Over 200 of the world’s leading international Modern and contemporary art galleries display artworks by over 4,000 artists, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, film, video, and digital art. Visitors can find works ranging from editioned pieces by young artists to museum-caliber masterpieces.
‘Nameless and Friendless’ was painted in 1857 by Emily Mary Osborn. It captures a single woman trying, and failing, to earn a living as an artist in Victorian England. In a trade traditionally occupied by men, she becomes nameless and friendless.
Osborn was actively involved in the campaign for women’s rights during the mid-19th century. She was supported by wealthy patrons, including Queen Victoria. But she used her position of power to help improve the lives of women like those depicted in her paintings.
Isolation was a persistent theme in Hopper’s art and life. Was he dogged by isolation or did he pursue it? ‘Did anybody really know this silent, non-communicative man?’ asked Raphael Soyer in a 1981 interview, 14 years after Hopper’s death. His friends recollected a cynical and taciturn artist, self-doubting, introspective and distrustful of fame. But before Hopper became the painter of lonely figures in all-night diners, he was the illustrator of raucous party scenes and smiling couples waltzing together at summer fêtes.
Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, a rich exhibition now at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, highlights the contrast between Hopper’s early, lesser-known years as a commercial illustrator and his later eminence as laconic American icon, the serious solitary who painted crumbling Victorian boarding houses, faded hotel lobbies and highway motels.
The artist incorporates an array of art historical scenes such as John Martin’s English-Romantic apocalypses and Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass with ubiquitous imagery sourced from the Internet. The highly rendered areas in her paintings resemble a cascade of Google image search results where cellphone photos of skylines and gardens slide past gestural marks.
Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Strange Little Beast, a solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based painter Annie Lapin. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Annie Lapin’s paintings call attention to the human desire for meaning making–our effort to create order out of chaos. In Strange Little Beast, Lapin’s paintings use her interest in art history, perception, and the materiality of painting itself to examine the role of digital technology and narrative building in our contemporary moment.
Caravaggio & Bernini: The Discovery of Emotions features some of the artists’ greatest works, but also charts their influence on others. And that influence proved to be powerful and enduring. Caravaggistas spread across Europe like termites. And so we could call this exhibition a battle of the swaggerers, the pomp of a very eclectic brand of Viennese historicism facing off against the theatrical push and preen of two great Italians.
Bernini, “Medusa” (1638–40)
From almost the beginning, Caravaggio, that man who arrived in Rome in the 1590s, is completely outrageous. Whom did he think were his principal patrons? Churchmen, of course. Did they care that he depicted John the Baptist in an extraordinary painting, circa 1602, as a carefree, lascivious, curly-haired boy with the cheekiest of grins imaginable?
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.
Since I work as a fine artist now, there are fewer commercial entities to please, so I’ve discovered something that should have been very obvious. If you want to engage the viewer, don’t tell them everything, encourage them to ask their own questions. An artist should not describe—he or she should interpret. If you design into your work a bit of mystery—areas where the viewer must “fill in the blanks”—you set up an unspoken dialog with your viewers and an emotional weight will begin to develop organically. This is just one example of course, but an important one.
Artist Thomas W. Schaller combines a passion for architecture and storytelling into emotional landscape watercolor paintings. Originally trained as an architect, he found himself drawn to images of the built environment and eventually left designing behind to pursue fine art on a full-time basis. His education places him in an ideal position for architecture painting. Schaller understands how to design structures and knows what attributes to include and what he should leave out. At the same time, he’s able to tap into the feelings we get from visiting a city—such as a sentimentality—to produce pieces that are both beautiful and alluring.
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.
Radio 3 presents a radiophonic art exhibition, as 30 of the world’s most creative minds choose a favourite work from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ep5 Pinker and Picasso.
“The Way I See It” is a co-production of the BBC and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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.
Davide Gasparotto is senior curator in the Department of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where Scott Allan is associate curator and Anne T. Woollett is curator. Peter Björn Kerber is curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.