A Portrait of Michael Jackson, Feb 24 - April 2, 2011
Hikari Shimoda, April 7 - May 7, 2011
Edward Mapplethorpe, May 12 - June 18, 2011

www.foleygallery.com

The Talent Show at MoMA PS1 features works by 18 artists

The Talent Show
MoMA PS1, Long Island City
December 12, 2010 - April 4, 2011

The Talent Show at MoMA PS1 featuring works by 18 artists in the First Floor Main Galleries beginning on December 12, 2010. The exhibition is curated by MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey. The artists featured in Talent Show are:  Stanley Brouwn, Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, Peter Campus, Graciela Carnevale, Phil Collins, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tehching Hsieh, David Lamelas, Piero Manzoni, Adrian Piper, Amie Siegel, John Smith, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Hannah Wilke, Shizuka Yokomizo, Carey Young.

 

GILLIAN WEARING, I Signed On and They Would Not Give Me Nothing from Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-1993
chromogenic print mounted to aluminum. 16-1/2 x 11-3/4 in.
Collection Walker Art Center. Gift of Richard Flood, 2006
Image reproduced courtesy Maureen Paley, London and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

CHRIS BURDEN
You’ll Never See My Face in Kansas City
Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.A; November 6, 1971
Relic: ski mask
Collection: Gilbert and Lila Silverman, Southfield, Michigan

 

In recent years, television’s reality shows and talent competitions have offered participants a chance at fame, while various kinds of Web-based social media have pioneered new forms of communication that increasingly allow us to present our private lives as public theater. During the same period, governments worldwide have asserted vast new powers of surveillance, placing unwitting “participants” on an entirely different kind of stage. Against this backdrop, THE TALENT SHOW examines a range of relationships among artists, audiences, and participants that model the competing desires for notoriety and privacy marking our present moment. Whether portraying seemingly benevolent partnerships or those that appear to exploit their subjects, many of the works in the exhibition animate the tensions between exhibitionism and voyeurism, and raise challenging ethical questions around issues of authorship, power and control. 

For the classic 1970 MoMA exhibition Information, ADRIAN PIPER (American, b. 1948) installed a visitor’s book on a pedestal, providing a pen and the instruction to “you (the viewer) to write, draw, or otherwise indicate any response,” with the disclaimer that “the information entered in the notebook will not be altered or utilized in any way.” Visitors filled seven notebooks over the 11 weeks of the show with a range or responses, including political slogans, statements of rebellion and resistance, and declarations of love and artistic identity (“I hereby claim to be an included artist in this show as a result of my presence as justified by my signature”). Pointedly, a number of visitors wrote that they couldn’t write what they wanted because they were being surveilled.

Piper’s invitation finds an echo in London in the early 1990s, when GILLIAN WEARING (British, b. 1963) approached strangers with markers and posters, suggesting that they write whatever they wished and then pose for a portrait with the poster. Wearing’s Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-1993) gave her subjects a voice, inviting them to participate directly in the creation of their own image. Some 30 years earlier, STANLEY BROUWN (Dutch, b. 1935) had also approached passersby on the streets of Amsterdam, but he was asking them for directions. He later signed the sketches people helpfully drew for him as his own artworks, calling into question whether he was in some way misusing these drawings or taking advantage of those who had unknowingly created artwork on his behalf. JOHN SMITH (British, b. 1952) takes this one step further in his 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum, in which the narrator seems to direct the actions of people passing before his camera on the street.

SOPHIE CALLE (French, b. 1953), who has both stalked strangers and had herself stalked by a private detective, undertook a particularly invasive project in 1983 that provided a window into the life of an unwitting man whose address book Calle had found in the street. She returned it to him, but only after photocopying every page. Over the next month, she contacted people listed in the address book and interviewed them about its owner, publishing summaries of these conversations in a daily Paris newspaper. The ways in which these works model control and participation prefigure dynamics that animate a range of cultural forms that have proliferated in the past decade, as well as the concurrent rise in the collection and commercialization of personal information.

Two relics of early CHRIS BURDEN (American, b. 1946) performances offer a counterpoint to the publicizing of personal information represented by Calle. As part of a performance in Kansas City in 1971, Burden wore a ski mask during the entire duration of his visit. In another, he disappeared for three days, advising no one of his whereabouts or activities during that time. Burden’s counterperformances point to the ways in which people have variously resisted the coerced exhibitionism of popular culture, dropping out of society to go “off the grid,” and more recently, canceling their Facebook accounts.

Alternatively, TEHCHING HSIEH (Taiwanese, b. 1950)—who had illegally immigrated to New York in the 1970s and was living in fear of deportation—made a poster in 1978 in which he advertized his illegal status, and encouraged people to turn him in to the appropriate authorities if they saw him. 

A vague sense of coercion lurks behind a recent work by AMIE SIEGEL (American, b. 1974) that compiles and combines YouTube videos of many different people singing the same song. The singers—mostly performing in front of their computers at home—variously adopt poses and conventions from music videos, calling into question the supposed diversity of expression that such new cultural forms claim to elicit. An earlier form of the impulse that Siegel investigates is found in an ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928–1987) Screen Test that documents an unknown teenager who came by the Factory, one of only a handful of anonymous subjects in Warhol’s legendary project.

Several works bring the dynamics of viewer participation into real time in the exhibition space itself by directly inviting the audience to place themselves on view or watch as others do. DAVID LAMELAS’ (Argentine, b. 1946) Limit of a Projection I (1967), a simple theatrical spotlight illuminating a darkened gallery, is an implicit and alluring, if ambiguous, invitation. Similarly, those who elect to stand on the pedestal that comprises PIERO MANZONI’s (Italian, 1933–1963) Base magica – Scultura vivente (Magic Base – Living Sculpture) (1961) are instantly elevated to the status of art. PETER CAMPUS’ (American, b. 1937) Shadow Projection (1974) extends this performative invitation to the televisual realm, as visitors step into a spotlight, face a camera, and witness a sort of auto-eclipse of themselves. Through a simple construction, visitors’ exaggerated, on-camera images become visible only in the shadow of their real selves.

Expanding upon the questions begged by Campus’ installation, HANNAH WILKE’s (American, 1940–1993) final work, produced after her death, explores the space between our private lives and what we show to the world. Wilke, who died of lymphoma in 1993, recorded her life during its last two-and-a-half disease-ridden years, compiling more than 30 hours of tape that were assembled posthumously into a 16-channel installation. Partly anticipating the world of reality television to follow, Wilke’s moving work urgently asks why, and under what circumstances, do we place or find ourselves on view? Moreover, what do we gain from such exposure, and how much control, freedom, and dignity are we willing to give up in exchange?

THE TALENT SHOW is organized by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and curated by Peter Eleey, Curator of MoMA PS1.

The presentation of the exhibition at MoMA PS1 is made possible by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley.  Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.  The development of the exhibition was made possible by generous support from the David Teiger Foundation and Ann M. Hatch.

MoMA PS1
Long Island City
New York 11101

www.ps1.org

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen at MoMA, NYC

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Through March 14, 2011

 

MARGARETE SCHUTTE-LIHOTZKY (Austrian, 1897-2000). Frankfurt Kitchen from the Ginnheim-Höhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (reconstruction). 1926-27. Various materials, 8’9” x 12’10” x 6’10” (266.7 x 391.2 x 208.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Joan R. Brewster in memory of her Husband George W.W. Brewster, by exchange and the Architecture & Design Purchase Fund. Courtesy of MoMA, NY.

 

The Museum of Modern Art presents Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, an exhibition that examines the kitchen and its continual redesign as barometer of changing aesthetics, technologies, and ideologies, through March 14, 2011. Comprising almost 300 works drawn from the Museum’s collection, including design objects, architectural plans, posters, photographs, archival films, prints, paintings, and media works, the exhibition’s centerpiece is an unusually complete example of the iconic ―Frankfurt Kitchen,‖ designed in 1926-27 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and recently acquired by MoMA. In the aftermath of World War I, about 10,000 of these kitchens were manufactured for public-housing estates built around Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, as part of a comprehensive 5-year program to modernize the city. Schütte-Lihotzky’s compact and ergonomic design, with its integrated approach to storage, appliances, and work surfaces, reflected a commitment to transforming the lives of ordinary working people on an ambitious scale. Since the innovations of Schütte-Lihotzky and her contemporaries in the 1920s, kitchens have continued to articulate, and at times actively challenge, our relationships to food; popular attitudes toward the domestic role of women, family life and consumerism; and even political ideology, as in the case of the famous 1959 Moscow “Kitchen Debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War.

Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen is organized by Juliet Kinchin, Curator, and Aidan O’Connor, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.

 

 

MARGARETE SCHUTTE-LIHOTZKY (Austrian, 1897-2000). Frankfurter Küche (Frankfurt Kitchen). 1926-7. As illustrated in Das Neue Frankfurt 5 (1927).

 

Historically, kitchens were often drab, poorly ventilated, and hidden from view in a basement or annex, but by the end of the 19th century the kitchen became a bridgehead of modern thinking in the domestic sphere. Counter Space shows the variety of innovations that were developed in the 20th century through an array of design objects: appliances powered by gas and electricity (the earliest, a 1907 kettle designed by Peter Behrens for AEG); heat-resistant glass and steel wares that were featured in MoMA’s landmark 1934 Machine Art exhibition; and colorful plastics ranging from Tupperware to Japanese artificial food for restaurant display from the 1970s.  These objects are complemented by works by artists including Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Laurie Simmons, all drawn from MoMA’s collection.  

The exhibition is arranged in three sections which span the 20th century. The New Kitchen, an interwar design concept that embodied modernist principles of efficiency, hygiene, and standardization, appeared in numerous iterations throughout Europe and the United States. By transforming daily life at the level of the kitchen, it was argued, behavioral change and improved social well-being would follow. Modernist architects and designers like Schütte-Lihotzky looked to the model of the laboratory or factory to create rational, labor-saving kitchens that minimized drudgery. Their ambitions are reflected small-scale in works such as Wagenfeld’s 1938 Kubus storage system or Rex Stevens’ stainless steel mixing bowls. The section concludes with World War II, during which rationing of food and materials emphasized frugality and necessitated new products such as the glass frying pan by Corning, which introduced Pyrex.

 

LILLY REICH (German, 1885-1947). Boarding House at Die Wohnung unserer Zeit (The Dwelling of Our Time), German Building Exhibition, Berlin, Germany, Apartment for a Single Person, view of the living room and kitchenette. 1931. Gelatin silver print, 6 5/8 x 9" (16.8 x 22.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect. Courtesy of MoMA, NY.

 

After World War II, particularly in America, a climate of abundance and an emphasis on consumer choice put a new spin on the well-established rhetoric of efficiency and anti-drudgery in design for the kitchen. Visions of Plenty looks at postwar kitchens—larger, more colorful, and family-centered—that glorified the ease and comfort of fully-automated design.   The idea of the ―dream kitchen,‖ captured in Tom Wesselmann’s exuberant Still Life #30 collage of 1963, was celebrated in commercial films produced by manufacturing giants such as General Electric and Frigidaire, several of which are in the exhibition. Images from the Museum’s vast collection of film stills, for example, Full of Life (1956), with Judy Holliday, emphasize how Hollywood helped prime consumer desire for modern kitchens and appliances.

 

ROLF HARDER (German, born 1929). Alcan Foil, Brochures for the Aluminum Company of Canada. c.1960-62. Lithograph, each: 8 x 4" (20.3 x 10.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer. Courtesy of MoMA, NY.

 

During the 1950s, the German appliance company Braun, began to develop a cohesive family of objects that quickly became known for their superior functionality and pure form, such as the Multipurpose Kitchen Machine, which is exhibited complete with all 16 different fixtures. Italy pioneered design in plastics, and in the 1960s designers re-imagined the entire kitchen in flexible, mobile, and miniaturized forms. An example is Virgilio Forchiassin’s Spazio Vivo mobile kitchen unit (1968), featured in the exhibition.

 

VIRGILIO FORCHIASSIN (Italian). Spazio Vivo (Living Space) Mobile Kitchen Unit. 1968. Steel and plywood covered with plastic laminate, 36 1/4 x 48 7/8” closed (92 x 124 x 124 cm). Manufactured by SNAIDERO (Italy, founded 1946). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the manufacturer. Courtesy of MoMA, NY.

 

Alternative design thinking for the kitchen by the 1970s pushed beyond new materials and forms to social and environmental concerns. In Sweden, groups like Ergonomi Design shaped kitchen tools for the elderly and physically disabled. And dedicated designers like Lebanese diplomat Adnan Tarcici supported sustainable energy with impressively simple solar cookers, a collapsible version of which is featured. Contemporary designers continue to creatively address the enormous range of materials, functions, possibilities and problems that reside in the modern kitchen.

The final section, Kitchen Sink Dramas, introduces a human element to the kitchen—a space that evokes a gamut of emotions, from genuine pleasure to anxiety. Photographs, prints, and media works by contemporary artists highlight the kitchen as a subject that has permeated artistic practice since the late 1960s as a means of addressing larger debates around economics, politics, and gender.  Included in the installation are Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills with groceries in a kitchen, William Eggleston’s photographs of the inside of an oven and a freezer, and Martha Rosler’s 1975 video, Semiotics of the Kitchen.

Throughout the exhibition prominence is given to the contribution of women, not only as the primary consumers and users of the domestic kitchen, but also as reformers, architects, designers, and as artists who have critically addressed kitchen culture and myths.

The exhibition Counter Space is supported by Silestone Quartz Surfaces.

The Counter Space website offer users the ability to explore the exhibition, archival materials, and video clips, as well as a blog. www.moma.org/counterspace

MoMA, New York

09-15-2010 -> 03-14-2011

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 Exhibition at the MoMA

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 
MoMA, New York
February 13 - June 6, 2011

PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Bottle, Guitar, and Pipe. Paris, autumn 1912
Oil, enamel, sand, and charcoal on canvas
23 5/8 x 28 3/4" (60 x 73 cm)
Museum Folkwang, Essen.
Acquired in 1964 with the support of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia and Eugen-und-Agnes-Waldthausen-Platzhoff-Museums-Stiftung

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 focus on Pablo Picasso’s cardboard and sheet-metal Guitar sculptures, and the incandescent period of material and structural innovation these sculptures bracket in the artist’s long career. The exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art’s Special Exhibitions gallery bringing together some 70 closely connected collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs assembled from over 30 public and private collections worldwide. The exhibition situates Picasso’s modest yet revolutionary Guitars within his broader studio practice between 1912 and 1914.

The exhibition is organized by Anne Umland, Curator, with Blair Hartzell, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. 

PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Guitar. Paris, October-December 1912
Paperboard, paper, string, and painted wire
25 3/4 x 13 x 7 1/2" (65.1 x 33 x 19 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. Courtesy of MoMA

The exhibition takes as its point of departure Picasso’s first Guitar construction, a sculpture made between October and December 1912. Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire—materials he cut, folded, threaded, and glued—Picasso’s silent instrument resembled no sculpture that had ever been seen before. Its creation coincided with Picasso’s embrace of a wide range of what were then unconventional materials, including cardboard, newspaper, wallpaper, sheet music, and sand. In 1914 the artist reiterated his fragile, papery Guitar construction in more fixed and durable sheet-metal form. In the early 1970s Picasso donated both works to The Museum of Modern Art.  

PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Installation in the artist’s studio at 242, boulevard Raspail. Paris, December 9, 1912, or later
Gelatin silver print
3 3/8 x 4 1/2" (8.6 x 11.5 cm)
Private collection
Courtesy of MoMA

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 was catalyzed by the recent rediscovery of a still-life element in MoMA’s storage that once accompanied the cardboard Guitar in one of the artist’s well-documented but ephemeral Cubist assemblages. From this carefully composed still life, first published in November 1913, Picasso had saved both the Guitar and the semi-circular “tabletop” on which it had rested. Prompted by the careful study of a photograph of the 1913 assemblage by art historian Christine Poggi, the “tabletop” was rediscovered in MoMA’s collection in 2005. To reunite the two pieces is to recognize the variable installations that were integral to the artist’s practice in the years before World War I, and to consider anew the distinct yet interrelated histories of two of his most iconic works. Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 is the first time that cardboard Guitar will be publicly exhibited with this distinctive tabletop element.

In February 2011 the publication Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 will accompany the MoMA exhibition. Synthesizing archival material and eyewitness accounts, the richly illustrated volume offers new insights into Picasso’s Guitars and the constellation of paintings, constructions, collages, drawings, and photographs that surrounded them in the studio at this breakthrough moment in the artist’s career and in the history of 20th-century art. Hardcover, 8 x 10”. 112 pages; 120 illustrations. MoMA is also working on the development of an e-book to follow Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 that will draw upon the close examination of works assembled on the occasion of the exhibition.

The exhibition is supported by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NYC, USA
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Third Floor

www.moma.org

Charles Biederman - Works: 1934-1994 – Exhibition at Meridith Ward Fine Art in NYC

Charles Biederman - Works: 1934-1994
Meridith Ward Fine Art, NYC
Through January 8, 2011

 
CHARLES BIEDERMAN – WORKS: 1934-1994 is on view at Meredith Ward Fine Art and feature twelve works, including constructions, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper from 1934 to 1994. The exhibition celebrates the publication of a new biography on the artist by Susan C. Larsen and Neil Juhl Larsen.

The show includes examples of Biederman’s structurist reliefs from all periods, including New York #8, a rare painted wood and glass construction from 1939; #2 Red Wing, a monumental wood, aluminum, and Plexiglas work from 1949; and #34 Aix, an aluminum construction from 1972. Also included will be a selection of paintings and works on paper from the few years in the mid-1930s when Biederman was focusing on two-dimensional media.

In September 1934, Charles Biederman moved to New York to be near the hub of developments in modern art. There, he observed firsthand the latest works of the European avant-garde, and made acquaintances with influential artists, dealers, and curators. By 1936, Biederman was working in an increasingly abstract mode, and was given his first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. 

Credited with inventing the medium of three-dimensional structurist reliefs, Charles Biederman was a pioneer in the development of abstraction in America. With their vibrant colors and unusual choice of materials, these constructions broke new ground in the development of an abstract vocabulary in the United States. Biederman considered the reliefs so successful, that by 1937, he put painting aside and worked exclusively in three dimensions from that point on.

Born in Cleveland, Charles Biederman began his career working in a commercial art studio, followed by formal instruction at the Art Institute of Chicago. His exposure to the work of modernist masters in the Art Institute’s collection stimulated his interest in cubism, and convinced him to take a progressive path in his work. As the young artist experimented in a range of styles, his works became increasingly ordered and geometric.

MEREDITH WARD FINE ART
44 East 74th Street - Suite 1
New York, NY 10021 USA

www.meredithwardfineart.com

Art Collection of Max Palevsky Christie's Auctions

Highlights from The Collection of Max Palevsky tour started today at Christie's Paris where it is exhibited through September 21, followed by Christie’s Hong Kong from October 2-6, then to Christie’s London from October 9-14 and finally in Christie’s New York from October 21-27, 2010. 

The Collection of Max Palevsky is a superb group of over 250 works ranging  from Antiquities to those by the most significant artists from the Impressionist and Modern and Post-War and Contemporary periods.  The collection will be offered throughout multiple auctions starting in October 2010 at Christie’s New York and is expected to realize from $53 million to $78 million. 

Short biography of Max PALEVSKY (1924-2010) - Born in Chicago, he was an innovator and forerunner in computers and systems technology. His work continues to influence computing technology today. After serving in World War II, he traveled to New York and became fascinated with an exhibition on modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art.  It was then that he began to envision what a modern utopia could be.  Palevsky was trained in mathematics and engineering and had a love for the literature of Balzac and Proust. In 1951 Palevsky leapt from a job as a philosophy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles to pursue computers technology, a fledgling field.

“We saw a class of problems that should be solved by computers, but for which no computers were being built.” — Max Palevsky, 1967

He worked early on at firms including Bendix Corporation and Packard Bell Computer Corporation.  In the early 1960s he  was a  proponent of small and medium-size business computers — a market he intuited was neglected by IBM and other leading firms at the time —  and co-founded Scientific Data Systems, which he eventually sold to Xerox in 1969 for close to $1 billion. He helped found Intel Corp. and then exited the corporate world for other endeavors such as film production, then politics supporting Democrats George McGovern, Robert F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Gray Davis. He also invested in a passion of his, Rolling Stone magazine. Palevsky began collecting art later in life, which enriched his homes in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Palm Springs, Calif.

“Max Palevsky’s keen intellect, passion for mathematics, computer systems and philosophy is acutely reflected in the works he collected,” said Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s America.  “From Fernand Léger, whose obsession with the machine age echoed Palevsky’s own, to Richard Lindner’s robotic women and Alexander Calder’s riveted steel sculptures, there is a sense of order and symmetry to the collection.  Palevsky’s art collection offers insight to his genius.”

The Collection of Max Palevsky comprises Antiquities, Impressionist and Modern Art, Post-War and Contemporary Art, 20th Century Decorative Arts and Design, Prints and Multiples, Japanese Art, Latin American Art, American Sculpture and  Modern British Art.

Highlights from The Collection of Max Palevsky within Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale to be held on November 3, 2010 in New York, include five works by the French artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Most notable is Léger’s La Tasse de Thé 1921 (estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000), a depiction of a voluptuous curvilinear woman against a geometric background of contrasting forms in primary colors. It belongs to Léger’s pivotal series of the early 1920s, which culminated in his seminal masterpiece Le Grand Déjeuner, on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is the top lot in the Palevsky collection.  Femme sur fond rouge, femme assise, painted in the 1920s (estimate: $5,000,000-7,000,000) shows Léger in his most daring and reductive style, placing a woman in tones of steely gray and black against a flat crimson background. 

Max Palevsky’s love of Balzac inspired him to collect a series of Auguste Rodin bronzes related to the sculptor's commission for a monument to the author. Balzac étude finale (estimate: $500,000-700,000), depicting the imperious Balzac in costume, is the highlight of the group. Other exciting versions of the Balzac subject will be offered in the following Day Sale on November 4. 

Also a part of the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale is Giorgio Morandi’s poetic Natura Morta (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000), a still life of a carafe and two canisters in muted tones and an Egon Schiele work from 1911, named Liegender Akt mit schwarzen Strumpfen (estimate: $1,000,000- 1,500,000), depicting a nude woman lounging.

For the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening sale to be held on November 10, 2010, at Christie’s Rockefeller Center flagship, the highlights from The Collection of Max Palevsky include: Tableau Noire, a painted steel stabile sculpture completed by Alexander Calder in 1970 (estimate: $2,500,000-3,500,000), four works by Donald Judd including Untitled, 1980, a signature Judd stack comprised of 10 units of stainless steel and red anodized aluminum (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror, 1964 (estimate: $3,000,000-4,000,000) depicting a flaxen-haired woman smiling at her reflection in a hand mirror in porcelain enamel on steel.

Frank Stella’s Telluride, 1960-1961 (estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000) is a rare and important example from his copper painting series, the majority are in museums and institutions. The T-shaped painting with striations in copper oil paint is a testament to Palevsky’s fondness for symmetry. Four lots by Richard Lindner are also slated to be sold in the Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale. Most notable is West 48th Street, 1964 (estimate: $600,000- 800,000) which shows a woman with breasts exposed wearing a fantastically-harsh metal corset juxtaposed with a ladylike handbag and opera-length gloves.

The standouts in the Antiquities auction on December 10, 2010 include: A Roman Marble Athena, circa 1st-2nd Century A.D. (estimate: $200,000-300,000), A Roman Marble Head of Aphrodite, circa 1st-2nd Century A.D. (estimate: $150,000- 250,000) and A Roman Marble Herm of a Draped Female, circa 1st-2nd century A.D. (estimate: $250,000-350,000).

Palevsky’s collection of Decorative Arts was international, but also focused on the richness of American decorative art in the early 20th century.  Christie’s 20th Century Decorative Arts & Design department will offer several pieces from The Collection of Max Palevsky on December 15th, 2010, including a group of leaded glass windows by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Morris & Co. and Louis Sullivan; works by Tiffany Studios and an enameled silver vase by Archibald Knox for Liberty & Co. (estimate: $70,000-90,000).

On October 26, 2010, Christie’s will offer several works from The Collection of Max Palevsky in the Prints and Multiples Sale in New York.  The key features in that sale are Pablo Picasso, Buste de Femme au Chapeau, 1962 (estimate: $220,000-280,000) as well as several works by Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Lindner.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
November 10, 2010 - April 10, 2011

Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand, three masters of photography, will be featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from November 10, 2010, through April 10, 2011, in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand.

The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of more than 100 photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum's collection. On view will be several of the Metropolitan's greatest photographic treasures from the 1900s to 1920s, including Stieglitz's famous portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, Steichen's large colored photographs of the Flatiron building, and Strand's pioneering abstractions.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864–1946) was a photographer of supreme accomplishment as well as a passionate advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery "291" and his sumptuous journal Camera Work. Stieglitz also laid the foundation for the Museum's collection of photographs. In 1928, he donated 22 of his own works to the Metropolitan; these were the first photographs to enter the Museum's collection as works of art. In later decades he gave the Museum more than 600 photographs by his contemporaries, including Edward Steichen and Paul Strand.

Among Stieglitz's works to be featured in this exhibition are portraits, views of New York City from the beginning and end of his career, and the 1920s cloud studies he titled Equivalents, through which he meant to demonstrate how "to hold a moment, how to record something so completely, that all who see [the picture of it] will relive an equivalent of what has been expressed."

The exhibition will also include numerous photographs from Stieglitz's extraordinary composite portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), part of a group of works selected for the Museum's collection by O'Keeffe herself. Stieglitz made more than 300 images of O'Keeffe between 1917 and 1937—some of them candid shots, some focusing on her face, hands, or feet alone, and many of them showing her nude. Through these photographs Stieglitz revealed O'Keeffe's strengths and vulnerabilities, and almost single-handedly defined her public persona for generations to come.

Stieglitz's protégé and gallery collaborator, EDWARD STEICHEN (1879–1973), was the most talented exemplar of the Photo-Secession, the group founded by Stieglitz in 1902, seceding, in his words, "from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph," but also from the camera clubs and other institutions dominated by a more retrograde establishment. In works such as The Pond—Moonrise (1904), made using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen rivaled the scale, color, and individuality of painting.

Steichen's three large variant prints of The Flatiron (1904) are prime examples of the conscious effort of Photo-Secession photographers to assert the artistic potential of their medium. Steichen achieved coloristic effects reminiscent of Whistler's Nocturne paintings by brushing layers of pigment suspended in light-sensitive gum solution onto a platinum photograph. Although he used only one negative to create all three photographs, the variable coloring enabled him to create three significantly different images that convey the chromatic progression of twilight. The Metropolitan's three prints, all donated by Stieglitz in 1933, are the only known exhibition prints of Steichen's iconic image.

In 1908 Steichen photographed the plaster of Rodin's sculpture of Honoré de Balzac in the open air, by the light of the moon, making several exposures as long as an hour each. In Balzac, The Silhouette—4 A.M., the moonlight has transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints to Rodin, the elated sculptor exclaimed, "You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures."

Stieglitz's and Steichen's younger contemporary, PAUL STRAND (1890-1976), pioneered a shift from the soft-focus aesthetic and painterly prints of the Photo-Secession to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Strand was introduced to Stieglitz by his teacher, Lewis Hine, the social reformer and photographer, and quickly became part of the coterie of artists that gathered at "291," where he was exposed to the latest trends in European art through groundbreaking exhibitions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi.

Strand incorporated the new language of geometric abstraction into his interest in photographing street life and machine culture. His photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes: movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits. The final double issue of Stieglitz's Camera Work (1917) was devoted to this young photographer's work, marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography.

In From the El (1915), Strand juxtaposed the ironwork and shadows of the elevated train with the tiny form of a lone pedestrian. In 1916, he experimented with radical camera angles and photographing at close range. Strand's Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut is among the first photographic abstractions to be made intentionally. When Stieglitz published a variant of this image in Camera Work, he praised Strand's results as "the direct expression of today."

In the same year, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a hand-held camera fitted with a special lens that allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a 90-degree angle. Blind, his seminal image of a street beggar, was published in Camera Work and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the objectivity of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of Modernism. As is true for most of the large platinum prints by Strand in the exhibition, the Metropolitan's Blind, a gift of Stieglitz, is the only exhibition print of this image from the period.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand is organized by Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 160-page volume, by Malcolm Daniel, will feature 125 illustrations, including reproductions of many of the crown jewels from the Museum's collection of photographs. It is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press ($35).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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www.metmuseum.org

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The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs [Wanafoto, October 2010]

"Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s, also on view at the Met from November 9, 2010 through April 10, 2011 [Wanafoto, October 2010]

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art – This exhibition featured famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz.[Wanafoto, December 2009]

This post has been updated in October 2010.