Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern - Exhibition @ MoMA, New York + Book

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern

MoMA, New York

November 17, 2024 – March 29, 2025

Lillie P. Bliss. c. 1924 

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

The music room in Bliss’s apartment, 

1001 Park Avenue, c. 1929–1931

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Installation view of the exhibition 

“The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.”

May 14, 1934 – September 12, 1934

The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Installation view of Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern 

on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025 

Photo: Emile Askey

The Museum of Modern Art presents Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern, an exhibition focusing on the collection and legacy of LILLIE P. BLISS, one of the Museum’s three founders and an early advocate for modern art in the United States. The exhibition which marks the 90th anniversary of Bliss’s bequest coming to MoMA, includes iconic works such as Paul Cézanne’s The Bather (c. 1885) and Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska (1917). The exhibition, which features about 40 works as well as archival materials, highlights Bliss’s critical role in the reception of modern art in the US and in the founding of MoMA.

Paul Cézanne

The Bather. c. 1885 

Oil on canvas. 50 x 38 1/8″ (127 x 96.8 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934 

Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America 

Art Conservation Project 

Photo: John Wronn

Amedeo Modigliani 

Anna Zborowska. 1917 

Oil on canvas. 51 1/4 x 32″ (130.2 x 81.3 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York  

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Photo: John Wronn

When it opened in 1929, The Museum of Modem Art was a destination where visitors could see groundbreaking temporary exhibitions, but it did not have a significant collection. Just two years later, when Lillie P. Bliss died, she left approximately 120 works to the Museum in her will. In an effort to ensure the Museum's future success, Bliss stipulated that MoMA would receive her collection only if it could prove that it was on firm financial footing within three years of her death. 

In 1934 the Museum was able to secure the bequest, which became the core of MoMA's collection. This included key works by Paul Cézanne, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Odilon Redon, Marie Laurencin, and Henri Matisse, as well as a selection of paintings by Bliss's friend, the American artist Arthur B. Davies. 

Georges-Pierre Seurat 

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor. 1888 

Oil on canvas. 21 5/8 x 25 5/8″ (54.9 x 65.1 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Odilon Redon 

Silence. c. 1911 

Oil on prepared paper. 21 1/2 x 21 1/4″ (54.6 x 54 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934

Bliss's bequest also allowed for the sale of her works to fund new acquisitions, facilitating the purchase of many important artworks, including Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, which is featured in the exhibition. Other favorites wholly or in part funded through the Bliss bequest, such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, are on view in the collection galleries.

Vincent Van Gogh

The Starry Night. Saint Rémy, June 1889

Oil on canvas. 29 x 36 1/4″ (73.7 x 92.1 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York 

Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), 1941 

Conservation was made possible by the Bank of America 

Art Conservation Project 

Photo: Jonathan Muzikar

At the end of her life, Lillie P. instructed her bother Cornelius Newton Bliss Jr. to burn her personal papers, making it challenging for future generations to recognize the essential part she played in the history of modern art. The exhibition showcases archival materials from MoMA's Archives and other collection, reconstructing Bliss's life before MoMA, including her passion for music, her involment in the Armory Show of 1913, and her interactions with fellow collectors and artists. It also highlight Bliss's critical role in MoMA's founding, and her continued impact on the Museum going forward, through scrapbooks, journals, photographs, and letters.

"It has been a joy to explore the life and work of this courageous woman whom we have known as little more than an important name. We are eager to share our discoveries, and to shine a spotlight on Lillie Bliss for the first time since 1934, when MoMA organized an exhibition to celebrate the new bequest," says Ann Temkin.

Inventing the Modern: 

Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art

by Romy Silver-Kohn (Editor), Ann Temkin (Editor), 

Anna Deavere Smith (Foreword by), 

Mary Schmidt Campbell (Text by), Sloane Crosley (Text by)

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 2024

384 p. - ISBN 9781633450790

 

The exhibition is presented on the occasion of the release of Inventing the Modem: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modem Art, a revelatory account of the Museum's earliest years told through newly commissioned profiles of 14 women who had a decisive impact on the formation and development of the institution. Inventing the Modem comprises illuminating new essays on the women who, as founders, curators, patrons, and directors of various departments, made enduring contributions to MoMA during its early decades (especially between 1929 and 1945), creating new models for how to envision, establish, and operate a museum in an era when the field of modem art was uncharted territory.

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Romy Silver-Kohn, co-editor with Ann Temkin of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, with Rachel Remick, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York

11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019

moma.org

Impressionism and Beyond @ Saint Louis Art Museum

Impressionism and Beyond

Saint Louis Art Museum

February 1 - July 31, 2022

“Due to a surge of COVID positive cases among our staff and the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, the Museum is closed to the public. At this time, we anticipate reopening to the public on Tuesday, February 1"

EDGAR DEGAS

French, 1834–1917

"Ballet Dancers in the Wings", c.1890–1900

Pastel; 28 x 26 inches

Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum Purchase 24:1935

ODILON REDON

French, 1840–1916 

"Eyes in the Forest", 1882

Charcoal on pale brown paper; 

framed: 23 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches 

Saint Louis Art Museum 

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Morton D. May 234:1959

The Saint Louis Art Museum presents “Impressionism and Beyond,” an exhibition of works on paper drawn exclusively from the museum collections.

Through 59 European drawings, pastels and prints dating from the 1850s to the 1930s, “Impressionism and Beyond” highlights the many conversations occurring in the art world between tradition and innovation, representation and abstraction, and the artist’s studio and the art market.

During this period, European life underwent dramatic social, political and psychological changes, which contributed to significant artistic developments. Artists responded to this fluid environment in many ways—visualizing modern life as it was, but also viewing the world through an imaginative lens.

The exhibition reveals that, at this same moment, new attitudes about artistic practice and expressions of modernity elevated drawing and printmaking to prominence among the avant-garde.

In France, which dominated progressive trends, the Impressionists broke with traditional academic modes of representation through formal experimentation and innovative print and drawing techniques. Mary Cassatt, for example, elevated color printmaking to new heights through her adaptation of the Japanese aesthetic that was taking Paris by storm in the 1890s, while her Impressionist colleague Edgar Degas sought multiple avenues for experimentation in print. Degas and other Impressionists also developed inventive drawing styles that allowed them to capture movement and intense effects of color and light in their works.

EDVARD MUNCH

Norwegian, 1863–1944 

"The Scream", 1895

Lithograph; image: 13 3/4 x 27 1/4 inches, 

sheet: 23 1/2 x 16 3/8 inches

Saint Louis Art Museum 

Private Collection 2019.348

EDVARD MUNCH

Norwegian, 1863–1944

"Moonlight", 1896; printed c. 1906

Color woodcut on Japan paper; 

image: 15 13/16 x 18 9/16 inches, 

sheet: 18 7/8 x 23 5/16 inches

Saint Louis Art Museum

Gift of General and Mrs. Leif J. Sverdrup 338:1952

This experimental impulse in turn provided a launchpad for later generations to push formal and technical innovations even further. Paul Cézanne’s early-20th-century watercolors transformed natural environments into abstract washes of color, while Odilon Redon focused on the expressive power of black to create images that blurred the lines between fantasy and reality. Edvard Munch rethought the ancient medium of woodcut printmaking, cutting his blocks into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle to print in multiple colors.

“Impressionism and Beyond” explores several themes that guided artists in their examinations of modernity. Subjects of modern urban life such as the domestic interior and the modern woman of fashion abound during this period. Meanwhile, experimental treatments of figures and landscapes highlight news ways artists viewed the world around them, sometimes giving way to quirky, even frightening, visions.

“Impressionism and Beyond” is curated by Abigail Yoder, research assistant, and Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings and photographs.

SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM

One Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park, Saint Louis, Missouri 63110

www.slam.org

Surrealism and the dream, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

SURREALISM AND THE DREAM 

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 

Curator: José Jiménez 

8 October 2013 - 12 January 2014 

SALVADOR DALI

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, 1944

51 x 41 cm

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

       

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza presents the first monographic exhibition on Surrealism and the dream. Including a total of 163 artworks by the great Surrealist masters -André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Max Ernst, André Masson, Jean Arp and Man Ray- the exhibition, curated by the art critic José Jiménez, will offer a thematic presentation of the Surrealists' visual interpretation of the world of dreams. 

Surrealism should not be considered just one more art movement: rather, it was an attitude to life essentially based on a vision of interior images accessed through the flow of desire. Its ideas have had a key influence on all subsequent art and on the contemporary mindset. The present exhibition aims to demonstrate that this influence has its most profound roots in the Surrealist connection between dream and image. 

In order to do so, the exhibition will include examples from the wide range of media in which this link is evident: painting, drawing, graphic work, collage, objects, sculptures, photography and film. The Surrealists’ creative horizon encompassed all art forms that could enrich and expand the mind, and its doors were equally open to painters, sculptors, photographers and filmmakers who were the first to adopt the fusion of expressive genres with a multimedia aesthetic during a period of major technological advances in the production and reproduction of images.

From this viewpoint, the role played by film was crucial. The darkness of the cinema brought about an encounter with the unexpected and the amazing of an unpremeditated and unconscious kind. Looking at the silver screen was the realm of waking dreams. According to André Breton, it was in cinemas that “the only totally modern mystery was celebrated”.

In the present exhibition the cinema is represented by seven video installations that will project excerpts from selected Surrealist films including Un chien d’Andalou (1929) by Louis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, in which the idea of alienation or rootlessness – a key concept in the Surrealist aesthetic - is taken to its furthest limit. The film discards any narrative ordering in order to unfold a flow of images that is as open as a dream.

The significant presence of female artists in the exhibition is another important feature. For the first time, women artists encountered a key role within the context of Surrealism and one that gradually extended beyond their initial function as muses, objects of desire or companions. Many of them developed a creative personality that challenged or differed from those of their male colleagues. The large number (eleven) of women artists represented in the present exhibition, including Claude Cahun, Kay Sage, Nadja, Toyen, Dora Maar, Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Ángeles Santos, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, offers proof of the unique nature of their contribution to the Surrealist representation of dreams. 

KAY SAGE

The upper side of the Sky, 1944

58,4 x 71,4 cm

The Israel Museum. 

The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

SURREALISM AND THE DREAM: The other half of life

The Surrealists’ most important contribution to the artistic concept of the dream lies in the way that they ceased to consider it a void or a hole in consciousness, rather seeing it as the other half of life and a conscious plane of experience. Knowledge and liberation of this plane was central to the enrichment and expansion of the interior world, which was the principal aim of these artists. In this sense, Goya, with his depiction of the dream as a realm of human reality devoid of the supernatural or mythical connotations that were present in earlier art, crucially embarked on a direction that would be pursued by the Surrealists a century later. 

HENRI ROUSSEAU 

Carnival Evening, 1886

117,3 x 89,5 cm

Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louis E. Stern Collection, 1963

ODILON REDON

Closed Eyes, 1889

45 x 35 cm

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

SURREALISM AND THE DREAM: From the dream to art

The liberation of the visual arts from a mimetic reproduction of exterior reality was one of the factors that brought about the transformation of modern art, particularly from the second half of the 19th century with the artistic avant-gardes. One of the most crucial aspects of the Surrealists’ contribution to this transformation was their championing of the representation of the dream world in art. In order to do so, they looked for a place in which dream and reality came together, moving to and from between the interior and exterior. Through their artistic endeavours the Surrealists thus transcribed the materials of the dream in visual form.

ROLAND PENROSE

Seeing is Believing (L'Ile invisible), 1937

100 x 75 cm

The Penrose Collection

The visual material in Surrealism and the Dream is divided into eight thematic sections: 

1. Those who opened up the paths (of dreams) 

2. I is another: variations and metamorphoses of identity

3. The infinite conversation: the dream is the overcoming of Babel: all languages communicate with each other, all languages are the same 

4. Landscapes of a different place: an alternative universe that nonetheless forms part of the existing one 

5. Irresistible perturbations: nightmare, anxiety 

6. Beyond good and evil: a world ruled by neither morality nor reason 

7. Where everything is possible: omnipotence, everything is possible in dreams 

8. The harsh light of desire: the sex drive without the restraints of conscious life 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a film cycle that includes the complete versions of the films of which excerpts will be shown on video installations in the galleries, as well as other titles. There will also be an international conference (8 and 9 October 2013) directed by the exhibition’s curator José Jiménez, which will focus on the different approaches and ideas regarding the representation of the dream in the visual arts.

Curator: José Jiménez, philosopher and professor of aesthetics and theory of the arts, Universidad Autónoma, Madrid

Coordinator: Laura Andrada, Curatorial Department, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Publications: catalogue, English and Spanish versions

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

Paseo del Prado 8, 28014 Madrid

Opening times: Tuesdays to Sundays, 10am to 7pm. Saturdays, 10am to 9pm. Last admissions one hour before closing.

Museum's website: www.museothyssen.org

Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 - Exhibition in Paris and Montpellier at the Grand Palais and Fabre Museum

Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 

Grand Palais - Galeries nationales, Paris 

23 March - 20 June 2011 

Musée Fabre, Montpellier 

7 July - 16 october 2011 

The exhibition ODILE REDON: PRINCE OF DREAMS, 1840-1916 is on view in France in Paris through June 2011 and will be on view in Montpellier (South of France) at Fabre museum from July to October 2011. An exhibition organised by the Rmn-Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay and the musée Fabre de Montpellier Agglomération. With special support from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  

Although he was a contemporary of the Impressionists (he took part in the group’s last exhibition in 1886), ODILON REDON (Bordeaux 1840 - Paris 1916) remains the champion of mystery and the subconscious in a period which focused on reality and objectivity. One of the leaders in the art world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he was a key figure in early symbolism, with his charcoals and lithographs (the famous noirs -blacks) before being admired for his pastels and paintings by the young generation of artists in love with colour, the Nabis and the Fauves. He was then regarded as one of the precursors of surrealism. 

The exhibition in the Galeries nationales-Grand Palais is a real rediscovery of this artist. A number of major exhibitions have recently been devoted to him in other parts of the world -Chicago and London, 1994; Frankfurt, 2007-, but this retrospective is the first in Paris since the exhibition in the Orangerie in 1956. It is based on the study of many unpublished documents which shed new light on Redon’s work. In particular it makes systematic use of his “book of reason” (Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet), in which he jotted down the titles and dates of his works. The book is on display and was published in the appendix to the catalogue. 

Some hundred and eighty paintings, pastels, charcoals and drawings, many unpublished, and a major set of engravings and lithographs (about a hundred prints, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France-French National Library, Paris) are arranged in chronological  order to emphasise the development in Redon’s style and themes, from the anguished period of the Noirs to the explosion of colour in his last works, in a gradual progression from shade to light. For the first time, the great mural that he painted for his patron Robert de Domecy will be displayed in its original size and layout. Redon’s work in the decorative arts will also be on show, thanks to major loans from the Mobilier national. 

ODILON REDON BIOGRAPHY

Despite the overall continuity of Odilon Redon' style throughout his career, three periods can be distinguished.  

Odilon Redon: Early years to 1890 

From Odilon Redon’ youth and his training in etching under the mysterious Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885) in Bordeaux, until the beginning of the Noirs [Blacks] (charcoal drawings, lithographs) which, from his first collection of lithographs (Dans le Reve [In the Dream], 1879), made his reputation in the budding symbolism movement, particularly in literary circles. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) paid homage to him in his famous novel A rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), whose archetypal refined, decadent hero fervently collected Redon’s  work. His references are Darwin and the mysteries of the origins of the world but also the sumptuous macabre works of Edgar Allen Poe and Goya. The extraordinary beauty of his lithographs is due to an accomplished technique and velvety blacks, which were said to be inimitable. 

Odilon Redon: From 1892 the end of the century 

This is the period when the dreams of the Noirs were gradually transposed into colour. Yeux clos (Closed Eyes 1890, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), of which there is a painting and a lithograph, is a turning point after which Redon approached colour in a new spirit. He used pastel with startling originality and, alongside Degas, is still one of the great masters of this medium. He became a major figure in symbolism, and mixed with Mallarmé and Gauguin.  

Odilon Redon in the twentieth century 

After 1899, Redon gave up lithography and charcoal drawing. Black and white gave way to vivid colour in increasingly large formats. Collectors competed for his mythological themes and brightly coloured flower paintings, a sign of his new peace of mind. It was during this period that Redon produced some of the great decorations which number among the lesser known masterpieces of the twentieth century, including the one in the Fontfroide abbey, which will be open to the public while the exhibition is showing at the Musée Fabre (Fabre museum) in Montpellier, in summer 2010. He won the admiration of Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and the Fauves and in his last years he designed tapestry cartoons for the Manufacture des Gobelins. 

Head curator: Rodolphe Rapetti, general heritage curator, associate researcher at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art [National Institute of Art History, Paris]

Curators: 

Marie-Pierre Salé, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay [Orsay Museum, Paris]

Valérie Sueur-Hermel, curator of the Print and Photography department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [French National Library, Paris], head of the 19th century collections 

Exhibition design: Hubert Le Gall  

RMN - GRAND PALAIS, PARIS 

www.rmn.fr 

Information, tickets, download of audioguides on the website