The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 and is often recognized as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. Over the course of the next ten years, the Museum moved three times into progressively larger temporary quarters, and in 1939 finally opened the doors of its midtown home, located on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in midtown.
MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. Highlights of the collection inlcude Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Salvador Dali's The Persisence of Memory, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiseels d'Avignon and Three Musicians, Claude Monet's Water Lilies, Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Paul Gauguin's The Seed of the Areoi, Henri Matisse's Dance, Marc Chagall's I and the Village, Paul Cezanne's The Bather, Jackson Pollack's Number 31, 1950, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans. MoMA also owns approximately 22,000 films and four million film stills, and MoMA's Library and Archives, the premier research facilities of their kind in the world, hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, and extensive individual files on more than 70,000 artists.
In 1928, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., Lillie Plummer Bliss and Marry Quinn Sulivan, wife of Cornelius J. Sullivan, perceived a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums. They rented six rooms on the twelfth floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building and opened to the public on November 7, 1929--just nine days after the Wall Street Crash.
Initial public reaction was positive, and the museum museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next ten years. Behind the guidance of president A. Conger Goodyear and director Alfred H. Barr Jr, the museum's holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. MoMA became America's premier American museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.
In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Abby son, Nelson Rockefeller was selected as President in 1939 and that same year oversaw the museum's move to its present midtown location, on land donated by John D. Rockefeller. The new building, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip C. Johnson and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, and with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin Roosevelt.
Subsequent expansions took place during the 1950s and 1960s planned by the architect Philip Johnson, who also designed The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden. In 1984, a major renovation designed by Cesar Pelli doubled the Museum's gallery space and enhanced visitor facilities. At the turn of millennium, the building again underwent extensive renovations, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening on November 20, 2004. Designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, the new MoMA features 630,000 square feet of new and redesigned space. The Peggy and David Rockefeller Building on the western portion of the site houses the main exhibition galleries, and The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building—the Museum's first building devoted solely to these activities—on the eastern portion of the site provides over five times more space for classrooms, auditoriums, teacher training workshops, and the Museum's expanded Library and Archives. These two buildings frame the enlarged Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.
In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art was ranked #146 on the AIA 150 America's Favorite Architecture list.
Tags: New York City NYC Manhattan midtown museum MoMA museum of modern art AIA150 International style Philip C. Johnson Edward Durrell Stone Yoshio Taniguchi ny New York
Le Monument à Balzac (The Monument to Balzac) by Auguste Rodin was commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres, under the impetus of its president, Emile Zola. The original commission to honor one of France's greatest novelists, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) went to sculptor Henri Chapu, but after he died in 1891, Rodin agreed to deliver the 3-meter tall bronze sculpture within 18 months, which was to be placed at the Palais-Royal.
Rodin immersed himself in the piece. Since Balzac had been dead for forty years, he faced the challenge of having to render his likeness from photographs. He extensively researched the writer's life and works, made several trips to Balzac's home region of Tourraine, posed models who resembled him, and even went as far as to order suit from Balzac's tailor to visualize his size and girth. Over the course of the next seven years, Roding completed over fifty prepatory studies. Some showed Balzac paunchy, others atheltic. Some were nudes, and others in his preferred work clothes, the Dominican cowl. In 1894, the Société threatend to dissolve the contract and pass the commission onto Alexandre Falguière. Roding responded with a promise to speed up the work.
Rodin finally settled on an athletic figure, leaning slightly backwards. He ordered six plaster casts to be made and had them covered in an empty-sleeved coat. When finally exhibited at the 1898 Salon, it was widely attacked. Critics dismissed it as a crude sketch, associating the figure with everything from an erected phallus to a sack of coal to a snowman, and interpreting him masturbating under his protecting coat. The Société des Gens de Lettres, now presided by Henry Houssaye, rejected piece and the payment it owed him. Rodin's admirers, who mainly supported the politically volatile imprisoned Jewish officer Dreyfus, tried to collect enough to purchase the monument for public display but instead retired it to his studio at Meudon, refusing to allow it to be cast during his lifetime. In 1939, 22 years after Rodin's death, Balzac was finally cast in bronze and placed at the crossing of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail.
This casting, standing 9'3 x 48 1/4" x 41" was executed in 1954 and presented to MoMA in memory of Curt Valentin by his friends.
Tags: New York City NYC Manhattan moma museum of modern art art aia150 museum rodin statue sculpture Auguste Rodin New York ny monument to balzac Honore de Balzac Honoré de Balzac balzac balzac monument monument a balzac Le Monument à Balzac Le Monument a Balzac Monument à Balzac
Frank Stella
American, born 1936
Empress of India, 1965
Metallic powder in polymer emulsion paint on canvas, 6' 5" x 18' 8"
Gift of S. I. Newhouse, Jr.
Gallery label text, 2007:
Part of Stella's Notched-V series, begun in late 1964, Empress of India comprises four different colored chevronshaped canvases. Stella deliberately avoided dramatic changes in color intensity, because, he reasoned, "when you have four vectored V's moving against each other, if one jumps out, you dislocate the plane and destroy the whole thing entirely." The lines parallel to the canvas edges, painted in metallic browns and ochres, contribute to Stella's perceptual play of pushing parts of the whole forward and back. Although it is unclear why Stella chose the phrase "Empress of India" for this painting, the grandly scaled work shares the title taken by Queen Victoria when India was incorporated into the British Empire.
Tags: New York City NYC Manhattan moma museum of modern art art aia150 museum frank stella empress of india New York ny
Le Monument à Balzac (The Monument to Balzac) by Auguste Rodin was commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres, under the impetus of its president, Emile Zola. The original commission to honor one of France's greatest novelists, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) went to sculptor Henri Chapu, but after he died in 1891, Rodin agreed to deliver the 3-meter tall bronze sculpture within 18 months, which was to be placed at the Palais-Royal.
Rodin immersed himself in the piece. Since Balzac had been dead for forty years, he faced the challenge of having to render his likeness from photographs. He extensively researched the writer's life and works, made several trips to Balzac's home region of Tourraine, posed models who resembled him, and even went as far as to order suit from Balzac's tailor to visualize his size and girth. Over the course of the next seven years, Roding completed over fifty prepatory studies. Some showed Balzac paunchy, others atheltic. Some were nudes, and others in his preferred work clothes, the Dominican cowl. In 1894, the Société threatend to dissolve the contract and pass the commission onto Alexandre Falguière. Roding responded with a promise to speed up the work.
Rodin finally settled on an athletic figure, leaning slightly backwards. He ordered six plaster casts to be made and had them covered in an empty-sleeved coat. When finally exhibited at the 1898 Salon, it was widely attacked. Critics dismissed it as a crude sketch, associating the figure with everything from an erected phallus to a sack of coal to a snowman, and interpreting him masturbating under his protecting coat. The Société des Gens de Lettres, now presided by Henry Houssaye, rejected piece and the payment it owed him. Rodin's admirers, who mainly supported the politically volatile imprisoned Jewish officer Dreyfus, tried to collect enough to purchase the monument for public display but instead retired it to his studio at Meudon, refusing to allow it to be cast during his lifetime. In 1939, 22 years after Rodin's death, Balzac was finally cast in bronze and placed at the crossing of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail.
This casting, standing 9'3 x 48 1/4" x 41" was executed in 1954 and presented to MoMA in memory of Curt Valentin by his friends.
Tags: New York City NYC Manhattan moma museum of modern art art aia150 museum rodin statue sculpture Auguste Rodin New York ny monument to balzac Honore de Balzac Honoré de Balzac balzac balzac monument monument a balzac Le Monument à Balzac Le Monument a Balzac Monument à Balzac
Richard Serra, Sculpture: Forty Years was on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from June 3 - September 10, 2007. The exhibition was a forty-year survey of the work of American minimalist sculptor, Richard Serra (b. November 2, 1939, San Francisco). Serra, who was involved in the Process Art movement, is known for working with large scale assemblies of sheet metal (COR-TEN-Steel). The monumental exhibit, which included three new works, spanned the museum's tall-ceilinged second floor, sixth floor, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992-93) braved the outdoor elements.
Intersection II (1992-93), a gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, consists of four upright, almost identical conical sections of weatherproof steal--two sections 13'1 1/2" high x 51'9" along the chord x 2 1/8" thick; two sections 13'1 1/2" high x 50'9" along the chord x 2 1/8" thick. The sections tilt their way inviting visitors to travel along three routes between its massive walls, exerting a psychic pressure from the weight, height, and leaning angles, and from their variously dark and rusted surfaces. It is tempered by the elegant precision of their lines and the satisfying logic of their arrangement. The slopes and placements of the great steel curves produce two outer spaces that invert each other at floor and ceiling, one being wide where the other is narrow. Meanwhile the central space is a regular yet biased ellipse.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 and is often recognized as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. Over the course of the next ten years, the Museum moved three times into progressively larger temporary quarters, and in 1939 finally opened the doors of its midtown home, located on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in midtown. The building underwent extensive renovations, closing on May 21, 2002 and reopening to the public in a building redesigned by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, on November 20, 2004. The renovation project nearly doubled the space for exhibitions and programs, featuring 630,000 square feet of new and redesigned space.
MoMA's holdings include more than 150,000 individual pieces. Highlights of the collection inlcude Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Salvador Dali's The Persisence of Memory, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiseels d'Avignon and Three Musicians, Claude Monet's Water Lilies, Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Paul Gauguin's The Seed of the Areoi, Henri Matisse's Dance, Marc Chagall's I and the Village, Paul Cezanne's The Bather, Jackson Pollack's Number 31, 1950, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans.
When David Rockefeller became president of MoMA in 1958, replacing his brother Nelson who took up the position of Governor of New York, he hired the noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the Museum garden and name it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The Gardens are framed by the Peggy and David Rockefeller Building, which houses the main exhibition galleries, on the western end of the site; and and The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, on the eastern end.
In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art was ranked #146 on the AIA 150 America's Favorite Architecture list.
Tags: New York City NYC Manhattan moma museum of modern art art aia150 museum richard serra sculpture Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years steel intersection Intersection II Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden sculpture garden modern art New York ny minimalist process art