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.
This exhibition traces the first sixty years of the etched print (circa 1490 to circa 1560), from its emergence in the workshop of the German printmaker and armor decorator Daniel Hopfer to the years when a range of artists from Germany, Flanders, Italy, and France began experimenting with etching. Approximately 125 etchings, produced by both renowned and lesser-known artists, are displayed alongside a number of drawings, printing plates, illustrated books, and armor.
Today’s edition features Harvard professor Steven Pinker. As an experimental psychologist, Steven has written extensively about violence – and for his choice from the gallery’s collection he has selected two of Pablo Picasso’s most gruesome depictions of man’s inhumanity, Charnel House and Guernica, now housed in Madrid.
Masterpieces of Painting surveys more than one hundred of the most exquisite and significant paintings displayed in the museum’s famed, daylight-suffused galleries. Vibrant full-color illustrations and engaging descriptions of these masterworks reveal their fascinating histories and cultural, social, and religious meanings. Sure to enchant and edify all art lovers, this book is a spellbinding tour through the history of Western painting.
Rooted in a passion for the Italian Renaissance as well as Dutch and Flemish Baroque works, the original collection of J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) has been transformed over four decades to include seminal pieces by celebrated masters such as Masaccio, Titian, Parmigianino, Cranach, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Canaletto, Fragonard, Turner, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Ensor.
I became engrossed in Mitchell’s drawings while browsing the book—they’re vivid, intimate—but her handwritten lyrics and poems are just as revelatory. It’s hard not to think about art-making of any kind as an alchemical process, in which feelings and experiences go in and something else comes out. Whatever happens in between is mysterious, if not sublime: suddenly, an ordinary sensation is made beautiful. Our most profound writers do this work with ease, or at least appear to. Mitchell’s lyrics are never overworked or self-conscious, and she manages to be precise in her descriptions while remaining ambiguous about what’s right and what’s wrong; in her songs, the cures and the diseases are sometimes indistinguishable. 
Joni Mitchell, in the foreword to “
There’s also a special focus on architecture and design in this new approach to the collection: Several galleries are devoted to various aspects of those fields, including “The Vertical City,” an examination of skyscraper construction that includes photos by Berenice Abbott, Hugh Ferriss’s architectural drawings, and other ephemera. Elsewhere, building models of the Guggenheim and a spec design of MoMA by modernist master William Lescaze emphasize the importance of architecture to museums, and vice versa.
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