de Kooning: A Retrospective - MOMA

This website includes selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the MoMA exhibition de Kooning: A Retrospective (September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012) and related publication, both devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning (American, b. the Netherlands, 1904–1997). Among these are some of the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—including Pink Angels (c. 1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus examples from all of his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid-1950s to the artist’s return to figurations in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. text and image source: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/dekooning/

Link Credits

MOMA - Abstract Expressionist New York, October 3, 2010–April 25, 2011

More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker in 1946, first used the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe the richly colored canvases of Hans Hofmann. Over the years the name has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. Beginning in the 1940s, under the aegis of Director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., works by these artists began to enter the Museum’s collection. Thanks to the sustained support of the curators, the trustees, and the artists themselves, these ambitious acquisitions continued throughout the second half of the last century and produced a collection of Abstract Expressionist art of unrivaled breadth and depth.

Drawn entirely from the Museum’s vast holdings, Abstract Expressionist New York underscores the achievements of a generation that catapulted New York City to the center of the international art world during the 1950s, and left as its legacy some of the twentieth century’s greatest masterpieces...source: MOMA website

Link Abstract Expressionist New York, MOMA website

William Kentridge - MOMA, 5 Themes, An Interactive Site

William Kentridge

"I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing - the contingent way that images arrive in the work - lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world." - William Kentridge

Over the last three decades William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955) has developed a vast multidisciplinary practice that includes drawing, film animation, artist's books, printmaking, collage, and theatrical performance. He first achieved international recognition in the 1990s, with a series of what he called "drawings for projection," short animated films made from charcoal drawings that address life in Johannesburg during and after apartheid...

 - source, MOMA web site

Link  William Kentridge - MOMA, 5 Themes

Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh

Starry Night(created after the painting), Reed Pen and Pencil, 18.5 x 25.5 inches, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, Museum of Architecture (?), Moscow, Russia

Starry Night, Oil on Canvas, 29x36.25 inches, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, MoMa

Letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo Van Gogh (excerpt)

June 17 or 18, 1889

...At last I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky. Though I have not seen either Gauguin's or Bernard's last canvases, I am pretty well convinced that these two studies I've spoken of are parallel in feeling.

When you have looked at these two studies for some time, and that of the ivy as well, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and Bernard and I sometimes used to talk about, and which we've thought about a good deal; it is not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no. Nevertheless, by going the way of Delacroix, more than is apparent, by colour and a more spontaneous drawing than delusive precision, one could express the purer nature of a countryside compared with the suburbs and cabarets of Paris... - source: Vincent van Gogh. Letter to Theo van Gogh. Written 17 or 18 June 1889 in Saint-Rémy. Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, number 595.

When he wrote this letter, Vincent Van Gogh was 36 years old. He died July 29, 1890.

Link Full Text

Link Starry Night, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Chuck Close and the Painting Process

Excerpt from the public program Painting Process/Process Painting, featuring artists Chuck Close and Carroll Dunham.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, What Is Painting? Contemporary Art from the Collection.

For more information about the exhibition, please visit http://www.moma.org/exhibitions.php?i... For a full audio recording of the presentation as well as the conversation with Chuck Close, Carroll Dunham, and curator Anne Umland, please visit http://www.moma.org/audio or the ThinkModern podcast in iTunes.

© 2007 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Category: Film & Animation

Link Google, Chuck Close Images

Matisse - The Dance, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

The Dance, Matisse, Oil/Canvas, 260 cm × 391 cm (100 in × 150 in), 1909/1910

The Dance by Matisse is considered by scholars to be a defining moment for Matisse and modern art. There are two versions. The preliminary version hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA. The final version hangs in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

"The pair of panels known as 'The Dance and Music' (also in the Hermitage) are amongst Matisse's most important - and most famous - works of the period 1908 to 1913. They were commissioned in 1910 by one of the leading Russian collectors of French late 19th and early 20th-century art, Sergey Shchukin. Until the Revolution of 1917, they hung on the staircase of his Moscow mansion." - Hermitage Museum

Link The Dance, Full Commentary, Hermitage Museum

Link The Dance (Preliminary Version), Commentary, MoMa

Link Hermitage Museum Web Site

Link MoMa Web Site

Color Chart - Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, MOMA

'This (MOMA) exhibition takes as its point of departure the commercial color chart, an item that openly declares the status of color as mass-produced and standardized. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual or emotional power of particular colors gave way to the embrace of color as an ordinary commodity...the...quest for personal expression...instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine." The artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "Straight out of the can; it can't get better than that." This exhibition features the work of forty-four artists who take a position in which art and life mingle rather than remain separate, and where beauty is found in the everyday rather than in the ideal.'

Ann Temkin, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture

Link Online Interactive Exhibit, MOMA

Webby Award Nominee, 2009

George Seurat - The Drawings

George Seurat, Charcoal/Paper

MoMa offers us an online exhibit of Seurat drawings and sketchbooks with commentary. You can 'flip' through four sketchbooks and catch a glimpse of his pictorial thinking. Please take a look.

Link George Seurat - The Drawings, MoMa