Displaying items by tag: Modernist

1. It doesn’t get any better than this Modernist masterpiece by Richard Meier.

esigned by the world renowned architect Richard Meier, the 11,000-square-foot “White Castle” was built in Old Westbury, New York, in 1972. A minimalist study in Meier’s signature white, the dramatic home features glass walls and a skylit gallery hall -- ideal for displaying a stunning art collection. The striking home is situated on five sprawling acres and features six bedrooms, a tennis court, a pool, and a pond. The “White Castle” will...

Only a short time remains for a special exhibition of the work of American modernist Gershon Benjamin (1899-1985), a Romanian-born, Montreal-educated artist remembered as an Expressionist for his individualistic style and use of color. The exhibition, Gershon Benjamin: Modern Master features more than 60 portraits, still lifes, landscapes and city scenes in oil, watercolor and charcoal—all representing more than seven decades of work.

Benjamin was part of a 1920s New York scene of progressive artists who favored European modernism to the popular American Scene and Regionalist art of the day.

Created in 1956 for Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper, this monumental chair is more than a fascinating piece of Modernist history. Lacy Anderson of Exchange Int, the Houston- and Detroit-based gallery offering the chair, says, “It has several components that identify it as a Frank Lloyd Wright piece, but there’s more to it than that. It’s so unique in its design and you can’t really assign it to a period right off the bat. I also like the way people respond when they see it. We work with people, including collectors and interior designers, who have...

The interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, a vision of Modernist elegance with its French walnut paneling and white marble pool of bubbling water, should not be changed, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission decided on Tuesday.

The decision was a setback to Aby J. Rosen, the owner of the Seagram Building, which is home to the restaurant. Mr. Rosen had proposed what he characterized as minor changes to the interior that was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in 1958.

When the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district on May 1, it’s the big things everyone will notice first: the sweeping views west to the Hudson River; the romantic silhouettes of Manhattan’s wooden water towers; the four outdoor terraces for presenting sculptures, performances and movie screenings; and the tiered profile of its steel-paneled facade, intentionally reminiscent of the Whitney’s Modernist, granite-clad Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which had been the museum’s home since 1966.

Its new digs, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, also offer commodious interior spaces: 50,000 square feet of galleries, unencumbered by structural columns, and huge elevators that are themselves immersive environments, the work of the artist Richard Artschwager.

The woman, carved from limestone, sits with her arms resting on her pulled-up legs and looks enigmatically ahead. She is regarded as one of Romania’s finest modernist artworks, yet the Bucharest government’s refusal to say whether it wants to buy her has left the €20m (£15m) sculpture in a murky legal limbo, and its owners unable to sell.

The statue, "The Wisdom of the Earth" by Constantin Brâncuși, has a history that reflects the tumult in its creator’s native land. First sold in 1911, it was confiscated by the communists in 1957 and became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, ending in 2008 with it returned to the family of its original owner.

For thirty-seven years, Josef Albers’ mural “Manhattan” graced the lobby of the MetLife (previously PanAm) Building on Park Avenue in New York City. Installed in 1963, the giant red, white, and black work was designed as an homage to New York, the city to which Albers emigrated in 1933. The mural was removed in 2000 during a lobby redesign and all but one of the panels ended up in a landfill site in Ohio after a failed attempt to remove asbestos from the backs of the tiles. Much to the delight of art lovers, “The Art Newspaper” has reported that the modernist masterpiece could make a triumphant return to New York City.

The forthcoming World Trade Center Transit Hub could be a possible home for the work, but no definitive plans have been announced. 

Sotheby’s continues to build aggressively on its strength in the Impressionist and Modern market announcing today Matisse’s "Odalisque au fauteuil noir," estimated at between £9 and 12m, for its London sale of Impressionist and Modern art. Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Co-Head, Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide, said, “This exquisitely colored painting is one of the finest of the artist’s celebrated ‘Odalisque’ paintings to come to the market.”

An exquisite portrait depicting Princess Nézy-Hamidé Chawkat, the great granddaughter of the last Sultan of Turkey, "Odalisque au fauteuil noir" (dated 1942 and estimated at £9-12m) is one of Henri Matisse’s finest paintings from his famed ‘Odalisque’ series, his depictions of the notorious concubine figure, with which he created one of the most recognizable emblems of eroticism in Modern art.

"Forbidden Games” is an exhibition of 167 of the 178 photographs David Raymond donated and sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. The show, which runs through Jan. 11, 2015, includes works taken from 1920 through the 1940s by such major surrealist and modernist photographers as Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Brassaï and Hans Bellmer, as well as many less well known, such as Dora Maar, Marcel G. Lefrancq and George Hugnet. There are also works by photographers not ordinarily identified with either tendency who nonetheless occasionally took pictures that could be so considered. The images Mr. Raymond assembled make a grand introduction to important aspects of art photography between the end of the First World War and mid-century.

Cardi Gallery, the Milan-based modern and contemporary art gallery, presents "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," an exhibition of over thirty important collages and sculptures created between 1955 and 1970 that reveal the formalist achievements of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), an icon of the Feminist art movement and one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century. "Louise Nevelson: 55-70," is on view through December 20, 2014.

"Louise Nevelson: 55-70" features works created between 1955 and 1970, a period when the artist’s signature modernist style emerged, with labyrinthine wooden assemblages and monochrome surfaces, and evolved, as Nevelson incorporated industrial materials such as Plexiglas, aluminum and steel in the 1960s and 1970s.