Andrew Wyeth and Cristina's World

Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World. 1948. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2012 Andrew Wyeth

What is it about Wyeth's Cristina's World ? It appears to be a simple painting of a young girl looking up towards her house.  It is one of the most recognized images in the art world, loved by many and perhaps scorned by those who don't have an appreciation for realism.



So who is the young woman gazing up towards the farm house on the hill? A new book from MoMA, Wyeth: Christina’s World, by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman explains in detail about this painting.  Hoptman writes, " Wyeth depicted only two locations in his paintings over the course of his 70-year career: Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and South Cushing, Maine, where his wife Betsy’s family owned a home. And within these two locations, he focused mainly on two families, the Kuerners in Chadds Ford and the Olsons in South Cushing." Anna Christina Olson of South Cushing, who had a degenerative muscle condition that cost her the use of her legs by her early 30s, was the inspiration for Wyeth’s most famous painting. Wyeth explained, "The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless."



Curator Laura Hoptman’s essay is illustrated with many of Wyeth's works and she writes about the work and places it within the context of Wyeth’s life and career.  As the art world moved onto Abstract Expressionism and then onto Pop Art, Wyeth never changed the style of how he worked. He drew criticism for being too conservative and for being too provincial as he refused to move on with the times. Hoptman's book examines kitsch and art-world elitism that continue to surround Wyeth’s work today, long after his death in 2009.

For more of Hoptman’s essay, download a preview of Wyeth: Christina’s World from the MoMA website.



Below are some items from the Art Division's collection

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MoMA: Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

August 12, 2012–January 7, 2013

This MoMA gallery exhibition and accompanying film retrospective will be the first presentation of the Quay Brothers' work in all their fields of creative activity. Internationally renowned moving image artists and designers, the Quay Brothers were born outside Philadelphia and have worked from their London studio, Atelier Koninck, since the late 1970s. For over 30 years, they have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation and live-action movie-making in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer and the Russian Yuri Norstein, and have championed a design aesthetic influenced by the graphic surrealism of Polish poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Beginning with their student films in 1971, the Quay Brothers have produced over 45 moving image works, including two features, music videos, dance films, documentaries, and signature personal works, including The Street of Crocodiles (1986), the Stille Nacht series (1988–2008), Institute Benjamenta (1995), andIn Absentia (2000). They have also designed sets and projections for opera, drama, and concert performances such as Tchaikovsky’sMazeppa (1991), Ionesco’s The Chairs (Tony-nominated design, 1997), Richard Ayre’s The Cricket Recovers (2005), and recent site-specific pieces based on the work of Bartók and Kafka.

In addition to their better known films, this exhibition will include never-before-seen moving image works and graphic design, drawings, and calligraphy, presenting animated and live-action films alongside installations, objects, and works on paper.

Book from the Exhibit will be here soon

Taryn Simon Interview with Charlie Rose

Artist Taryn Simon on her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII"

Click photo above to watch video

TARYN SIMON: A LIVING MAN DECLARED DEAD AND OTHER CHAPTERS I–XVIII

May 2–September 3, 2012

The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor

This exhibition is the U.S. premiere of Taryn Simon's (b. 1975, New York) photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII. The work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the 18 “chapters” that make up the work, external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. (from MoMA).

Read more at MoMA

MOMA: Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000

July 29–November 5, 2012

MoMA’s ambitious survey of 20th century design for children is the first large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking. The exhibition will bring together areas underrepresented in design history and often considered separately, including school architecture, clothing, playgrounds, toys and games, children’s hospitals and safety equipment, nurseries, furniture, and books. Read more at MoMA

MoMA:Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII

Excerpt from Chapter XVII, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII5. (Name withheld), 16 Mar. 1993. Student. Undisclosed location, Ukraine. 18. (Name withheld), 25 Nov. 1993. Student. Undisclosed location, Ukraine. 19. (Name withheld), 17 Jan. 1994. Student. Undisclosed location, Ukraine.© 2012 Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII

May 2–September 3, 2012

The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor

This exhibition is the U.S. premiere of Taryn Simon's (b. 1975, New York) photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII. The work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the 18 “chapters” that make up the work, external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. (from MoMA).

Read more at MoMA

More about Taryn Simon

Find books on Taryn Simon in the Central Library's Art Collection

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

The Innocents

Leading civil rights attorneys Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck of The Innocence Project commissioned photographer Taryn Simon to travel across the United States photographing and interviewing individuals who were convicted of heinous crimes of which they were innocent. Simon photographed these innocents at sites of particular significance to their illegitimate conviction: the scene of the crime, misidentification, arrest, or alibi. Simon’s portraits are accompanied by a commentary by Neufeld and Scheck.

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language

May 6–August 27, 2012

Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language is a group exhibition that brings together 12 contemporary artists and artists’ groups working in all mediums including painting, sculpture, film, video, audio, and design, all of whom concentrate on the material qualities of language—visual, aural, and beyond. The work that these artists create belongs to a distinguished history of poem/objects, and concrete language experiments that dates to the beginnings of modernism, and includes both the Dada and Futurist moments as well as the recrudescence of Neo-Dada in the late 1950s, and international literary movements like concrete and sound poetry in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Like visual artists who experimented with abstract forms with the goal of arriving at a non-metaphoric artwork that was itself and nothing else, artists working with words in the late 1950s and 1960s used language as a medium; letters, words, and texts were dissected, displayed as objects, or arranged so that form and content were combined.

The works in Ecstatic Alphabets represent a radical updating of the possibilities inherent in the relationship between art and language. In this exhibition, the letter, the word and the phrase are seen and experienced, and not necessarily read. The exhibition is divided into two sections, with the first featuring an abbreviated timeline of language in modern art culled primarily from drawings, sculptures, prints, books, and sound works from MoMA's collection.

 Artists in this historical section of the exhibition include: Carl Andre, Marcel Broodthaers, Henri Chopin, Marcel Duchamp, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Giorno, Kitasono Katue, Ferdinand Kriwet, Liliane Lijn, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, and others. Artists in the contemporary section of the exhibition include: Ei Arakawa/Nikolas Gambaroff, Tauba Auerbach, Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), Trisha Donnelly, Shannon Ebner, Paul Elliman, Experimental Jetset, Sharon Hayes, Karl Holmqvist, Paulina Olowska, Adam Pendleton, and Nora Schultz. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication designed and produced by Dexter Sinister. (from MoMA).

View Images from the Exhibit here:

Read more at the New York Times, Building Blocks of Meaning, Retranslated ‘Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language’ at MoMA. 

“Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language” at ArtInfo.

MoMA: Print/Out February 19–May 14, 2012

February 19–May 14, 2012

Ellen Gallagher. Black Combs from DeLuxe (detail). 2004–05. Photogravure, chine collé, oil, laser cutting, plasticine, and toy eyeballs, from a portfolio of 60 mixed media works, composition and sheet: 13 x 10" (33 x 25.4 cm). Publisher and printer: Two Palms Press, New York. Edition: 20. Acquired through the generosity of The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art and The Speyer Family Foundation, Inc., with additional support from the General Print Fund. © 2012 Ellen Gallagher and Two Palms Press

Print/Out looks at how artists have changed the way a print is made and the way we look at prints. The idea of a print has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. No longer confined to a piece of paper rolled through a press, the print is a medium where artists have can play with mediums such as digitization, appropriation from other sources, and blur what is the original and what is the fake. Artists now alter images into other images using digital technology to make “new originals.” 

Print/Out, is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Printin’. Printin’ begins with 60 works by Gallagher (American, b. 1965). Gallagher pushes the idea of what is a print and uses mediums not usually associated with prints such as pomade and ice. The exhibit shows 50 other artists that begin with the 17th century to present day. Print/Out is an exhibit that brings together drawings, films, books, sculptures, videos, and comic strips. The exhibition features such artists as Vija Celmins, David Hammons, George Herriman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Martha Rosler. 

Over the past two decades, the art world has broadened its geographic reach and opened itself to new continents, allowing for a significant crosspollination of post-conceptual strategies and vernacular modes. Printed materials, both in innovative and traditional forms, have played a key role in this exchange of ideas and sources. This catalogue, published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, examines the evolution of artistic practices related to prints, from the resurgence of ancient printmaking techniques often used alongside digital technologies to the worldwide proliferation of self-published artists books and ephemera. Print/Out features focused sections on ten artists and publishers, including Ai Weiwei, Ellen Gallagher, Martin Kippenberger, Lucy McKenzie, Museum in Progress, Superflex and Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as rich illustrations of additional printed projects from the last twenty years by major artists such as Trisha Donnelly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Schütte, and Kelley Walker. An introductory essay by Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, offers an overview of this period with particular attention to new directions and strategies within an expanded field of printmaking.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1169

MoMA: Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration

March 14–July 9, 2012


Exquisite Corpse is a game Surrealists played where players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for them to add their part. At the end there is a composite juxtaposition of thoughts that created a surreal story. The Surrealist artists also played with the human body and subjected it to distortions which also resulted in a composite. Through history we see the exquisite corpse come to life by artists like André Masson and Joan Miró to Louise Bourgeois and Robert Gober to Mark Manders and Nicola Tyson.

These corporeal pastiche drawings can be seen now through July 9 at MoMA.
MoMA press release.

Read a review of the show at Hyperallergic and at the New York Times.

Cindy Sherman Unmasked

Yes it's my third post about Cindy Sherman but this show at MOMA is about to open her landmark show on Feb. 26. with more than 170 photographs some 18 feet tall. Sherman is the subject of all her photographs where she uses props she has collected to alter herself, complete with wigs, body parts, and full rubber body suits. Sherman is the makeup artist, costumer, and photographer, the creator, the dark and complex characters that maybe we have encountered in other paces other than a museum wall.
Read more at the NYT article.
See more at MoMA Interactive

The photographer Cindy Sherman in a rare pose as herself.

Cindy Sherman show at MOMA

Cindy Sherman at MOMA

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman

At MOMA in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor-

February 26–June 11, 2012  

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.
See more at MoMA Interactive.