Displaying items by tag: MOMA

Billionaire Ken Griffin donated $40 million to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one of the largest gifts in the institution’s 85-year history.

The unrestricted gift from the founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel will help provide education and exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, the museum said Tuesday in a statement. In recognition of the gift, MoMA will name its 1964 Philip Johnson-designed East Wing after Griffin.

Within the Museum of Modern Art’s announcement on Tuesday of coming exhibitions were signs of a seismic shift underway in how it collects and displays modern and contemporary art — changes that are expected to have a powerful impact on the museum’s renovation.

While curatorial activities used to be highly segregated by department, with paintings and sculpture considered the most important, the museum has gradually been upending that traditional hierarchy, organizing exhibitions in a more fluid fashion across disciplinary lines and redefining its practice of showing art from a linear historical perspective.

The Museum of Modern Art is planning its biggest masterpiece yet, not that you’ll get it.

The museum is moving ahead with plans for an estimated $93 million expansion at the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, according to an application filed with the New York City Department of Buildings Tuesday.

The plans for an adjacent lot, at 45 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, call for 32,842 square feet of new space, which will include theaters, a library/lounge, classrooms, exhibit space and gardens, the application indicates.

The decadelong quest included archive detectives, location mix-ups, vintage postcards and a coveted art collection torn apart by war. When it was done, the Museum of Modern Art decided to return an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner landscape to the heirs of its original, Jewish owner.

The museum announced Monday that the German expressionist painter’s 1917-18 canvas “Sand Hills (By Grünau)” rightly belongs to the heirs of a Berlin writer, Max Fischer, who had to leave his art behind when he fled Germany for the U.S. in late 1935.

If you’ve been meaning to make it to MoMA to check out “Picasso Sculpture,” you’ll need to plan ahead starting next week. Beginning November 10, MoMA is requiring visitors to purchase timed entrance tickets for the five-month exhibit, which opened September 14.

This isn’t the first time MoMA has implemented timed ticketing. Over the past seven years, the Tim Burton, Van Gogh, Bjork and two Matisse exhibits have also required viewers to enter at a particular time.

Klaus Biesenbach announced in an email today that the museum he directs, MoMA PS1 in Queens, will be free for all New York City residents thanks to a gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation. Tickets currently cost $10 for adults and $5 for students and seniors, though it’s worth noting that those are suggested fees. Visitors from out of town will still have to pay.

How are they going to confirm residency? From the museum: “Upon arrival please present proof of New York City residency such as a driver’s license, state-issued identification card or a New York City utility bill.”

He is one of the great draftsmen of the impressionist era, acclaimed for strongly structured compositions and a masterful use of line. But when Edgar Degas discovered the printmaking technique known as monotype, everything changed.

As a major exhibition due to open at the Museum of Modern Art next spring reveals, he became much looser and more improvisational in his working methods. He regularly mixed printmaking with other media, like pastel. And he expanded past the subjects for which he is best known—dancers and scenes of modern life—to include risqué brothel scenes and landscapes verging on abstraction.

A flea market find may mean a big payout for a Texas man. Ray Riley believes that the canvas he picked up for a mere $90 earlier this year is an authentic Sigmar Polke painting.

Polke has had a resurgence over the past few years, with a retrospective of his work at MoMA this past year and a new record for his work set at auction in May this year when it sold for $27.1 million at Sotheby's New York (prior to that, the record was $9.2 million, set in 2011).

Museums have traditionally been spaces of contemplation, refuges from the outside world where visitors can bask in front of masterpieces in quiet serenity.

Well, that's if you don't live in New York City.

In the Big Apple, even art museums can be crushed with crowds and airport security-style lines. These are massive buildings with some of the best collections of art in the world—it's natural. The Metropolitan Museum's attendance stood at a near-record 6.16 million people in 2014; the Museum of Modern Art's was more than 3 million, and if recent visits to the packed new Whitney are any indication, it will blow the old Breuer building's attendance out of the water.

Contemporary art giant Bruce Nauman will be honored with a full-dress retrospective, organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Schaulager, in Basel. It's slated to open at the Schaulager in March 2018 and come to New York in September that year.

Co-curating the show are MoMA's associate director, Kathy Halbreich, Schaulager's senior curator Heidi Naef, and MoMA curatorial assistant Magnus Schaefer.