The new MoMA opens. Cherished works return to the walls of the galleries in brand new frames, while curators and artists watch the completion of the reinstallation. After being closed for four months, MoMA reopens its doors to the public.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:13 – Associate sculpture conservator Roger Griffith and sculpture conservation fellow Joy Bloser clean Arthur Young’s Bell-47D1 Helicopter.
0:52 – Senior curator of Painting and Sculpture Anne Umland and chief curator of Painting and Sculpture Ann Temkin oversee the hanging of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
1:20 – Peter Perez, frame shop foreman, discusses “The Starry Night’s” new, black frame.
2:53 – Artist Amy Sillman explains how she curated and arranged “The Shape of Shape,” part of the long-running Artist’s Choice exhibition series in which artists selects works to show from the Museum’s collection
4:17 – Photography curator Sarah Meister and conservator Lee Ann Daffner adjust the lighting on Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey’s “Rome. Arch of Septimus Severus and Capitoline Lion.”
5:02 – Senior deputy director of exhibitions and collections Ramona Bronkar Bannayan and director of exhibition design and production Lana Hum make a final checklist of things to accomplish before the opening.
5:32 – Artist Betye Saar sees her exhibition for the first time.
7:11 – Manager of enterprise applications Rik Vanmechelen and developer Ryan Sprott check the new ticket machines.
8:04 – Chief facilities and safety officer Tunji Adeniji welcomes the public to the new MoMA on opening day.
8:30 – Silent film accompanist Ben Model improvises a live piano soundtrack for Frank Powell’s 1915 film “A Fool There Was.”
9:12 – Security supervisor Chet Gold greets volunteer Fred Liberman. Gold returns to his favorite room in the new MoMA.
In “Unto This Last and Other Essays on Art and Political Economy” (1860), which gives the exhibition its title, Ruskin “sees” interconnected social injustices. He attacks economic inequality. Later, he sets out to establish a utopian community in working-class Sheffield, England. In one gallery we see his influence on “progressive thinkers worldwide.” Gandhi said that reading “Unto This Last” in 1904 transformed his life and ideas.
‘If you can paint one leaf,” John Ruskin once declared, “you can paint the world.” And in “Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin”—the hypnotically potent (though flawed) exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art marking the bicentennial of his birth—we see how wonderfully he kept trying.
The mind of Leonardo
James McElhinney: Discover the Hudson Anew presents the painter’s sketch books and prints related to the River in a comprehensive showing for the first time. A video program, animating turning pages, will allow visitors to see additional sketchbook paintings. McElhinney says he wants his art to demonstrate “that constructive dialogue between humanity and nature is alive and well, while underscoring how art provides durable and dynamic modes of engagement.”
While all of the works on exhibit hold special interest, Aurisch identifies several gems. For example, Van Gogh fans will enjoy his spectacular perspectival rooftop view from the window of his room in The Hague in 1882. Maurice de Vlaminc’s 1906 Dancer at the “Rat Mort” (La danseuse du “Rat Mort”) is a delight with his Fauve treatment of the figure; through color and gestural line, it’s as though we are witnessing a shift into the 20th century. And Henri Matisse’s 1943 still life titled Lemons against a Fleur-de-lis Background (Citrons sur fond rose fleurdelisé) vibrates with lively pink patterned wallpaper and a stacked brick platform, charged with Japonisme energy.
Warhol, with obvious self-deprecation, described his philosophy as spanning from A to B. As this exhibition decidedly proves, his thinking and artistic production ranged well beyond that, but his true genius lies in his ability to identify cultural patterns and to use repetition, distortion, and recycled images in a way that challenges our faith in images and questions the meaning of our cultural icons.
Things take an even stranger turn when he gets to Egypt, and his own features still appear again and again; not, as before, as a barely significant detail in an otherwise busy composition, but as a principal element. In a series of fine single-figure paintings brought together at the Watts Gallery, Lewis represents himself as a Syrian sheikh scanning the horizon of the Sinai desert; as the suave ‘bey’ of a Cairene household, lowering his eyelids as his servant offers him a water pipe; as an impassive carpet-seller in the Bezestein bazaar
Revere’s place in history was cemented by 
The exhibition was organized by the 
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