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Tag: guggenheim

Published May 28, 2016

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present

“Photogram” (1926) by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.
“Photogram” (1926) by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy

The New York Times on a new exhibition of work by Hungarian artist and designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Guggenheim in New York:

The first large Moholy-Nagy exhibition in this country in over 50 years may also be, its organizers say, the largest anywhere. It packs around 300 works into Frank Lloyd Wright’s great spiral — perhaps a record itself. They represent some dozen mediums including painting and sculpture, film and projection, works on paper as well as graphic, set and exhibition design and several forms of photography.

The show provides a bracing picture of both the extent and the unity of Moholy-Nagy’s art as it moves up the ramp, superbly styled for the occasion by Kelly Cullinan, the museum’s senior exhibition designer. Her scheme separates Moholy-Nagy’s achievement into separate strands and then braids them together fluidly. The abstract paintings and sculptures dominate the museum’s signature bays; most films are displayed in small alcoves between the ramps. Moholy-Nagy’s extensive writings and graphic design are displayed on each level in vitrines, whose bright rectangular lids manage to evoke the colorful trapezoids in his paintings. And his complex involvement with photography is played out on free-standing partitions, enabling close study of the interplay of documentary, photomontage and camera-less photograms — a term he invented — sometimes made using his own sculpture. Certain forms and motifs reappear in different mediums, and the give and take between photography and painting is one of the show’s driving forces.

It sounds like a must-see.

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is at the Guggenheim until September 7. The exhibition is also travelling to Chicago and Los Angeles.

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Published March 14, 2014

Modernity as Catastrophe

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At the London Review of Books, Hal Foster reviews the exhibition of Italian Futurism currently at the Guggenheim in New York:

Futurism wasn’t all bravado; it did have an aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) of its own, which was to modernise the arts through a mimicry of the effects of new media, such as the adaptation of chronophotography and cinema to painting, photography and sculpture, or the application of the phonograph to musical performance. More ambitiously, the futurists sought to refashion the human sensorium along the lines of these new techniques of perception, and to this end they updated the ideas of synaesthesia, or the fusion of the senses, and kinaesthesia, or the mixing of bodies in motion and at rest. At the same time (and this is just one of many contradictions), the futurists were conservative stylistically; for all their nationalist pride, they relied on French sources, especially the divisionist brushstroke of neo-impressionist painting, which they adapted to themes of the modern city. Thus in Street Light (1909) Giacomo Balla offers the streetlamp as an improvement on the moon: both kinds of illumination are represented as waves of energy, but the artificial light dominates the natural one. So too in The City Rises (1910-11) Boccioni shows us the metropolis as a firestorm of colour greater than any in nature, where construction is difficult to distinguish from destruction; here the futurists thrill to modernity as catastrophe.

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Published February 21, 2014

In Thrall to Machines: Italian Futurism, 1909–1944

ex_depero_Skyscrapers-and-Tunnels

The New York Times reviews Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, a new exhibition at the Guggenheim:

Was any avowedly modern art movement as obnoxious and noisily contradictory as Italian Futurism? By turn aesthetically revolutionary and politically reactionary, farsighted and visually challenged, not to mention officially misogynist, it is both a stain on the Modernist brand and a point of pride. It needs all the help it can get and it receives a large dose from “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,” an epic exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.

Cool Hunting talks to curator Vivien Greene about the exhibition:

The show has a lot of didactics. Some of the artwork addresses that directly, so it’s easy enough to see their ideas, but we walk people through it as well. They celebrated war as this kind of cleansing medium, and a part of it was because Italy was seen as being so staid and so bourgeois, and after Italian unification in 1860, all those ideals of the Risorgimento really never come to fruition. So this idea of burn down the past and start fresh, be super modern—there were a lot of ideas of regeneration. But they also were very pro war because they wanted to enter World War One to get back the lands that were still under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire that were part of the Italian peninsula. So that’s a really practical historical reason that goes beyond you know, Sorelian ideas of the mob and violence—although Georges Sorel does inform them too, but sort of at different levels… [They] also were very aggressive: they start off as a left-wing revolutionary movement and then—how it often happens when you’re at one extreme of something totalitarian—you shift to the other and end up being on the right. They disagreed with the anarchists because the anarchists, although they were running around throwing bombs, had a more pacifist goal in mind.

Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe opens 21 February 2014 and runs through 1 September 2014.

(pictured above: Fortunato Depero, Skyscrapers and Tunnels (Gratticieli e tunnel), 1930.)

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