MY MAGICAL ATTIC: MOMA AT NGV: MORE THAN 200 WORKS FROM THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

July 06, 2018

MOMA AT NGV: MORE THAN 200 WORKS FROM THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

MOMA AT NGV: MORE THAN 200 WORKS FROM

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK COME TO MELBOURNE

June 9, 2018 – October 7, 2018

MOMA AT NGV: MORE THAN 200 WORKS FROM

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK COME TO MELBOURNE

June 9, 2018 – October 7, 2018

May 1, 2018: In an international exclusive, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) presents a major exhibition of modern and contemporary masterworks from New York’s iconic Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the world-premiere exhibition MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, opened June 9, 2018 at NGV International in Melbourne.

Co-organised by the NGV and MoMA, the exhibition features more than 200 works – many of which have never been seen in Australia – from a line-up of seminal nineteenth and twentieth-century artists, including Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Louise Bourgeois, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Agnes Martin and Andy Warhol. Bringing the exhibition up to the present are works by many significant twenty-first century artists including Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, El Anatsui, Rineke Dijkstra, Kara Walker, Mona Hatoum and Camille Henrot.

MoMA at NGV is the largest instalment of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition series to date, for the first time encompassing the entire ground floor of NGV International. Showcasing MoMA’s multidisciplinary approach to collecting and the breadth of its collection, the exhibition display features works drawn from the Museum’s six curatorial departments: Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Film, Media and Performance Art, Painting and Sculpture, and Photography.

MoMA at NGV will explore the emergence and development of major art movements, and represent more than 130 years of radical artistic innovation. The exhibition will also reflect the wider technological, social and political developments that transformed society during this period, from late nineteenth century urban and industrial transformation, through to the digital and global present. In recognition of both MoMA and NGV’s long-standing dedication to the study and presentation of architecture and design, the exhibition explores the deep-seated connections between twentieth-century art and design practice, with a particular focus on developments that shaped Europe in the 1920s and ’30s and the globalised world of the 1960s and ’70s.

Unfolding across eight loosely chronological thematic sections, the exhibition opens with ‘Arcadia and Metropolis’, examining how artists at the dawn of the 20th century responded to the rise of cities. ‘The Machinery of the Modern World’ highlights the simultaneity of foundational avant-garde movements (Futurism, Cubism, Orphism, Dada) and references MoMA’s 1934 Machine Art exhibition, while ‘A New Unity’ presents the cross-media manifestations of the Russian avant-garde, de Stijl, the Bauhaus and Joaquín Torres-Garcia’s School of the South. In ‘Inner and Outer Worlds’, iconic Surrealist paintings are seen alongside contemporaneous works that negotiate the relationship between interior and exterior landscapes. ‘Art as Action’ highlights key examples of Abstract Expressionism and expands to include other forms of kineticism in the 1950s. The exhibition’s largest section, ‘Things as They Are’, encompasses the varied production of the 1960s and ’70s, from Pop art to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, followed by ‘Immense Encyclopedia’, focusing on gestures of appropriation and reflections of identity from the 1980s and ’90s. The last section of the exhibition, ‘Flight Patterns’, considers contemporary ideas of movement, migration, and globalisation. Installation and performance works (Olafur Eliasson’s Ventilator, Simone Forti’s Huddle, and Roman Ondak’s Measuring the Universe) will also run throughout the course of the exhibition.

The Hon. Premier Daniel Andrews said: ‘Picasso, Van Gogh and Matisse: only in Melbourne will you see this roll call of history’s most iconic art figures – it will be an experience not to be missed. MoMA is one of the most prestigious modern art galleries in the world and its partnership with the NGV is testament to Victoria’s reputation as an international cultural destination.’

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV said: ‘This exciting exhibition will showcase an unparalleled collection of modern and contemporary art and design. We are delighted to be working with MoMA to bring such an extraordinary and diverse selection of works to Melbourne. Our visitors will be able to experience first-hand the momentous change and creativity in the development of modern art, and consequently appreciate contemporary art and design with greater understanding.’

Glenn D. Lowry, Director, MoMA said: ‘MoMA’s mission is to share our story of modern and contemporary art with the widest possible audience, to encourage the understanding and enjoyment of the art of our time. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to share these important works from nearly every area of our collection with the NGV and the many visitors who will take advantage of this rare opportunity.’

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/media_release/moma-at-ngv-more-than-200-works-from-the-museum-of-modern-art-new-york-come-to-melbourne-this-winter/

ARCADIA & METROPOLIS

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, artists reacted to the new era’s industrial innovations in various ways. Some embraced urbanisation and its technologies, making the metropolis the subject of their work. Others retreated to Arcadian idylls, composing pictorial sanctuaries of harmony and balance.

Post-Impressionist painters were among those who continued to create within established academic genres, seen here in a portrait by Vincent van Gogh, a landscape by Georges Seurat and a still life by Paul Cézanne. But if these artists’ subjects were traditional, their techniques were wholly inventive, including sinuous brushstrokes, divisionist dots and flattening facets employed as methods to reject illusionism. Others mined non-Western cultures for fresh inspiration; for example, paintings by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse in this gallery look to Tahiti and Japan, respectively, for their figures and forms.

At the same time, other artists revelled in portraying the spectacle culture of rapidly growing cities: Eugène Atget’s photographs, Jules Chéret’s posters, a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and a film by Auguste and Louis Lumière all capture the media and movement of a newly wired Paris. The designs of Berlin-based Peter Behrens – industrial objects as well as the branding conceived to promote them – similarly speak to the electricity of the age.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

ANDRE DERAIN

BATHERS 1907 (PART FROM PAINTING)

ANDRE DERAIN

BATHERS 1907

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 132.1 x 195 cm

Credit: William S. Paley and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Funds

HENRI MATISSE FRENCH 1869–1954

La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water 1905

Oil and Pencil on Canvas

Dimensions: 35.2 x 28.2 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Purchase and Anonymous Gift, 1983

HENRI MATISSE FRENCH 1869–1954

La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water 1905 (Detail)

ANDRE DERAIN

FISHING BOATS, COLLIOURE 1905

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 38.2 x 46.3 cm

Credit: The Philip L. Goodwin Collection

PETER BEHRENS

AEG. METAL FILAMENT LAMPS

Lithograph

Dimensions: 69.2 x 52.7 cm

Printer: Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Berlin, Germany

Credit: Arthur Drexler Fund

VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER GERMAN 1880–1938

STREET, DRESDEN 1908 ( REWORKED 1919, DATED ON PAINTING 1907) (DETAIL)

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER GERMAN 1880–1938

STREET, DRESDEN 1908 ( REWORKED 1919, DATED ON PAINTING 1907)

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 150.5 x 200.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Purchase, 1951 Digital Image

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER GERMAN 1880–1938

STREET, DRESDEN 1908 ( REWORKED 1919, DATED ON PAINTING 1907) (DETAIL)

PAUL GAUGUIN FRENCH 1848 - 1903

THE MOON & THE EARTH 1893

Oil on Burlap

Dimensions: 114.3 x 62.2 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934 Digital Image

HENRI MATISSE FRENCH 1869 - 1954

MUSIC ( SKETCH ) 1907

Oil and Charcoal on Canvas

Dimensions: 73.4 x 60.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of

A. Conger Goodyear in Honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1962

HENRI MATISSE FRENCH 1869 - 1954

MUSIC ( SKETCH ) 1907 (DETAIL)

EUGENE ATGET

FLEURS C.1896

Gelatin Silver Printing - Out - Paper Print

Dimensions: Approx. 22 x 18 cm

Credit: Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden

HENRI DE TOULOUSE - LAUTREC, FRENCH 1864–1901

LA GOULUE AT THE MOULIN ROUGE 1891–92

Oil on Cardboard

Dimensions: 79.4 x 59.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy, 1957

Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018

VINCENT VAN GOGH DUTCH 1853 - 1890

PORTRAIT OF JOSEPH ROULIN 1889

VINCENT VAN GOGH DUTCH 1853 - 1890

PORTRAIT OF JOSEPH ROULIN 1889

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 64.4 x 55.2 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden,
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Rosenberg, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Bartos,

The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, Mr. and Mrs. Werner E. Josten,

and Loula D. Lasker Bequest (all by exchange), 1989 Digital Image

VINCENT VAN GOGH DUTCH 1853 - 1890

PORTRAIT OF JOSEPH ROULIN 1889 (DETAIL)

JULES CHERET

FOLIES – BERGERE, LA LOIE FULLER 1893

Lithograph

Dimensions: 123.2 x 87.6 cm

Publisher: Folies-Bergère, Paris

Printer: Chaix

Credit: Acquired by Exchange

JULES CHERET

THEATER PHONE 1890

Lithograph

Dimensions: 124.2 x 87.4 cm

Printer: Imp. Chaix (Ateliers Chéret), Paris

AUGUSTE LUMIERE FRENCH 1862–1954

LOUIS LUMIERE FRENCH 1864–1948

DANSE SERPENTINE 1897–99 ( STILL )

Digital File, Transferred From Original 16mm Handcoloured Film,

Silent, 59 Sec © Institut Lumière

EINSTEIN AND 20TH-CENTURY ART: A ROMANCE OF MANY DIMENSIONS

Linda Dalrymple Henderson

A century after Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905, much research remains to be done on the impact of Einstein and Relativity Theory on 20th-century art as a whole. For the scientist whom Time magazine declared the “Person of the Century” in December 1999 and whose effect on 21st-century culture is unquestioned, this situation may seem rather surprising.1 In large part, it is the result of a misidentification—that of Einstein’s theories with Pablo Picasso’s Cubism—which began to be made widely in the 1940s and which came to dominate the question of Relativity’s relationship to modern art. Typical of this view is painter Philip Courtenay’s essay “Einstein and Art” for the volume Einstein: The First Hundred Years, published in 1980 to mark the centennial of the scientist’s birth. “Cubism attempted to incorporate Einstein’s fourth dimension to gain ‘realism of conception,’” Courtenay asserts, concluding, “how much modern art was aided by Einstein’s ideas is an open question; that it was aided is not.”2 As recently as 2004, Mary Acton’s Learning to Look at Modern Art declared, “two years before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Einstein had published his Theory of Relativity. A central idea in the theory was that our view of the world cannot be understood in a purely three-dimensional way because of the existence of the fourth dimension, which is time.”3

Such vague associations of Cubism and Relativity, usually on the grounds of references to the “fourth dimension” in Cubist literature, had first been promulgated widely in Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture of 1941 and were given their fullest exposition in the writings of Paul Laporte in the late 1940s. For both Giedion and Laporte, connecting modern architecture and Picasso’s Cubism to Einstein was a means to validate new forms of artistic expression and to argue for their grounding in culture at large.4 Having observed this development firsthand, prominent art historian Meyer Schapiro reacted strongly to these claims, and at the Jerusalem Einstein Centennial Symposium in 1979, he delivered what Gerald Holton has described as “an extensive and devastating critique of the frequently proposed relation between modern physics and modern art.”5

Schapiro’s specific target was the purported Cubism-Relativity link. Unfortunately, he never reworked the talk into an essay for the 1982 publication of the conference proceedings, and thus his arguments reached a larger audience only in 2000, with the posthumous publication of his book The Unity of Picasso’s Art.6 In the meantime, other scholarship on this subject had begun to appear, including my 1983 book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. That text pointed up the absence of accessible literature on Relativity Theory in France in the pre–World War I era and established, on the contrary, the Cubists’ focus on the spatial “Fourth Dimension” that had been the subject of intense popular interest in the early decades of the century.7

Instead of the fourth dimension as time in the four-dimensional spacetime continuum Minkowski had formulated in 1908 for Relativity Theory, Cubist painters and theorists were stimulated by the notion of a suprasensible fourth dimension of space that might hold a reality truer than that of visual perception. An outgrowth of the mid-19th-century development of n-dimensional geometry, the spatial fourth dimension had first been popularized widely in E. A. Abbott’s 1884 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by a Square, a cautionary tale about refusing to believe that one’s world was merely a section of the next higher dimensional space. A massive amount of popular writing on the subject followed, including a 1909 Scientific American essay contest on the question, “What is the fourth dimension?” with entries received from all over the world.8

Beginning with the Cubists in pre–World War I Paris, artists in almost every modern movement engaged the spatial fourth dimension in one way or another during the first three decades of the century. In both Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Fig. 8.1) and French geometer E. Jouffret’s 1903 rendering of a “see-through” view of a four-dimensional solid, transparent, multiple views of an object as well as shifting, shaded triangular facets create an ambiguous space that cannot be read as three dimensional (Fig. 8.2). “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them,” Picasso declared, and—along with his engagement with the art of Cézanne and African sculpture (as well as the science discussed below)—contemporary interest in a higher dimension of space encouraged his increasingly conceptual approach to the visible world.9 Cubist theorists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger drew directly on Henri Poincaré’s ideas on tactile and motor sensations in his 1902 La Science et l’hypothèse, in which he asserted that “motor space would have as many dimensions as we have muscles” and suggested that one might represent a four-dimensional object by combining multiple perspectives of it.10

Whereas Schapiro had argued correctly against the Cubism-Relativity myth, his treatment of “science” in this period solely as Einstein and Relativity led him to argue against any sort of art-science connection in the early 20th century. In fact, Picasso and his fellow Cubist Georges Braque—as well as virtually all artists before the later 1910s—actually were responding to certain ideas in physics. However, it was the exhilarating discoveries of the 1890s redeﬁning the layperson’s understanding of matter and space (e.g., X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy)— and not Relativity Theory—that excited artists and writers in the ﬁrst two decades of the new century.11 In addition, the ether of space and its model of continuity and interpenetration had been embraced by the general public and were not to be dislodged easily, even after the popularization of Einstein’s theories in the wake of the 1919 eclipse expedition that conﬁrmed his prediction of the curvature of light by the mass of the sun.12 Rather than Relativity Theory, then, Picasso’s Vollard portrait gives visual form to the contemporary conception of space as suffused with ether and matter as transparent and continually dematerializing into the ether on the model of radioactivity. If Gustave Le Bon’s 1905 bestseller L’Evolution de la matière was the primary French popularization of this view, American science writer Robert Kennedy Duncan captured its essence in his 1905 book The New Knowledge: “How much we ourselves are matter and how much ether is, in these days, a very moot question.”13 Marcel Duchamp, Picasso’s counterpart in the early 20th century, was the artist most fully engaged with both late Victorian ether physics and the geometrical fourth dimension—a prowess manifested in his extensive notes for his nine-foot-tall work on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even of 1915–23 (Fig.8.3).

The Large Glass, as it is known, is a scientiﬁc and mathematical allegory of frustrated desire rooted in the insuperable contrasts Duchamp created between the realm of the Bride above and the domain of the Bachelors below. Here Duchamp’s organic Bride hangs, gravity-free, in an ethereal, indeterminate space he deﬁned as four-dimensional, forever beyond the reach of the three dimensional, perspectival gravity-bound Bachelor Machine below.14 The rising acclaim for Einstein and Relativity Theory after 1919, however, would alter the terrain for Duchamp and other early 20th-century artists, gradually displacing the popular spatial fourth dimension and inaugurating the conception of time as the fourth dimension that would characterize the public’s view for much of the century. Only in the 1960s and 1970s would the spatial fourth dimension begin to be recovered in popular literature, and it would re-emerge full-blown only in the 1980s with the rise of string theory and computer graphics.15

Duchamp, who died in 1968, lived through this metamorphosis and, as a result, waited until 1966 to publish his playfully inventive Large Glass notes on four-dimensional geometry and space in his White Box or A l’inﬁnitif, issued by the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in early 1967.16

Duchamp had published facsimiles of others of his notes in two earlier artist’s boxes, and Einstein’s status as cultural hero by century’s end was made clear in the deluxe publication of his 1912 manuscript on Special Relativity.Advertised as “the book of the century,” the manuscript was published with a slipcase and marketed as if it, too, were a deluxe artist’s book.17 From the 21st century we can now observe the waxing and waning of the two competing traditions represented by these individuals and objects: the spatial fourth dimension engaged by Duchamp and others in the early 20th century versus Einstein and Relativity Theory.

From its earliest days, the popular fourth dimension had quickly acquired a variety of nongeometric associations—from mystical higher consciousness and inﬁnity to science ﬁction usages—that made it attractive to a wide range of artists. Einsteinian Relativity, by contrast, represented a much more specifically scientiﬁc or mathematical source, which was also less immediately suggestive to the visual imagination of artists. Nonetheless, a good many artists took up the challenge of addressing Einstein and/or Relativity, and we can begin here to trace the shape of those responses during the 20th century and even propose an initial typology of reactions to them. Their varied form reﬂects, in part, the changing attitudes toward and understanding of Einstein and his physics during the course of the century. With Einstein standing as the single cultural icon of science for much of this period, any examination of his impact necessarily ranges beyond painting, sculpture, architecture, and experimental ﬁlm to include the broader ﬁeld of visual representations— cartoons, popular photographic images, book and magazine covers, and speciﬁc scientiﬁc illustrations—that served as vehicles for the art world’s “romance of many dimensions” with the scientist and his theories.

The cover of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung for December 14, 1919 (Fig. 8.4),documents Einstein’s sudden rise to celebrity that year, declaring,“ a new great in world history: Albert Einstein, whose researches, signifying a complete revolution in our concepts of nature, are on a par with the insights of a Copernicus, a Kepler, and a Newton.”

As might be expected, the ﬁrst widespread artistic response to Einstein and his ideas occurred in his home city of Berlin, which during the early 1920s became a crossroads for the international artistic avant-garde. Soon after this cover photo appeared, Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch incorporated it into her monumental (over a meter tall) photomontage, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knifethrough the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, dated 1919–20 (Fig.8.5).

In her commentary on postwar Weimar culture, Höch places Einstein in the upper left quadrant with other signs of revolution—literal and figurative—in opposition to the German military and Kaiser Wilhelm and in league with the Dadaists at lower right. Höch’s disjunctive and cacophonous technique of photomontage shouts Dada’s critique of values held sacred in art and culture—just as Einstein’s Relativity Theory had undercut the absolutes of Newtonian science.18 No knowledge of the new physics was necessary for Höch’s message—the face of Einstein sufﬁced for her purposes, as it would for a number of artists, designers, and cartoonists later in the century.

Predating Höch’s exposure to Einstein, the ﬁrst major attempt in Germany to embody any aspect of Relativity physics was actually Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (Fig. 8.6), built in 1920–21, but designed between 1917 and 1920.Mendelsohn was unique in having a direct connection to Einstein’s theories well before his 1919 emergence as a celebrity—in this case through the astronomer Erwin Finlay Freundlich. Mendelsohn had met Freundlich in 1913, when he was already in contact with Einstein about conducting experimental observations to test General Relativity. Freundlich conceived the Einstein Tower project with this goal in mind, and as Kathleen James has documented, Mendelsohn’s design was clearly stimulated by the astronomer’s exposition of Einstein’s theories.19 Seeking to express the new awareness of the energies inherent in mass, the architect chose reinforced concrete (ultimately replaced with brick in key places) to create a “dynamic...and rhythmic condition” in architecture. Mendelsohn was also particularly struck by the discussion in Special Relativity of the contractions of form that would be observed at the speed of light, and such deformations of distance and time would subsequently become one of the visual signs of Relativity Theory.20 Rooted in Jugendstil and Expressionist architectural styles, the Einstein Tower—like the Italian Futurism to which Mendelsohn also looked— interpreted science and technology in organic terms. Here his building surges forward as if its internal energies and formal distortions were those of muscles of the human body.

Mendelsohn’s organic vision of Relativity Theory was soon to be replaced by an emphasis on geometric form in the context of the Berlin avant-garde’s links to Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. Not until French Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s would the organic again become a preferred language for Relativity-oriented art.Although in the 1940s the Surrealists’ focus would be on imaginative renderings of the space-time continuum, as discussed below, Salvador Dalí’s 1931 The Persistence of Memory (see Plate 1) engages the distortions of space and time in Special Relativity that had also struck Mendelsohn. Among the Surrealists, Dalí was one of the artists most engaged with science, and he drew on both psychoanalysis and recent developments in science to support his theory of Paranoic-Critical Activity intended to “contribute to a total discrediting of the world of reality.”21 Dalí’s interest in Einstein and Special Relativity is clear in a seminal essay of 1930,in which he compares the paranoic “psychic dilation of ideas”to Einstein’s “physical dilation of measures.” In The Persistence of Memory, Dalí, inspired by a plate of melting cheese, gives visual form to the temporal and spatial distortions in Special Relativity, producing, as he later described it, “the soft, extravagant, and solitary paranoic-critical Camembert of time and space.”22

Given the variety of these three initial images, it is useful to categorize such responses in order to begin to characterize the ways in which 20thcentury artists have engaged Einstein and Relativity Theory. Höch’s collage (Fig. 8.5) is the ﬁrst of the genre that would dominate visual representations of Einstein and Relativity—the image of Einstein himself.23 Formal distortion or speciﬁc contraction of forms in the work of artists aware of Einstein such as Mendelsohn or Dalí—or graphic designers of book covers like David Cassidy’s 1995 Einstein and Our World—would be second on the initial list of eight approaches this essay will suggest.24 That sign of Relativity, however, has been rarer than the primary artistic response to Einstein that emerged in the early 1920s—the incorporation of time into art. As noted earlier, the new deﬁnition of time as the fourth dimension was rooted in Minkowski’s 1908 four dimensional space-time continuum that provided a framework for the viewpoints of all observers after Einstein had made them relative in 1905.25 Whereas Gottfried Ephraim Lessing in the 18th century deﬁned painting as the spatial art and music as the temporal art, Einstein’s and Minkowski’s theories now encouraged artists to claim time as their domain as well. This infusion of time and motion into art, which stands as a third type of response, was by far the most prevalent among artists throughout the 20th century.

No other German artist enjoyed Mendelsohn’s front-row seat on developing Relativity physics during the 1910s.After 1919, however, Einstein’s presence in Berlin and popular fascination with his theories made the city a locus for avant-garde innovation in response to the newest science.26 Moreover, because of the much greater scientiﬁc interest in Relativity Theory in Germany and Russia in the 1910s (in contrast to France, England, and the United States), German and Russian artists who gathered in Berlin were more likely than others to have heard something of Relativity Theory before the 1919 eclipse.27 Indeed, the two major Russian artists who participated in the Berlin milieu, Naum Gabo and El Lissitzky, had both spent time studying in Germany: Gabo pursued medicine, science, and art history in Munich, and Lissitzky studied architectural engineering in Darmstadt before earning a diploma as “engineer/architect” in Moscow. Gabo later recalled ﬁrst hearing of Relativity Theory in 1911 or 1912, when he was taking physics classes in Munich.28 Rather than physics, though, it was Gabo’s engineering skill that prepared him to create the ﬁrst time-based work of art.

While still in Moscow in 1920, Gabo had produced his Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (Tate Gallery, London), a vertical steel rod mounted on a base containing an electromagnet and springs that set the rod into the vibratory pattern of a standing wave.29 When Gabo exhibited the work in Berlin in 1922, he highlighted the sculpture’s temporal quality with the title Kinetic Construction (Time as a New Element of Plastic Art).Already in their Realist Manifesto of 1920, Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner had alluded to the newly popular space-time of Relativity Theory: “Space and time are re-born to us today....The realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time is the aim of our pictorial and plastic art.”30 As the ﬁrst sculpture in the history of art to incorporate motorized motion, Gabo’s Kinetic Construction is a milestone in the development of the tradition of kinetic art that would reach its height in the 1950s and 1960s. In a 1957 interview, Gabo afﬁrmed his continued commitment to the temporal fourth dimension: “Constructive sculpture...is four-dimensional in so far as we are striving to bring the element of time into it.”31

By 1922 the Berlin studio of the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy had become a central gathering point for avant-garde artistic discussion. In that year Moholy conceived the kinetic work he called a Light Prop for an Electric Stage, which he ﬁlmed in 1930 as it produced its moving patterns of reﬂected light (Fig.8.7).The Light-Space Modulator, as the work came to be known after his death in 1946, would become the single most important icon of the “space-time” world the artist subsequently promoted in his books such as The New Vision (1928, 1946) and Vision in Motion, ﬁrst published in 1947 and in print into the 1970s.32 Instrumental in establishing the curriculum at the Bauhaus, Moholy actually met with Einstein in 1924 to discuss the possibility of his writing a popular book on Relativity for the Bauhaus buch series.

Although Einstein did not write the book, he lent his name to the school’s Circle of Friends.33 For Moholy, Relativity Theory was emblematic of a fundamental cultural shift toward a more dynamic worldview to which artists must respond by replacing the static methods of the past with an art of motion and time.

PABLO PICASSO SPANISH 1881 - 1973

THE ARCHITECT’S TABLE 1912

Oil on Canvas on Panel

Dimensions: 72.6 x 59.7 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York The William S. Paley Collection, 1971

The ﬁrst artists to write extensively about the new importance of time to art were the Dutch De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg and the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, who were both drawn to Berlin in this period. Having heard of the experiments in ﬁlm by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, van Doesburg visited Berlin in December 1920 and ultimately stayed on in Berlin and Weimar from 1921 through early 1923.34 In a lecture of 1921 or 1922 entitled The Will to Style, van Doesburg addressed the pioneering experiments of Eggeling and Richter:

‘’ As a result of the scientiﬁc and technical widening of vision a new and important problem has arisen in painting and sculpture beside the problem of space, and that is the problem of time. [Noting the need to incorporate time in painting, sculpture and architecture, he suggests that the synthesis is already being achieved in ﬁlm.] Here... new artistic form is being created from the combining of the impetus of space and time (example: V. Eggeling and Hans Richter). . . . Using ﬁlm technique in the painting of pure form gives the art a new ability: the artistic solution of the dichotomy of static and dynamic, of spatial and temporal elements, a ﬁtting solution to the artistic needs of our time.35 ‘’

Eggeling and Richter had been so conﬁdent in the relevance of their new “universal language” of abstract forms in motion that in 1920 they had solicited from Einstein, among others, letters of support for their application to Universum-Film AG for technical assistance. The ﬁlm studio granted their request, although there is no evidence that Einstein wrote such a letter.36

Van Doesburg, like a number of more established artists by the 1920s,had actually explored the spatial fourth dimension before Einstein’s emergence in 1919,and those ideas remained with him as he contemplated the implications of Relativity Theory for art. After his initial enthusiasm for Eggeling’s and Richter’s direct incorporation of time in abstract ﬁlm, van Doesburg, who died in 1931, spent much of the rest of his career seeking in his architecture and painting to merge the earlier, spatial fourth dimension with Relativity Theory’s emphasis on time. His most successful efforts were in architecture, where drawings such as those in his 1924 Color Construction in the Fourth Dimension of Space-Time (Fig. 8.8) served as models for his designs for houses. Van Doesburg argued that architecture must break out of the traditional “box,” and he compared the space of his new anticubic architecture to the hypercube of four-dimensional geometry.37 He further added color to his buildings to emphasize the necessity of movement in time to viewing the new architecture. Along with Moholy-Nagy, van Doesburg was an important source for Sigfried Giedion’s theory of modern architecture as the expression of Einstein’s space-time world in his 1941 Space, Time and Architecture.38

Before considering the role of time and space-time in the work of van Doesburg’s fellow visionary Lissitzky, a ﬁnal aspect of the De Stijl artist’s ﬁlm theory reveals a fourth vehicle for artists responding to Einstein in this period and later: light—either alone or in relation to time and/or ﬁlmmaking. Echoing the argument he had made for an anti cubic architecture, van Doesburg utilized the four-dimensional hypercube in a 1929 essay on ﬁlm to suggest that the ﬁlm projection surface should be broken open to create a new “light-space continuum.”39 Van Doesburg’s terminology, in fact, may well have been a source for the later usage of Light-Space Modulator as the title for Moholy’s Light Prop. Both Moholy’s emphasis on the role of light in the new space-time world in the New Vision and Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture were critical stimuli in the 1940s for American painter Irene Rice Pereira. Like van Doesburg, Pereira was grounded in the tradition of the spatial fourth dimension as well as the new world of Relativity, which she embraced.40 As she declared in a 1940 lecture,

‘’ In abstract art, space-time is the dominant concept. . . . [T]he abstract artist seeks, by using contemporary knowledge, to create new forms to express the new age. Space-time is his medium, and substances of modern science the material with which he works. In its own right, abstract art seeks plastic equivalents for the revolutionary discoveries in mathematics, physics, biochemistry, radio-activity...41 ‘’

In works such as Transversion (Fig.8.9), Pereira painted on the back of the newest types of corrugated and textured glass (i.e., “substances of modern science”) and then mounted these panes in front of painted panels to incorporate light as energy directly into the work of art. The exploration of light— “light-space,” as this approach might be termed—was reafﬁrmed as appropriate to the “century of Einstein” by sculptor Athena Tacha in a 1967 article on Sculptured Light. In her text Tacha addresses both static and kinetic light works by contemporary artists as well as by the pioneers of the 1920s, including Gabo and Moholy-Nagy, whose description of light as “time-spatial energy” she notes. Manifesting the continuity between the 1920s and 1960s in the “century of Einstein,” Tacha concludes,“ Light-art is intrinsically not just three- but four-dimensional, since time is also an essential quality of it.”42

Returning to 1920s Berlin, in contrast to van Doesburg’s initial advocacy of time in ﬁlm as the appropriate expression of Relativity Theory, the Russian Lissitzky only espoused time or motion in the mid-1920s. Before that, in the paintings he termed “Prouns”(an acronym for “project for afﬁrmation of the new”), Lissitzky, who had been a pupil of the Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, worked to extend his mentor’s investigations of a cosmic spatial fourth dimension in relation to Relativity’s new conception of space-time.43

Referring repeatedly to Einstein, Lissitzky declared in his 1920 essay “Proun,” “Methods which were once employed in a particular branch of art, knowledge, science, philosophy, are now being transferred into other areas. This is happening, for example, to the four coordinates of Minkovsky’s world: length, breadth, height, and the fourth one, time, are being freely interchanged.”44 Lissitzky preserved Suprematism’s freedom from orientation; however, in contrast to Malevich’s planes of color ﬂoating freely in an absolute white space, Lissitzky in Proun 30T (Fig.8.10) ﬁgures a relational space created and curved by the complex forms within it. In many of his Prouns, the artist also achieved an unprecedented degree of ambiguous spatial shifting through his use of Necker-reversing, axonometrically projected three-dimensional forms.45

By the time of his 1924 essay A.[rt] and Pangeometry, however, Lissistzky had rejected the possibility of effectively ﬁguring space-time in painting, declaring that “the multi-dimensional spaces existing mathematically cannot be conceived, cannot be represented, and indeed cannot be materialized.” Noting that “space and time are different in kind,” he concluded that “time [itself] now becomes a factor of prime consideration as a new constituent of plastic F[orm].”46 Lissitzky referred to the Prouns as a “interchange station between painting and architecture,” and by 1923 he had already begun to move beyond painting to incorporate time and motion directly into exhibition spaces, such as his Proun Room of 1923 and subsequent designs.47 Here Lissitzky set his viewer into motion in an environment of geometric shapes painted or mounted on walls,creating a new kind of perceptual experience. Declaring his preference for physical space versus mathematical spaces in A. and Pangeometry, Lissitzky touted a new, motion-generated “imaginary” space that would produce a “fundamental change” in the “apparatus of the senses.”48 Yet in 1924 Lissitzky continued to celebrate non-Euclidean geometry’s “explod[ing] of the absoluteness of Euclidean space,” as he had done in the 1920 “Proun” text, and the curved elements present in many of the Prouns strongly suggest General Relativity’s description of the non-Euclidean curvature of the space-time continuum in the vicinity of matter.49 Lissitzky made this very point in a 1924 letter to De Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud, arguing that the straight line “does not correspond with the universe, where there are only curvatures and no straight lines.”50 Indeed, the non-Euclidean curvature of space-time would become an increasingly important theme in the subsequent ﬁgurations of space-time, particular among the Surrealists, whose form language itself was already organic and curvilinear.

“Imagining space-time” effectively designates this ﬁfth approach to Relativity Theory, beginning with Lissitzky and continuing with the Surrealists in the 1940s (and occasionally in subsequent decades). In his 1939 essay “Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste,” reprinted in Le Surréalisme et la peinture in New York in 1945, Surrealism’s founder André Breton discussed the artists Roberto Matta Echaurren, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Oscar Dominguez as speciﬁcally concerned with the “four-dimensional universe”of space-time. Of their works such as Matta’s 1944 The Vertigo of Eros (Fig.8.11), Breton explained,

‘’ Though, in their forays into the realm of science, the accuracy of their pronouncements remain largely unconﬁrmed, the important thing is that they all share the same deep yearning to transcend the three-dimensional universe .Although this particular question provided one of the leitmotifs of cubism in its heroic period, there is no doubt that it assumed a greatly heightened signiﬁcance as a result of Einstein’s introduction into physics of the space-time continuum. The need for a suggestive presentation of the four-dimensional universe is particularly evident in the work of Matta (landscapes with several horizons) and On slow Ford.51 ‘

Note: You may scroll down page to read whole essay under headline of the INNER & OUTER WORLD ....

UMBERTO BOCCIONI ITALIAN 1882 - 1916

UNIQUE FORMS OF CONTINUITY IN SPACE 1913 (CAST 1931)

Bronze

Dimensions: 111.2 x 88.5 x 40.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired Through the Lillie

P. Bliss Bequest (by Exchange), 1948 Digital Image

GIACOMO BALLA

SWIFTS: PATHS OF MOVEMENT + DYNAMIC SEQUENCES 1923 (DETAIL)

THE MACHINERY OF THE MODERN WORLD

In the first decades of the twentieth century, multiple artistic movements arose in response to rapid technological advances that were both largely productive, such as the invention of aeroplanes and automobiles, and destructive, including the devastating machines of the First World War.

Pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism compressed multiple perspectives into flat planes, conveying the fractured nature of vision in a newly stimulated society. Robert Delaunay’s and Sonia Delaunay’s resplendently coloured canvases addressed the effects of modernity on the perception of time, expressing the phenomenon of simultaneity, or the possibility of multiple experiences existing at once. Italian Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, devoted their compositions to tracing the dynamic trajectories of high-speed motion. And Marcel Duchamp, affiliated with Dada, dared to classify an everyday object as a work of art, introducing the radical concept of the readymade.

Machines also figured in artists’ inventions, whether in imagery or as actual objects. Fernand Léger paid homage to the propeller in his paintings and harnessed the kinetic quality of film to choreograph a mechanical ballet. Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler document the whirring gears and fiery furnaces of manufacturing equipment. The architect Le Corbusier declared houses to be ‘ machines for living in ’, and MoMA’s landmark 1934 exhibition Machine Art put steel objects on pedestals, elevating ball bearings and springs to the status of icons.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

GIACOMO BALLA

SWIFTS: PATHS OF MOVEMENT + DYNAMIC SEQUENCES 1923

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 96.8 x 120 cm

ROBERT DELAUNEY FRENCH 1885 - 1941

SIMULTANEOUS CONTRASTS: SUN AND MOON 1913, DATED 1912

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 134.5 cm Diameter

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund,

1954 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018

MARCEL DUCHAMP AMERICAN, BORN FRANCE arcel 1887 - 1968

BICYCLE WHEEL 1951 ( THIRD VERSION, AFTER LOST ORGINAL OF 1913)

Metal Wheel Mounted on Painted Wood Stool

Dimensions: 129.5 x 63.5 x 41.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, 1967

FERNAND LEGER, FRENCH 1881 - 1955

PROPELLERS 1918

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 80.9 x 65.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Katherine S. Dreier Bequest, 1953

FERNAND LEGER

BALLET MECANIQUE 1924

35mm Film (Black and White, Silent)

Duration: 12 min.

This film remains one of the most influential experimental works in the history of cinema. The only film made directly by the artist Fernand Léger, it demonstrates his concern during this period—shared with many other artists of the 1920s—with the mechanical world. In Léger's vision, however, this mechanical universe has a very human face. The objects photographed by Dudley Murphy, an American photographer and filmmaker, are transformed by the camera and by the editing rhythms and juxtapositions. In Ball k on her shoulder, condemned like Sisyphus (but through a cinematic sense of wit) to climb and reclimb a steep flight of stairs on a Paris street. The dynamic qualities et méchanique, repetition, movement, and multiple imagery combine to animate and give an aesthetic raison d'être to the clockwork structure of everyday life. The visual pleasures of kitchenware—wire whisks and funnels, copper pots and lids, tinned and fluted baking pans—are combined with images of a woman carrying a heavy sac of film and its capacity to express the themes of a kinetic 20th-century reach a significant level of accomplishement in this early masterpiece of modern art.

Publication excerpt from Circulating Film Library Catalogue, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984, p. 167.

SONIA DELAUNAY – TERK FRENCH, BORN UKRAINE 1885–1979

PORTUGUESE MARKET 1915 (DETAIL)

SONIA DELAUNAY – TERK FRENCH, BORN UKRAINE 1885–1979

PORTUGUESE MARKET 1915

Oil and Wax on Canvas

Dimensions: 90.5 x 90.5 cm

Gift of Theodore R. Racoosin, 1955

CHARLES SHEELER

CRISS-CROSSED CONVEYORS, RIVER ROUGE PLANT,

FORD MOTOR COMPANY 1927

Gelatin Silver Print, Printed 1941

Dimensions: 23.9 x 19 cm

Credit: Gift of Lincoln Kirstein

CHARLES SHEELER

FORD PLANT, RIVER ROUGE, BLAST FURNACE &
DUST CATCHER NOVEMBER 1927

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 24.1 x 19.2 cm

Credit: Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund Through

Robert B. Menschel and Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, by Exchange

GEORGES BRAQUE FRENCH 1882 - 1963

SODA 1912

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 36.2 cm diameter

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired Through

the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), 1942

MARGARET BOURKE - WHITE, AMERICAN 1904 - 1971

BRAZILIAN CLIPPER C. 1930

Gelatin Silver Photograph

Dimensions: 33.7 x 23.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of the Photographer, 1974

GEORGES BRAQUE FRENCH 1882 - 1963

SODA 1912 (DETAIL)

LOUISE BOURGEOIS AMERICAN, BORN FRANCE 1911 - 2010

QUARANTANIA, III 1949–50 (CAST 2001)

Bronze

Dimensions: 148.0 x 32.4 x 5.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of the Artist, 2002

ELLSWORTH KELLY

RUNNING WHITE 1959

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 223.6 x 172.2 cm

ART AS ACTION

If in preceding decades Surrealism and its affinities represented an art of introspection, the 1950s was an era of action. The discourse of the decade came to be dominated by the large gestures, canvases and personalities of a group of American painters alternately referred to as the Abstract Expressionists or the New York School.

Within this reigning approach, also dubbed Action Painting by the critic Harold Rosenberg, painters developed signature gestures, from Jackson Pollock’s vigorous drips to Franz Kline’s sweeping, muscular slashes. Other painters within the group imbued their vast canvases with more spiritual concerns: Mark Rothko sought to communicate ‘basic human emotions’ through his compositions’ vibrating, multi-hued rectangles; Barnett Newman aimed to express the sublime through vertical ‘zips’ of colour; and Ad Reinhardt strove for the absolute in his monochromes.

The kineticism characteristic of art of this period was not exclusive to painting. Fuelled by currents of air, Alexander Calder’s mobiles captured nature’s dynamism, and Louise Bourgeois’s sculptures cut like sharp knives into their surrounding space. Nor was this vitality limited to a single geography: in Brazil, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica pioneered a Neo-Concrete art, which not only foregrounded the action of the artist, but also prompted participation from the viewer.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

MARK ROTHKO AMERICAN, BORN RUSSIA (NOW LATVIA ) 1903 - 1970

NO. 3/NO. 13 1949

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 216.5 x 164.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Bequest of Mrs. Mark Rothko Through

The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., 1981

MARK ROTHKO AMERICAN, BORN RUSSIA (NOW LATVIA ) 1903 - 1970

NO. 3/NO. 13 1949 (DETAIL)

FRANZ KLINE AMERICAN 1910 - 1962

WHITE FORMS 1955

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 188.9 x 127.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Philip Johnson, 1977

FRANZ KLINE AMERICAN 1910 - 1962

WHITE FORMS 1955 (DETAIL)

JACKSON POLLOCK AMERICAN 1912 - 1956

NUMBER 7, 1950 1950

Oil, Enamel, and Aluminium Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 58.5 x 268.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Sylvia Slifka in

Honor of William Rubin, 1993

JACKSON POLLOCK AMERICAN 1912 - 1956

NUMBER 7, 1950 1950 (DETAIL)

BARNETT NEWMAN

ONEMENT III - 1949

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 182.5 x 84.9 cm

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Slifka

BARNETT NEWMAN

ONEMENT III - 1949 (DETAIL)

HELIO OITICICA

METAESQUEMA 1958

Gouache on board

Dimensions: 50.5 x 68 cm

Credit: Purchased with funds given by Patricia Phelps de

Cisneros in honor of Paulo Herkenhoff

HELIO OITICICA

METAESQUEMA NO:348 - 1958 (DETAIL)

HELIO OITICICA

METAESQUEMA NO:348 - 1958

Gouache on Board

Dimensions: 46 x 58 cm

Credit: Purchased with funds given by Maria de Lourdes Egydio Villela

A NEW UNITY

In the 1920s and 1930s, several international art movements arose that held a utopian view of art’s potential to communicate universally. Artists reduced forms to their essentials, eliminating decorative elements to create widely accessible forms of abstraction.

In the years preceding and following the 1917 Russian Revolution, artists of that country’s avant-garde sought new languages to express a new society’s ideals. Lyubov’ Popova and Aleksandr Rodchenko were among those who developed Constructivism, which cast the artist as an engineer and emphasised the material reality of his or her productions, while Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism aimed to transcend the object in pursuit of ‘pure artistic feeling’. In the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg adopted a fundamental language of squares and rectangles, vertical and horizontal lines and a palette of primary colours plus black and white to pioneer a movement known as De Stijl (The Style). And in Uruguay, Joaquín Torres-García created his own Constructivist ‘School of the South’.

These artists’ remarkable synthesis of mediums abolished distinctions between the fine and applied arts. The achievements of the Russian avant-garde included posters, theatre designs and films, and furniture and design objects were crucial manifestations of De Stijl. But it was perhaps the Bauhaus, the pioneering school that made its home in three German cities between 1919 and 1933, which offered the era’s ultimate expression

of interdisciplinary practice: from László Moholy-Nagy’s painting and sculpture, to Gunta Stölzl’s weaving, to Marcel Breuer’s furniture, and beyond

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

THEODORE LUX FEININGER, GERMAN 1910 - 2011

BAUHAUS BALCONIES C. 1928

Gelatin Silver Photograph

Dimensions: 23.5 x 17.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Philip Johnson, 1967

THEO VAN DOESBURG

PRELIMINARY COLOR SCHEME FOR CEILING& SHORT WALLS OF
DANCE HALL IN CAFÉ AUBETTE, STRASBOURG, FRANCE 1926 - 1928 (DETAIL)

THEO VAN DOESBURG

(CHRISTIAN EMIL MARIE KUPPER) PRELIMINARY COLOR SCHEME FOR CEILING & SHORT WALLS OF DANCE HALL IN CAFÉ AUBETTE, STRASBOURG, FRANCE 1926-1928

Ink and Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 27.3 x 62.9 cm

Credit: Gift of Lily Auchincloss, Celeste Bartos, and Marshall Cogan

THEO VAN DOESBURG

PRELIMINARY COLOR SCHEME FOR CEILING& SHORT WALLS OF
DANCE HALL IN CAFÉ AUBETTE, STRASBOURG, FRANCE 1926 - 1928

Ink and Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 27.3 x 62.9 cm

Credit: Gift of Lily Auchincloss, Celeste Bartos, and Marshall Cogan

Department: Architecture and Design

ALEXANDRA EXTER

FAUST FROM ALEXANDRA EXTER: STAGE SETS 1927

One From an Album of 15 Pochoirs

Dimensions: 33 x 50.5 cm

Publisher: Éditions des Quatre Chemins, Paris

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nikita Lobanov

Portfolio: Alexandra Exter: Stage Sets (Alexandra Exter: Décors de théâtre)

ALEXANDRE EXTER, RUSSIAN 1882 - 1949

PROJECT REVIEW (REVUE PROJET) 1927 FROM ALEXANDRE EXTER:

STAGE SETS (ALEXANDRA EXTER: DECORS DE THEATRE ) 1930

Pochoir Print

Dimensions: 33.0 x 50.2 cm

Publisher: Éditions des Quatre Chemins, Paris The Museum of Modern Art,

New York Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nikita Lobanov, 1972 Digital Image

ALEXANDRA EXTER

DON JUAN & DEATH FROM ALEXANDRA EXTER:

STAGE SETS 1926 (PART)

One From an Album of 15 Pochoirs

Dimensions: 33 x 50.2 cm

Publisher: Éditions des Quatre Chemins, Paris

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nikita Lobanov

Portfolio: Alexandra Exter: Stage Sets (Alexandra Exter: Décors de théâtre)

ALEXANDRA EXTER

SPANISH PANTOMIME FROM ALEXANDRA EXTER: STAGE SETS 1926

One From an Album of 15 pochoirs

Dimensions: 33 x 50.8 cm

Publisher: Éditions des Quatre Chemins, Paris

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nikita Lobanov

Portfolio: Alexandra Exter: Stage Sets (Alexandra Exter: Décors de théâtre)

ALEXANDRA EXTER

DON JUAN, HELL FROM ALEXANDRA EXTER: STAGE SETS 1929

One From an Album of 15 Pochoirs

Dimensions: 33 x 50.2 cm

Publisher: Éditions des Quatre Chemins, Paris

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nikita Lobanov

Portfolio: Alexandra Exter: Stage Sets (Alexandra Exter: Décors de Théâtre)

VLADIMIR STENBERG, GEORGII STENBERG

POUNDED CUTLET ( POSTER FOR 1921 FILM AT THE RINGSIDE,

DIRECTED BY CHARLES CHASE, STARRING SNUB POLLARD ) 1927

Lithograph

Dimensions: 105 x 70 cm

Credit: Gift of The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund

VLADIMIR STENBERG, GEORGII STENBERG

THE THREE MILLION CASE 1927

Lithograph

Dimensions: 71.5 x 107.5 cm

Credit: Given anonymously

PIET MONDRIAN, DUTCH 1872 - 1944

Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow 1937 - 1942

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 60.3 x 55.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York The Sidney and

Harriet Janis Collection, 1967 Digital Image

GERRIT RIETVELD, DUTCH 1888 - 1964

RED BLUE CHAIR DESIGNED C. 1918,

PAINTED C.1923 Painted Wood

Dimensions: 86.7 x 66.0 x 83.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Philip Johnson, 1953

LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY 1925

ZII

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 95.4 x 75.1 cm

Credit: Gift of Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy

In this work, made while he was teaching at the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy explored the intersection of abstract elements in abstract space. Broken forms, in varying degrees of transparency, slide past each other on illusory spatial planes, illustrating the artist's longtime interest in the function and effects of light. In these years Moholy-Nagy also experimented with photography—a medium closely aligned with the credo of the Bauhaus: "Art and Technology: A New Unity." These photographic investigations informed his painting process, which he reimagined as an art not of pigment but of light. This kind of cross-medium exploration was strongly encouraged at the Bauhaus, where a broad range of workshops in the fine and applied arts helped to shape productive relationships among faculty and students working in diverse media.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH

SUPREMATIST ELEMENTS: SQUARES 1923

Pencil on Paper

Dimensions: 50.2 x 36.2 cm

Credit: 1935 Acquisition Confirmed in 1999 by Agreement With the

Estate of Kazimir Malevich and Made Possible with Funds From the

Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by Exchange)

JOSEF ALBERS

BAUHAUS STENCIL LETTERING SYSTEM 1926-1928

Manufacturer: Mettalglas A.G.

Milk Glass and Painted Wood

Dimensions: 61.3 x 60.6 cm

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) is the oldest and most visited public art museum in Australia. Established in 1861, the NGV has two buildings displaying the NGV Collection – NGV International on St Kilda Road and The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square. NGV International houses the Gallery’s collections of International art and The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia is home to the Australian art collection – including works by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities. The NGV Collection includes over 70,000 art works from many centuries and cultures. The NGV offers an extraordinary visual arts experience with diverse temporary exhibitions, Collection displays, talks, tours, programs for kids, films, late-night openings and performances. In 2017, over 3 million people visited the National Gallery of Victoria.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE' DIRECTOR TONY ELLWOOD

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART' DIRECTOR GLENN LOWRY

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE

THINGS AS THEY ARE

In 1963 the art historian Peter Selz criticised the newly emergent Pop artists for their ‘passive acceptance of things as they are’. Despite Selz’s negative tone, his phrase captures something in common among a diverse group of artistic currents that arose in the 1960s and 1970s: from Pop art, with its unabashed celebration of consumer objects; to Minimalism, with its matter-of-fact repetition of elemental forms; to Post-Minimalism, with its emphasis on how materials respond to processes and exist in space.

As the name implies, Pop artists drew heavily on popular culture of the age, such as the new musical soundscape fuelled by the game-changing Fender Stratocaster guitar and disseminated on vinyl records with iconic cover designs. Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings co-opted the subject and style of mass-produced comics, while John Chamberlain and Kenneth Anger paid tribute to the ascendant American cult of the automobile in sculpture and film, respectively.

Working in a language of reduced geometry and a limited palette, artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt explored the infinite variations of primary structures in two and three dimensions. Sculptors including Lynda Benglis and Richard Serra expanded on these Minimalist foundations, subjecting metal to the effects of gravity in objects that intervene into the viewer’s experience.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

ANDY WARHOL AMERICAN 1928 - 1987

Marilyn Monroe 1967

Screenprint, Edition of 250

Dimensions: 91.5 x 91.5 cm (Image and Sheet)

Publisher: Factory Additions, New York Printer: Aetna Silkscreen Products, Inc.,

New York The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mr. David Whitney, 1968

Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2018

JOHN BALDESSARI (AMERICAN, BORN,1931)

WHAT IS PAINTING 1968

Synthetic polymer paint on canvas,

Dimensions: 172.1 x 144.1 cm

ROY LICHTENSTEIN AMERICAN 1923 - 1997

DROWNING GIRL 1963

Oil and Synthetic Polymer Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 171.6 x 169.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Philip Johnson Fund (by Exchange) and

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright, 1971

CLAES OLDENBURG AMERICAN, BORN SWEDEN 1929

GIANT SOFT FAN 1966 - 1967

Vinyl Filled With Foam Rubber, Wood, Metal and Plastic Tubing

Dimensions: 305.0 x 149.5 x 157.1 cm (Variable) (Fan), 739.6 cm (Cord and Plug)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York The Sidney and

Harriet Janis Collection, 1967 © Claes Oldenburg

GERHARD RICHTER

DEAD 1963

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 101 x 151.1 cm

Credit: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection (by exchange)

JASPER JOHNS AMERICAN BORN 1930

MAP 1961 (DETAIL)

JASPER JOHNS AMERICAN BORN 1930

MAP 1961

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 198.2 x 314.7 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, 1963

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

SURFACE SERIES FROM CURRENTS 1970

One From a Portfolio of 18 Screenprints

Dimensions: Composition: 89 x 89 cm

Sheet: 101.6 x 101.6 cm

Publisher: Dayton's Gallery 12, Minneapolis, Castelli Graphics, New York

Edition: 100

Portfolio: Surface Series from Currents

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

TOMAHAWK NOLAN 1965

Welded and Painted Metal Automobile Parts

Dimensions: 111.1 x 132.2 x 92 cm

Credit: Gift of Philip Johnson

SOL LE WITT

CUBIC CONSTRUCTION: DIAGONAL 4,

OPPOSITE CORNERS 1 & 4 UNITS 1971

Painted Wood

Dimensions: 62.2 x 61.6 x 61.6 cm

Credit: The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation

ROBERT INDIANA AMERICAN BORN 1928

LOVE 1967

Screenprint, Edition of 250

Dimensions: 86.3 x 86.3 cm (Image and Sheet)

Publisher: Multiples, Inc., New York Printer: Sirocco Screenprinters, North Haven, Connecticut The Museum of Modern Art, New York Riva Castleman Fund, 1990

THINGS AS THEY ARE ( … OR COULD BE )

In the 1960s, disaffection with functionalist modernism had permeated the fields of architecture and design. The emergence of a youth consumer market, more informal patterns of socialising and increased awareness of cultural diversity defied commitment to a single set of attitudes and beliefs. Openly taking the lead from popular culture and science fiction, collectives such as Archigram, a radical London-based group of architects, produced visionary creations that proposed nomadic and flexible alternatives to traditional ways of living. At the same time, in Italy, Ettore Sottsass envisaged a futurist technoutopia in which there would be no work and no social conditioning or sexual inhibition.

Electronics and plastics technologies were hallmarks of MoMA’s landmark 1972 exhibition Italy: A New Domestic Landscape. On that occasion, a series of multipurpose living environments, colourful plastic furniture and innovative lighting, such as the Pillola lamp in the form of a giant drug capsule, reflected a fresh and playful approach to design. In a sign of things to come, early video games heralded new forms of leisure, and computers opened up a language of virtual communication through universally accepted icons.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

TOM WESSELMANN AMERICAN 1931 - 2004

STUDY FOR MOUTH, 8 1966

Synthetic Polymer Paint and Pencil on Paper

Dimensions: 26.2 x 35.2 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York John B. Turner Fund, 1969

©Tom Wesselmann / VAGA. Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2018

HIPGNOSIS, LONDON (ART DESIGN STUDIO) BRITISH 1968 - 1982

STORM THORGERSON BRITISH 1944 - 2013

AUBREY POWELL BRITISH BORN 1946

ATLANTIC RECORDS, WASHINGTON, D.C. (RECORD LABEL) AMERICAN EST.

1947 ALBUM COVER FOR LED ZEPPELIN, HOUSES OF THE HOLY, 1973

Lithograph

Dimensions: 30.5 x 30.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on

Architecture and Design Funds, 2014 © Hipgnosis

KLAUS VOORMANN GERMAN BORN 1938

ROBERT WHITAKER (PHOTOGRAPHER) BRITISH 1939 - 2011

Parlophone Records, London (Record Label) British Est. 1923

Album Cover For The Beatles, Revolver 1966

Lithograph

Dimensions: 31.4 x 31.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Christian Larsen, 2008

MARTIN SHARP AUSTRALIAN 1942 - 2013

ROBERT WHITAKER (PHOTOGRAPHER) BRITISH 1939–2011

REACTION RECORDS (RECORD LABEL) BRITISH 1966- 1967

ALBUM COVER FOR CREAM, DISRAELI GEARS 1967

Lithograph

Dimensions: 30.5 x 30.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on

Architecture and Design Funds, 2014

RON HERRON

CITIES: MOVING, MASTER VEHICLE – HABITATION PROJECT,

AERIAL PERSPEDTIVE 1964

Ink and Graphite on Tracing Paper

Dimensions: 55.2 x 83.2 cm

Credit: Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation

Ron Herron, a founding member of Archigram, the influential British group known for its admixture of science-fiction and pop culture, created his Walking City out of an indefinite number of giant roaming pods containing different urban and residential areas. The pods could be connected by retractable corridors and, together, form a conglomerate metropolis. This literally mobile and indeterminate architecture was not so much a serious proposition for a structure as a commentary on the way in which change dominates every aspect of the modern city.

Publication excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo, in Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 54.

YONA FRIEDMAN

SPATIAL CITY, PROJECT, AERIAL PERSPECTIVE 1958

Ink on Tracing Paper

Dimensions: 21.3 x 27.3 cm

Credit: Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation

The Spatial City (Ville spatiale) is an unrealized theoretical construct inspired by the housing shortage in France during the late 1950s and by Yona Friedman's deep belief that housing plans and structures should allow for the free will of the individual inhabitants. Not wanting to displace the city below, Friedman raised a second city fifteen to twenty meters above the existing one. The framework was to be erected first, and the residences conceived and built by the inhabitants inserted into the voids of the structure. The layout of each level would occupy no more than fifty percent of the overall structure in order to provide air and light to each residence as well as to the city below. The project was designed for construction anywhere, and meant to be adapted to any climate.

Publication excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo, in Terence Riley, ed.,

CESARE CASATI ITALIAN BORN 1936

C. EMANUELE PONZIO ITALIAN 1923 - 2015

PILLOLA LAMPS 1968

Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene and Acrylic Plastic (1-5)

Dimensions: 55.2 x 13.0 cm Diameter (Each)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Celeste Bartos Purchase Fund, 2000

ROBERTO MATTA CHILEAN 1911 - 2002

KNOLL INTERNATIONAL, NEW YORK (MANUFACTURER)

AMERICAN EST. 1938

Malitte Lounge Furniture 1966

Wool and Polyurethane Foam (a-e)

Dimensions: 160.0 x 160.0 x 63.5 cm (Overall)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Knoll International, 1970

PETER COOK

PLUG-IN CITY: MAXIMUM PRESSURE AREA, PROJECT (SECTION) 1964 (DETAIL)

PETER COOK

PLUG-IN CITY: MAXIMUM PRESSURE AREA, PROJECT (SECTION) 1964

Ink and Gouache on Photomechanical Print

Dimensions: 83.5 x 146.5 cm

Credit: Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation

Plug-in City is one of many vast, visionary creations produced in the 1960s by the radical collaborative British architecture group Archigram, of which Cook was a founding member. A “megastructure” that incorporates residences, access routes, and essential services for the inhabitants, Plug-in City was designed to encourage change through obsolescence: each building outcrop is removable, and a permanent “craneway” facilitates continual rebuilding. Between 1960 and 1974, Archigram published nine provocative issues of its magazine and created more than nine hundred exuberant drawings illustrating imaginary architectural projects ranging in inspiration from technological developments to counterculture, from space travel to science fiction. The group’s work opposed the period’s functionalist ethos; Archigram designed nomadic alternatives to traditional ways of living, including wearable houses and walking cities—mobile, flexible, impermanent architecture that they hoped would be liberating.

JOE COLOMBO ITALIAN 1930 - 1971

Kartell S.p.A., Milan (manufacturer) Italian est. 1949

UNIVERSALE STACKING SIDE CHAIRS 1967

Polypropylene and Rubber (1-3)

Dimensions: 73.7 x 41.9 x 47.0 cm (Each)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of the Manufacturer, 1988

ETTORE SOTTSASS

THE PLANET AS FESTIVAL: STUDY FOR TEMPLE FOR EROTIC DANCES,

PROJECT (AERIAL PERSPECTIVE AND PLAN) 1972-1973

Graphite and Cut-and-Pasted Gelatin Silver Print on Paper

Dimensions: 35.4 x 32.1 cm

Credit: Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation

TOMOHIRO NISHIKADO JAPANESE BORN 1944

TAITO CORPORATION, TOKYO ( MANUFACTURER & PUBLISHER )

JAPANESE EST. 1953

Space Invaders 1978 Video Game Software

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of the Taito Corporation, 2013

GAETANO PESCE ITALIAN BORN 1939 BRACCIODIFERRO,

GENEVA ( MANUFACTURER ) SWISS 1970- 1975

MOLOCH FLOOR LAMP 1970 - 1971

Metal Alloy and Steel

Dimensions: 229.9 x 286.7 x 86.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of

The Manufacturer, 1972 © Gaetano Pesce

RAY TOMLINSON AMERICAN 1941 - 2016

@ 1971 ITC AMERICAN TYPEWRITER MEDIUM

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired, 2010

ANDY WARHOL, AMERICAN 1928 - 1987

BILLY NAME (PHOTOGRAPHER) 23, AMERICAN BORN 1940

CRAIG BRAUN (DESIGNER), AMERICAN BORN 1939

JOHN PASCHE (TYPOGRAPHER) AMERICAN BORN 1945

Rolling Stones Records, London (Record Label) British 1970–92

Album Cover For The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers 1971

Lithograph With Metal Zipper

Dimensions: 30.5 x 30.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Architecture and

Design Funds, 2014

INNER & OUTER WORLDS

Many artists in the 1920s and 1930s broke from the formal restraint and rational order of abstraction to embrace narrative excess and the unconscious. Looking to both internal and external landscapes, their works draw on forms in nature and imbue everyday observations with a sense of the uncanny.

Surrealism, which began as a formal movement in Paris but also attracted more casual and widespread fellow travellers, comprised two dominant approaches. Painters including Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte applied, to quote Dalí, ‘the most imperialist fury of precision’ to their canvases, making incongruous scenes appear possible through the meticulousness of their technique. Others, such as Joan Miró, Jean Arp and Meret Oppenheim adopted biomorphic forms, evoking the soft structures of living organisms.

As the looming Second World War forced many of these artists to disperse from Europe, their networks became more far-reaching and came into contact with longstanding cultural traditions. In Cuba, Wifredo Lam merged Surrealist aesthetics with the religious iconography of Afro-Cuban Santeria. In Mexico, Frida Kahlo cited native folklore and nineteenth-century devotional paintings in her dreamlike canvases.

The work of various American artists during this period similarly engages both physical and psychic landscapes. Edward Hopper’s desolate scenes possess a palpable psychological charge; highly detailed drawings by Georgia O’Keeffe and photographs by Imogen Cunningham render flora otherworldly; and the architect Frederick Kiesler’s amoebic Endless House was designed to negotiate the relationship between the individual and his or her environment, making room for ‘the “visitors” from one’s own inner world’.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

EINSTEIN AND 20TH-CENTURY ART: A ROMANCE OF MANY DIMENSIONS
BY PROF. LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON - THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AUSTIN

Although sharing Dalí’s organic form language, Matta and his young colleagues rejected the clearly three-dimensional perspectival space within which Dalí’s watches deform (Plate 1) in favor of a dimensionally suggestive amorphous space with no deﬁnite horizon or clear spatial orientation. The young Surrealists also embraced non-Euclidean geometry whole heartedly— both for its new association with Einstein and Relativity Theory and for its longstanding function as an iconoclastic sign of the overthrow of traditional absolutes (i.e., Euclid’s axioms).52 By the later 1950s and 1960s,in fact,“spacewarp” became a buzzword to suggest curved space-time, its popularity augmented by the Space Age, science ﬁction ﬁlms, and the popularization of black holes in the 1980s.53

By the time the Surrealists had come to New York during World War II and were producing such paintings, there had been another round of publicity about Einstein and Relativity in the United States. His initial impact in 1919 and the early 1920s had produced extensive newspaper and periodical coverage, including seventy-seven stories in the New York Times during 1921.Einstein visited the United States in winter-spring 1930–31 and 1931–32,lecturing at Cal Tech and generating new publicity with discussion of his latest adjustments to General Relativity.54 Two events of 1931 graphically register the impact of this visit: the publication of the song “As Time Goes By” and the painter Stuart Davis’ speculations on Relativity Theory in his daybooks of the early 1930s.Although “As Time Goes By” is most closely associated with the ﬁlm Casablanca (1942), Hermann Hupfeld wrote the song for the 1931 musical Everybody’s Welcome. Associating the current era’s “apprehension” with “speed and new invention / and things like fourth dimension,” the verse then complains,“ Yet we get a triﬂe weary / with Mister Einstein’s theory”— surely a response to the new wave of Einstein publicity in 1930–31.55

Stuart Davis, America’s preeminent painter in the planar style of later Cubism—and a friend of Pereira since the early 1930s—was hardly weary of Einstein’s theory in this period. In addition to jazz rhythms, which he saw as a vital new form of expression, Davis took to heart the implications of the newest science for art.56 In Landscape with Garage Lights of 1932 (Fig. 8.12), Davis gave form to his conviction that “through science the whole concept of what reality is has been changed.”57 James Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe had made that science newly accessible in 1930, and in his daybook of 1932, Davis responded directly to Jeans’ diagrammatic explanation of the interrelationship of space and time (Figs.8.13 and 8.14).

Davis’s notebook page includes similar diagrams with the notations “When you draw this—you are drawing this rectan[gular] linear space, potentially,” and “ you are drawing this angular direction, potentially, when you draw this.” 58 Akin to Paul Klee’s reconsideration of the basic marks an artist makes, Davis found in Jeans’ diagrams a new avenue for the modern painter to conﬁgure nature. Above the daybook drawings in Figure 8.14, Davis noted,

‘’ From any given point the line moves in a two-dimensional space relative to all existing points. . . . Relativity, knowledge of this fact, and the ability to visualize logical correlatives of a given angle allows the artist to see the real angular value of his drawing as opposed to associative value.59 ‘’

The angular structure underlying works such as Landscape with Garage Lights recalls space-time diagrams like Jeans’, which register both motion in space and the passage of time. Indeed, Davis continued in his daybook,“ The picture itself could be called a Duration of so many seconds in Time (Einstein has said that space is a fourth dimension).Therefore we must build a picture with four coordinates....”60 Although Davis would subsequently move beyond his focus on angles, Relativity Theory clearly continued to serve as an inspiration: he adopted the phrase “color-space”(with its suggestion of color-space-time) to describe his space-making system, and in 1947 referred to the act of painting as “a new event in Time and Space.”61 Stuart Davis, not Picasso, was the Cubist painter stimulated by Einstein and Relativity Theory—at the very moment, ironically, when the Picasso-Einstein myth was emerging in the 1940s in the wake of publications such as Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture. In a typology of artistic responses to Einstein, Davis represents a sixth category, which might be termed “diagramming relativity,” comprised of artists who have drawn directly upon diagrams and illustrations in sources on Relativity.62

If Davis was reading James Jeans, Andy Warhol, by contrast, was not engaged speciﬁcally with Einstein’s physics when he included the scientist in his 1980 silkscreen portfolio based on a series of paintings, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (Plate 2). Instead, for Warhol, Einstein—like Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and the Marx Brothers, among others—was a popular culture icon, a star like other of Warhol’s subjects, from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis Presley.63 Nonetheless, Warhol’s image may well be another example of an artist diagramming Relativity, if in a very general way. In contrast to all of the other, highly colored portraits in the series, the Einstein image is monochromatic—akin to the ubiquitous black-and-white photographs of Einstein and, speciﬁcally, to one of Philippe Halsman’s photographs of Einstein of May 1947.64 More importantly, instead of the freely overlaid blocks of color in the other images, the placement of the gray-tone planes and the unusual darker gray bar in the Einstein image strongly suggests the angular shift of frames of reference diagrammed by Minkowski in 1908 (Fig.8.15).

That diagram of the Lorenz-Einstein transformation was readily available in sources from the 1960s–70s, such as the Dover Publications paperback The Principle of Relativity, which also bore a photograph of Einstein on its cover.65 In addition, the two sides of Einstein’s face are rendered differently, effectively splitting his visage into two different frames of reference. Warhol was a keen observer of popular imagery, and, without engaging physics directly, he responded to the photographic record of Einstein (like Höch) and, it seems, augmented his portrait’s meaning with a widely reproduced, condensed sign of the signiﬁcance of Relativity Theory.66

Einstein’s death in 1955 focused attention once again on the person of the man, whose image was already solidiﬁed enough that a ﬁctional Einstein-like genius could be evoked in the 1951 ﬁlm The Day the Earth Stood Still simply by a blackboard covered with equations.67 Those equations could be distilled to E=mc2 (or a near approximation, as in the Sidney Harris cartoon, Fig. 8.16) with no loss of meaning, especially when joined to ﬂy-away hair and rumpled clothing. Those same metonymical signs accompany the Einstein Action Figure, marketed in 2003.In the Einstein ﬁgure’s packaging, the scientist is set against a background of star-ﬁlled space, with both E=mc2 and the popular sign of the atom with its orbiting electrons ﬂoating at his sides. In contrast to the rectilinear grid on which the ﬁgure stands, a curvilinear (i.e.,warped) line of letters above his head declares that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”68 This sign-oriented approach might be termed “popular iconographical signs of Einstein and Relativity” and added as a seventh element in a typology of artistic responses to the scientist. This is an iconography that may or may not include images of Einstein himself and consists of elements such as the scientist’s hair and rumpled clothing, E=mc2, equation-covered blackboards, distorted or impossibly numbered clocks, the phrase “space-time,” and curvilinear grids.69 That the new German Einstein memorial coin does not include an image of Einstein—but rather simply his equation on a spherical mass curving a spatial grid—testiﬁes to the power of this language to communicate.

This was the Einstein to whom Robert Wilson responded in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. According to Wilson, the opera’s title was inspired by photographs of Einstein, the sailor.70 While Glass prepared for the project by reading extensively on the subject, Wilson looked at photographs and talked to people about Einstein: “I just want to know what the man in the street knows because that’s what they’ll be bringing to the work,” he declared at the time. Wilson considered Einstein to be a “fellow dreamer, mystic, and time traveller,”and in Einstein on the Beach, he took a highly poetic approach to his subject, working to heighten the audience’s sense of time over its ﬁve-hour expanse.71 Besides his focus on time, emphasized by the rapid and repetitive mathematical counting in the lyrics, Wilson relied on the familiar iconographical signs of Einstein, dressing all his cast members to look like the scientist. As Wilson has explained,

‘’ Einstein talked about trains, so you see a train . . . in proﬁle, coming across the stage. It is then interrupted by a line, because Einstein said that if you saw a train going across a ﬁeld it would look like a line. There were all kinds of references [which] I prefer to use...in such a poetical sense. ‘’

To the train Wilson added Einstein’s violin, another image with resonance for anyone aware of the scientist’s personal life. And drawing upon the primary aspect of Einstein’s impact on modern art, Wilson has declared, “For me, the basis of all architecture, and constructing any work, is time and space.”72

Wilson had been a student of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and considers her course in the history of architecture to be “the most important class I had in school.”73 Through Moholy-Nagy’s widow, Wilson clearly absorbed Moholy-Nagy’s profound commitment to Einstein and the world of space-time. Although Moholy Nagy died in 1946, his message lived on in his book Vision in Motion, which was required reading in art schools in the 1950s and early 1960s.Moreover,that was the moment when kinetic art emerged full blown as an international movement and was regularly discussed as the appropriate art form for the world of Einstein.74 Moholy-Nagy’s 1922–30 Light Prop/Light-Space Modulator (Fig. 8.7) was often included in exhibitions as if it were a work of contemporary art, and it regularly ﬁgured in chronologies for such shows. Paris was a center point of international activity in kinetic art, including the 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René in Paris. Here, even Marcel Duchamp, enthusiast of the spatial fourth dimension, was recast as a kinetic artist on the basis of his optical experiments with dimensional illusion, such as his Rotary Demisphere of 1925 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).75

Robert Wilson was unusual among young American artists in the 1970s in his interest in Einstein and space-time.76 Between the myth of a Cubism Relativity connection and kinetic art’s dominance as the recognized expression of space-time, Relativity must have seemed used up as a relevant source for younger artists. Robert Smithson, in fact, railed against a fourth dimension associated with Einstein and kinetic art in an unpublished text of 1962, “The Iconography of Desolation.”77 However, Smithson was also in contact with a group of artists around the cooperative Park Place Gallery in New York, where there was discussion not only of the temporal fourth dimension but also of a newly recovered spatial fourth dimension. The ten members of the Park Place group, including Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, and Dean Fleming, were the subject of David Bourdon’s January 1966 Art News article titled “E=MC2 à GoGo,”a title that reﬂects the dominance of space-time discourse at midcentury.78 Di Suvero, who saw himself in the tradition of engineer-artists like Calder and the Russian Constructivists, was the group member engaged most speciﬁcally with Relativity Theory. “Space-time is the only way you can think since Einstein,” he declared to Bourdon. A deep interest in philosophy and science led di Suvero well beyond the popular evocations of space-time to explore the physics of gravity and other forces in the large-scale constructed sculptures (often with moving components) that he has continued to fabricate to the present day.79

In his June 1966 Artforum essay, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Smithson had referred to Park Place as a “space-time monastic order.”80 However, Park Place artists Forakis and Fleming were energized less by Einstein than by the geometry and philosophy associated with the spatial fourth dimension, which Forakis had discovered in books by P. D. Ouspensky and Claude Bragdon he found in a San Francisco artist’s book sale in 1957.81 Forakis shared Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum(ﬁrst published in 1911) with Fleming, and the two friends as well as Smithson also found more contemporary sources on the subject, including the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and the writings of Martin Gardner in Scientiﬁc American and, for Smithson, in The Ambidextrous Universe of 1964. Spatial ambiguity, mirror asymmetry, paradox, and visual illusion were central to the appeal of the spatial fourth dimension for these artists, who sought to undercut “‘three-dimensional’ logic.”82 In Forakis’ Atlanta Gateway of 1966 composed of three intersecting 200-foot steel pipes forming two tip-to-tip tetrahedrons with 100-foot bases, the conﬁgurations of the sculpture shift radically as a viewer moves around the sculpture (Fig. 8.17). It was Fuller who had promoted the tetrahedron as the building block with which to model “four-dimensional” geometry (with 60-degree versus 90-degree angles), and Atlanta Gateway’s unpredictable mutations call to mind the effects of four-dimensional objects in rotation. As Lawrence Alloway wrote in a 1968 article on Forakis,“his work is geometric, but it is a geometry of continuities and double-takes, rather than of stable determinate solids.”83 Although Forakis kept on his studio wall an enlargement of the famous photograph of Einstein sticking out his tongue, Park Place group members were generally more interested in spatial geometries, including topology. Critics who interpreted their references to the “4D” in terms of Einstein and the temporal fourth dimension alone missed a central aspect of their artistic practice.

The 1960s, however, saw a new phase of work on General Relativity by physicist John Wheeler and others that would recast the study of space-time in far more geometrical terms.84 This was the Relativity physics that excited painter Tony Robbin beginning in the early 1970s.Once Robbin’s attention had been turned to four-dimensional geometry and space, he was remarkably fortunate to be handed a group of early 20th-century books on the subject by a mathematics professor colleague at Trenton State College, where he was teaching.85 Subsequently, Robbin began a serious study of physics, auditing a course at NYU and working with a tutor, as well as conversing with Wheeler on a lecture trip to the University of Texas. Robbin has chronicled his interaction with mathematicians and physicists, including Paul Steinhardt and Englebert Schucking, in his 1992 book, Fourﬁeld: Computers, Art, and the Fourth Dimension.86

In the paradoxical structures of four-dimensional space-time, Robbin found an appropriate analog for the complexity of modern experience. For example, einstein and 20th-century art Figure 8.17 Peter Forakis, Atlanta Gateway,1966, steel pipe, Atlanta Gateway Park, Atlanta, GA. Photograph by Angus Winn; courtesy of Peter Forakis.

In works of the late 1970s, Robbin combined rich textures of color and linear grids in different orientations to create shifting perspectives that refuse to cohere in a single viewpoint.87 Although Robbin’s initial approach to the spatial fourth dimension was largely intuitive, he increasingly engaged four dimensional geometry. In the early 1980s, he connected with mathematician Thomas Banchoff at Brown University, who was doing pioneering work in four-dimensional computer graphics, and he subsequently studied programming himself. Robbin’s painting Lobofour of 1982 (Plate 3) combines a patterned background of Necker-reversing four- and eight-sided ﬁgures with pairs of projections of sections of the rotating hypercube (both painted on the surface and modeled in wire rods).In addition, the overall collapsing metric of the painting is meant to suggest the curvature of space-time.88 Robbin’s work pioneers an eighth category of responses to Einstein and Relativity, which might be designated “perceptual complexity based on four-dimensional (geometric) space-time.” Robbin’s continued study of four-dimensional geometry, including its history and its relation to contemporary developments in topology and physics, is the subject of his most recent book, Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Cubism, Relativity, and Modern Thought.89

The ﬁrst edition of my book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art appeared in 1983—just a year before the emergence of string theory as well as the ﬁeld of computer graphics and related ideas of cyberspace, which would all contribute to a major resurgence of interest in higher dimensional space by the end of the 20th century. Following upon the new focus on geometry in work on General Relativity by Wheeler and others, string theory has made dimensionality a lively issue in physics and cosmology and the subject of much science writing for a lay audience.90 Along with the great popular acclaim Einstein received as the 20th century ended, interest in the scientist and his theories has risen to new levels after a lull during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Reﬂecting that renewal, a recent series of works by Pop art pioneer James Rosenquist speciﬁcally addresses the moving and stationary frames of reference of Special Relativity. With their distortions and compressions of form, Rosenquist’s paintings such as Mariner—Speed of Light of 1999 (Fig.8.18) and The Stowaway Peers Out at the Speed of Light of 2000 bring this discussion full circle to the issue of motion-induced contraction explored by Mendelsohn in the Einstein Tower (Fig.8.6).According to Rosenquist,“ The paintings are about my imagination as to a new view, or a new look at the speed of light.”91 In Mariner—Speed of Light, brilliantly colored forms and their metallic reﬂections twist, stretch, and swirl, giving visual form to the effects that might be experienced near the speed of light. In paint on canvas Rosenquist produces some of the most visually compelling images of the “ vision in motion” that Moholy-Nagy argued was the central characteristic of the new world of Einstein and space-time. Metaphorically, the paintings express Rosenquist’s belief in the inevitable difference between his own frame of reference as a painter and that of his viewers and critics, who have not traveled the same lifelong voyage as he.92

From Höch to Warhol or from Mendelsohn and Dalí to Rosenquist, Einstein and Relativity Theory have clearly been important stimuli in the 20th century, providing new iconography and encouraging stylistic innovation for a number of artists, architects, and designers. The typology of visual responses herein—images of Einstein, formal distortion-contraction as a sign of Special Relativity, the incorporation of time into art, exploring light and “light-space,” imagining space-time, diagramming Relativity, popular iconographical signs of Einstein and Relativity, and perceptual complexity based on four-dimensional (geometric) space-time—is by no means complete, however. Much work remains to be done on this subject, particularly at nodal points where there was a concentration of activity in relation to Einstein’s theories, such as Berlin in the 1920s or Paris in the 1950s,with the ﬂowering of kinetic art. Post–World War II Europe and Latin America, on which far less art historical scholarship exists in general, are ripe for the study of art and science and, speciﬁcally, the impact of Einstein and Relativity Theory.93

Basic exploratory research with an eye to artists’ discussions of Einstein and science is the ﬁrst stage for such a reexamination of 20th-century art. These investigations also need to be undertaken against the backdrop of a more nuanced understanding of the history of early 20th-century science. Duchamp pinpointed the problem accurately when he declared in a 1967 interview,“ The public always needs a banner; whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other.”94 The sole focus on Picasso and Einstein as fully formed, public icons for much too long, even after the myth of a direct connection between them was debunked, has created a distorted view of the history of modern art and science. Just as Picasso does not embody all of Cubism, Einstein and Relativity do not represent all of early 20th-century science. Most importantly, it is crucial to recognize the continued dominance of the pre-Einsteinian, late Victorian “electromagnetic world view” for laypeople through the 1910s—as well as the loyalty to the ether by both the public and scientists such as Gustave Mie and Oliver Lodge in the later 1910s and early 1920s.Neither the Michelson-Morley experiment nor the publication of Einstein’s papers in 1905 spelled the immediate end of ether, as is so often stated.95 Recently, Peter Galison has issued a similar call for historians of science to “particularize” Einstein and the evolution of his theories, as he recedes further and further behind his words now “splintered into modules, stripped of context, and rendered into slogans.”96

For cultural historians addressing the engagement of artists with science, the critical interface to be explored is contemporary popular writing on science in magazines and books—e.g., Duncan’s The New Knowledge (1905), the widely read texts by Eddington and Jeans of the 1920s–30s (kept in print well beyond those decades), or accessible texts written for the public by scientists themselves. Such texts, along with such indexes as the Reader’s Guideto Periodical Literature or, for the 1960s, the Whole Earth Catalog, allow a historian to gauge what scientiﬁc ideas were accessible and seen as relevant in the cultural ﬁeld in which an artist was operating. Gavin Parkinson’s excellent book Surrealism, Art and Modern Physics, noted above, is solidly grounded in his careful tracing of the popularization of Relativity and quantum physics in interwar France. The same attention to transmission of ideas characterizes two other ﬁne contributions to the study of Einstein and art as well as literature: Kathleen James’ work on Mendelsohn, discussed herein, and Holly Henry’s Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science. Finally, Christina Lodder and Martin Hammer’s book on Naum Gabo is an exemplar of exacting scholarship on an artist who has long been linked loosely to Relativity Theory but whose range of sources was, in fact, far more varied.97

Because the “fourth dimension” was at the center of the Cubism-Relativity myth, this essay has focused primarily on Einstein’s and Minkowski’s ideas on space and time. Apart from Mendelsohn’s focus on energy in his “dynamic functionalism,” Einstein’s E=mc2 equation has been addressed in this essay primarily as a visual sign for Relativity and not in terms of its content. Yet new conceptions of energy and of mass/matter-energy interaction were vital to many artists both in the context of the pre-Einsteinian ether physics as well as in the decades after Relativity’s triumph.98 Artists Athena Tacha and Agnes Denes, for example, have been deeply engaged with Einstein’s physics of energy as well as space-time since the later 1960s, with Tacha also reading extensively in quantum physics. In her 1978 essay “Rhythm as Form, ”Tacha includes “the interchangeability of matter and energy” along with gravity and the “interdependence of space and time” among the concepts of science that she seeks “to render tangible and communicable to others” in her sculpture.99 Denes has discussed her detailed drawings that diagram or map invisible systems and structures as a response to the dynamic realm of Einstein’s “ four dimensional principles of relativity,” in which “objects become processes” and “[m] atter is a form of energy.”100

Finally, artist Matthew Ritchie, who initially came to prominence in the 1990s, is another ﬁgure for whom the full range of Einstein’s science has stimulated a highly creative imagination. Ritchie’s art is grounded in his extensive reading in science and other ﬁelds, out of which he creates complex systems of information and narrative, as in the 2003 exhibition Proposition Player. Yet Ritchie is primarily a painter, and his central expressive vehicle is an organic language of line and color drawn and painted on walls and ﬂoors and even suspended in space. Ritchie’s swirling imagery regularly evokes comments about its energy, and curator Lynn Herbert’s phrase “energy-ﬁlled continuum” is particularly apt for an artist who is adding a unique new phase to the tradition of 20th-century artists responding to Einstein.101 Now augmented by more recent issues in physics, including the eleven-dimensional universes of string theorists like David Gross and the membrane theory of Lisa Randall (see their essays herein), as well as time travel, dark energy, and dark matter, the “romance of many dimensions” of artists with Einstein and Relativity Theory is clearly continuing into the 21st century.

SALVADOR DALI SPANISH 1904 - 1989

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY 1931

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 24.1 x 33.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Given Anonymously, 1934

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE AMERICAN 1887 - 1986

BANANA FLOWER 1934

Charcoal on Paper

Dimensions: 55.2 x 37.7 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Given Anonymously (by Exchange), 1936

MAX ERNST

EARTHQUAKE FROM NATURAL HISTORY 1925, PUBLISHED 1926

One From a Portfolio of 34 Collotypes After Frottage

Dimensions: Composition: 42.8 × 26 cm; Sheet: 49.8 × 32.3 cm

Publisher: Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris

Edition: 300

Credit: Gift of James Thrall Soby

MAX ERNST

THE REPAST OF DEATH NATURAL ISTORY 1925, PUBLISHED 1926

One From a Portfolio of 34 Collotypes After Frottage

Dimensions: Composition: 25.6 × 42.9 cm; Sheet: 32.5 × 49.6 cm

Publisher: Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris

Edition: 300

Credit: Gift of James Thrall Soby

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO ITALIAN, BORN GREECE 1888 - 1978

GARE MONTPARNASSE ( THE MELANCHOLY OF DEPARTURE ) 1914

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 140.0 x 184.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of James Thrall Soby, 1969

ISAMU NOGUCHI AMERICAN 1904 - 1988

MY PACIFIC ( POLYNESIAN CULTURE ) 1942

Driftwood

Dimensions: 104.1 x 53.3 x 20.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Florene May Schoenborn Bequest, 1996

WIFREDO LAM CUBAN 1902 - 1982

SATAN 1942

Gouache on Paper

Dimensions: 106.4 x 86.4 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Inter-American Fund, 1942

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI FRENCH, BORN ROMANIA 1876 - 1957

THE NEWBORN VERSION I, 1920,

Close to the Marble of 1915 Bronze

Dimensions: 14.6 x 21.0 x 14.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Acquired Through the Lillie

P. Bliss Bequest (by Exchange), 1943

PABLO PICASSO SPANISH 1881 - 1973

SEATED BATHER 1930

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 163.2 x 129.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1950

FREDERICK KIESLER

ENDLESS HOUSE PROJECT

FREDERICK KIESLER

ENDLESS HOUSE PROJECT, PLAN OF SECOND MEZZANINE 1951

Medium

A: Ink and Ink Wash on Paper .B: Cut-and-Pasted Printed Paper on Tracing Paper

Dimensions: 37.5 x 45.1 cm)

Department

Architecture and Design

Kiesler began to develop The Endless House in the 1920s, and it continued to occupy him for decades. He described this single-family home as “endless like the human body—there is no beginning and no end to it.” A commission to make a full-scale prototype of the dwelling for MoMA’s sculpture garden in the late 1950s never came to completion, but he made numerous concept and preparatory drawings, including those on view here. Kiesler’s work in architecture, set and furniture design, painting, poetry, and sculpture was guided by his theory of correalism, an inclusive philosophy that embraced science and magic in equal parts and advocated for the dissolution of the boundaries that separate them. These interests were reflected in his participation in panels and discussions at the Club on a range of topics, from art and architecture to music.

FREDERICK KIESLER

ENDLESS HOUSE PROJECT. PLAN OF FIRST MEZZANINE 1951

Ink and Ink Wash on Paper

Dimensions: 37.5 x 45.1 cm

Department

Architecture and Design

JOAN MIRO SPANISH 1893 - 1983

PORTRAIT OF MISTRESS MILLS IN 1750 - 1929

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 116.7 x 89.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York James Thrall Soby Bequest, 1979

IMMENSE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Describing the landscape of art in 1982, Sherrie Levine expressed the feeling that ‘every word, every image is leased and mortgaged’, making the artist a ‘plagiarist’ who draws on an ‘immense encyclopedia’ of sources. Indeed, appropriation was a key strategy used by artists in the 1980s and 1990s to co-opt and comment on a vast trove of cultural references.

Jeff Koons’s readymade sculptures, for example, turn everyday objects into icons, adopting conventions of display from commercial advertising. Christian Marclay’s videos splice snippets of found footage, stitching together fragmented narratives through judicious edits. These strategies often shaped investigations of identity, as in the photographs of Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, which stage tableaux that question the roles played by women, or in works by Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon, which examine African-American experience by citing history and literature. Appropriation also gave shape to expressions of protest and mourning, as in artist group General Idea’s viral methods of raising AIDS awareness, or Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s metaphorically charged installations.

A punk spirit also permeated art of these decades, with poster designs for bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Clash influencing the vocabularies of young artists. It was a cultural era in which concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ were forcibly inverted. Both Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon designed album covers and zines before applying an

underground ethos to sculptures and drawings, including those on view here.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

JAMIE REID BRITISH BORN 1947

POSTER FOR THE SEX PISTOLS SOUNDTRACK & FILM

The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle 1979 lithograph

Dimensions: 69.9 x 89.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Lawrence Benenson, 2012

ISA GENZKEN

MLR 1992

Alkyd Resin Spray Paint on Canvas

Dimensions: 124.5 x 95 cm

Credit: Gift of The Riklis Collection of McCrory Corporation

(By Exchange) and The Modern Women's Fund

GLENN LIGON

UNTITLED (HOW IT FEELS TO BE – 7 COLORED ME) 1991

Oil Stick on Paper

Dimensions: 80.6 x 41 cm

Credit: Gift of The Bohen Foundation

GLENN LIGON

UNTITLED (I AM INVISIBLE MAN) 1991

Oil Stick on Paper

Dimensions: 76.2 x 43.8 cm

Credit: Gift of The Bohen Foundation

ANDREAS GURSKY

TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK 1997 (DETAIL)

ANDREAS GURSKY

TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK 1997

Chromogenic color print

Dimensions: 186 x 250.5 cm

Credit: The Family of Man Fund

KEITH HARING

TOTEM 1989

Woodcut on Three Sheets

Dimensions: Composition (Overall, Irreg.): 187 x 55.5 cm;

Sheet (Overall): 195 x 89 cm; Sheet (Each, Irreg.): 65 x 89 cm

Credit: Gift of Edition Schellmann, Munich and New York

ZAHA HADID BRITISH, BORN IRAQ 1950 – 2016

THE PEAK PROJECT, HONG KONG, CHINA, (EXTERIOR PERSPECTIVE) 1991

Synthetic Polymer Paint on Paper Mounted on Canvas

Dimensions: 129.5 x 182.9 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York David Rockefeller, Jr. Fund, 1992

GENERAL IDEA ( ARTISTS’ GROUP ) ACTIVE 1968 – 1994,

AA BRONSON CANADIAN BORN 1946

FELIX PARTZ CANADIAN 1945 - 1994,

JORGE ZONTAL CANADIAN, BORN ITALY 1944 - 1994

AIDS ( WALLPAPER ) 1988

Installation of Screenprinted Wallpaper

Dimensions Variable; Each Wallpaper Roll: 27 Inches by

15 Feet Approximately (68.6 by 457.2 cm.)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Richard Gerrig and Timothy Peterson in celebration of the Museum's reopening, 2004

Esther Schipper, Berlin; Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich; Maureen Paley, London;

and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

UNKNOWN (DESIGNER) POSTER FOR THE CLASH,

GIVE’ EM ENOUGH ROPE TOUR 1979

Lithograph

Dimensions: 76.2 x 50.8 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of

Lawrence Benenson, 2012

ROBERT GOBER AMERICAN BORN 1954

UNTITLED 1991

Wood, Beeswax, Leather Shoe, Cotton Fabric, Human Hair, and Steel

Dimensions: 31.8 x 90.2 x 23.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Robert and Meryl Meltzer,

Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, The Norman and Rosita

Winston Foundation Inc. Funds,

The Millstream Fund, and Jerry I. Speyer Fund, 1992

LINDER ( LINDA STERLING ) BRITISH BORN 1954

MALCOLM GARRETT BRITISH BORN 1956

POSTER FOR THE BUZZCOCKS SINGLE, ORGASM ADDICT 1977

Lithograph

Dimensions: 99.1 x 73.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of

PEARL THOMPSON BRITISH BORN 1957

ANDY VELLA BRITISH BORN 1961

POSTER FOR THE CURE ALBUM HEAD ON THE DOOR 1985

Lithograph

Dimensions: 76.2 x 50.2 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of

SHERRIE LEVINE AMERICAN BORN 1947 BLACK NEWBORN 1994

Cast and Sandblasted Glass

Dimensions: 12.7 x 20.3 x 14.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Painting and

Sculpture Fund and gift of Susan G. Jacoby in Honor of

Her Mother Marjorie Goldberger, 2004

FLIGHT PATTERNS

As the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, digital technologies both enabled an increasingly globalised world and allowed its contemporary networks to be represented. These open currents of information do not always guarantee borderless movement, however, and some of today’s artists and designers employ more traditional materials and methods to call attention to issues of immigration and displacement.

Designed by the Italian company Solari di Udine, the Split flap board flight information display system, 1996, exhibits an ever-changing array of potential destinations, while Aaron Koblin’s 2005 project Flight patterns plots data to model the crisscrossing paths of commercial aviation. Investigating the ways we store and categorise knowledge, Camille Henrot’s video Grosse fatigue, 2013, alludes to the exhaustion that can accompany an excess of information in an over-connected age.

Other contemporary projects address similar issues using more analogue methods. Composed of crumpled pieces of cast-off metal, El Anatsui’s shimmering wall sculpture speaks to cycles of colonialism and consumption. A panel woven by the National Union of Sahrawi Women maps the Algerian refugee camp in which that population has remained dislocated for more than four decades. And on a more individual level, Rineke Dijkstra’s recurring series of photographs of a Bosnian refugee – taken periodically since 1994 – powerfully traces the growth and movement of a single subject.

https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/moma-at-ngv/

SHIGETAKA KURITA ET AL. JAPANESE BORN 1972

NTT DOCOMO, INC. JAPAN ( MANUFACTURER ) JAPANESE EST. 1991

EMOLOJI 1998 - 1999

Digital Image

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of NTT DOCOMO, Inc., 2016

SOLARI DI UDINE, UDINE ITALIAN EST. 1948

SPLIT FLAP BOARD FLIGHT INFORMATION DISPLAY SYSTEM 1996

Painted Steel and Aluminium, Sicodur® Coating and Synthetic Polymer Paint

Dimensions: 166.6 x 330.5 x 20.0 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of the A+D Circle, 2004

EL ANATSUI GHANAIAN BORN 1944

BLEEDING TAKARI II 2007 (DETAIL)

EL ANATSUI GHANAIAN BORN 1944

BLEEDING TAKARI II 2007

Aluminium and Copper Wire

Dimensions: 393.7 x 576.6 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Donald L. Bryant, Jr. and Jerry Speyer,

EL ANATSUI GHANAIAN BORN 1944

BLEEDING TAKARI II 2007 (DETAIL)

CAMILLE HENROT, FRENCH BORN 1978

GROSSE FATIGUE 2013

Colour Video, Sound, 13 Min

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Fund for the Twenty-First Century, 2013

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE

MOMA OPENING NIGHT

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA MELBOURNE

I may work as a freelance Architect. I graduated Yıldız Technical University Istanbul, Turkey. I prepare all the presantation by myself. This blog is my magical attic. Blog include that I already collected and will collect time by time past to future. Some of them influence me with their story , other fascinate me charm of colour, some is bents me differ of design. Some of them come into my life all the fascinating contex together that fuse different concept with there imagination and presantation. They all take part enjoyable place in my memory library to be as metaphor. Some of them I already forgot but when I seen them that make me in good spirits. Other is unforgettable. Some of them connect before to now that make to come new people in our life with new stories. Dream and reality fuses in life. All of them take part in this blog that I love.
I share all the knowledge of art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, people’ s story etc… without professional doubt. After all this progress , my magical attic will improve, get rich, increase and multiply when new comer join us day by day as our universe.
Please you may not hesitate to contact me. I may prefer to hear your idea that you could share with me your own work or other' s people work.

You could contact me :
mymagicalattic@gmail.com

PAGES

July 06, 2018

MOMA AT NGV: MORE THAN 200 WORKS FROM THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK