In Our Time: The Museum of Modern Art

[Music] America is a land of great museums and every museum has spellbinding stories to tell be open-minded art is not something that ended a 100 years ago if there are a thousand people in the museum that day there should be a thousand different experiences look and look and look that's the aesthetic experience Moma the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in our time next on great museums major funding for great museums is provided by the Eureka Foundation dedicated to the educational power of television and New Media exercise your curiosity explore America's great museums knit into the urban fabric of Midtown Manhattan the Museum of Modern Art affectionately known worldwide as Moma is a 21st century think tank for art at MoMA the two two big questions are what makes it modern and what makes it art there's something here that captures the imagination that gets you thinking that makes you hungry to learn more about not just Modern Art but art in general I'm constantly confused by works that come in front of me at times you look and you say I have no idea what this is there are so many artists making art today making new art um trying things that haven't been tried before I think a large number of visitors uh probably are shocked but you can have many works of art Venture into new areas and give people a totally different concept of art people were coming to visit m i I hope they will do one thing and that's enjoy themselves of course as a print curator I'd love them to rush right to the print Gallery but I think Meandering around the museum is really the most rewarding way to do it it's a an extraordinary opportunity to recognize that art is not something that ended 100 years ago but that is vital and alive [Music] today [Music] Moma is a modern art Adventure at every turn I was in my brother and I I grabbed onto him I was like oh my god look what it is and he wases like why why I'm like it's water these I had was like so close to it and like it was the actual painting and like you try to think what the artist was feeling and like that he was that close to the canvus as well and it's amazing when you come in the museum what you encounter in fact is a soaring Atrium that is skylit and that is a huge surprise because spaces of this scale rarely can be found in New York and then of course anchoring this space is Barnett Newman's staggering broken Obelisk Monumental obelisks are inventions of ancient Egypt and by inverting the Obelisk and balancing it a top the Pyramid of course Newman's made something new something modern but something that is freighted with this kind of legacy of ancient art for us Contemporary Art is the way in which we look through and at the art of the past building on the past the new work takes elements of the past and reshapes it with the historical work in the collection it's quite clear these were the important Trends these were the major artists for the art of our own time we can't know that for sure we're still too much in the thick of it and in a way that's the tricky part of being a contemporary art curator in 10 years and 20 years we'll see our own mistakes our own omissions will have realized oh here are the artists we were so in love with who now everybody's forgotten and here's an artist who turns out to have had such an impact and nobody even noticed him off that's exactly what happened to Vince van go thank you he only sold one painting during his lifetime even though he painted nearly 800 one of these The Starry Night is now one of the world's most celebrated images actually there something strange about this picture it's a beautiful thing but it's sort of dislocated in its parts in a radical break with tradition and reality van go painted The Starry Night from his own imagination not from the scene and of course then you think well you know why did I even think it was painted from the scene it's at night did he actually go out and paint at night of course he didn't the sky swirls the stars explode the Moon is the color of the sun the paint is so palpable it's so fresh and intense in terms of the color in terms of the texture in terms of his giving a piece of himself to us in that painting and you can see see the glimmer of the paint against the light and the thickness of the paint and it's as if van go might have painted it yesterday of course he painted it well over a century ago starring night is one of the great pictures in the collection and of course the first show at the Museum this painting was was one of the paintings in it we were founded in November of 1929 not an ideal moment to to open any kind of institution in America but in literally a matter of months the museum took off 47,000 visitors came to see moma's first show held in an office building featuring works by the pioneers of Modern Art front and center was the bther by Paul ceson the figure seems almost paper thin sesan's constructions are flat and planer we notice the color sesan's colors are intense and unnatural it's applied in patches we get a building up of pictures from brush struges suzan's bather is boldly stepping forward toward a new world of Modern Art also deliberately departing from tradition was George surra who rejected the rapid and romantic brush work of the Impressionists to capture the look of natural light he constructed a system of colored dots called pointalism based on the science of Optics and Paul Goan not only abandoned impressionism he abandoned civilization for Tahiti where he expressed the Exotic through flat forms and violent colors in his paintings and most daringly in his woodcuts he treated woodcut with such energy and really released this kind of Primal force from the wood block he actually revolutionized the woodcut medium uh with this group of woodcuts at MoMA the Modern Art of any age is not the newest it's the next it's the experimental that becomes the established the work that makes me scratch my head and makes me even a little bit uncomfortable because it doesn't look quite like what I'm familiar with already that's what the museum is looking for it could be work that's really quiet but somehow it's changing the way we we think about art and changing the way we think about the [Music] world going through a museum like this you're aware that modern artart is many things it's like political parties who are vying for the attention of Voters you know there's the the Cubist party and the surrealist party and the futurist party each of whom offer views on what modern art should be the symbolists led by redon used art to show the depths of man's Soul expressionists like Edvard monk used Distortion and exaggeration to convey emotion and the fists as in wild beasts believe that art should look like art not nature and color should be intensely Vivid the the master was matis matis has this amazing ability to compose with color you can actually see him making pictures about the relationships of color fism was shortlived but mati's commitment to color was anything but the red studio is um one of the most popular pictures in the collection its popularity maybe at times hides the just EXT extraordinarily radical nature of what matis has done the idea of using one color to flood entire picture when he finished it in 1911 the red Studio was considered the flattest easel painting done to date traditional illusions of depth and dimension slightly disappear there is only color when you look more carefully at it you begin to see it as a work of art that actually is full of puzzles the room actually doesn't have walls and Floors that connect to each other the clock doesn't have hands on it there are all sorts of aspects of the painting that are essentially designed to trip us up this is actually something which artists do they use the puzzlement as a way of engaging the viewer at first glance the piano lesson by matis seems simple enough but what is really intriguing about the piano lesson is a psychological charge that the painting has peering over the boy's shoulder is his Prim piano teacher or perhaps his mother we then look to the other side and see what seems to be a naked woman sitting in the corner or should we think in fact that the very severe music teacher figure and the extra extremely sexual nude in the corner are actually there to represent different kinds of experience you know the the the life of the mind and the life of the senses on the piano top is a metronome measuring time and Tempo the beat of its pendulum swinging between two extremes and the angle of the metronome is reflected in the shadow that cuts across a young man's face and what you stand there is the power of concentration that that young boy must feel but also the pressure the pressure that must be there because of his mother's Gaze on him and I find it absolutely uh extraordinary how much matis can get out of this picture how much psychological depth can be there and yet the eyes the nose the mouth the evident uh elements that would normally reveal the psychology of the work are almost hidden fittingly mom's first onean show in 1931 was devoted to the acclaimed modern master matis who was then in his early 60s the Moroccans was featured as well as the diminutive La Serpentine which belonged to Abby aldri Rockefeller one of three ladies who founded Moma and it's a good example of one that uh as a child who had been brought up with things were very realistic was a bit of a shock to begin with I mean it isn't purely realistic walking through the galleries with David is an extraordinary experience because he has so much knowledge and such a long history of this institution these matis busts are very extraordinary showing Evolution from very realistic busts to ones that were much more abstract being able to put those five together was extraordinary mom has been part of my life from the very beginning because as a young boy I would sit in on some of the discussions between the three ladies who started it one of them being my mother my father did not particularly enjoy what he considered to be modern and and not very realistic and therefore not good but on the other hand he allowed mother to take the seventh floor of our house where I was born where we lived and make it into an art gallery which she did and so I always enjoyed going up and and looking at those things and hear her talk about them the lame bro statue is one of the ones that she had in that Gallery mom's Founders Abby Rockefeller and her two friends Mary Quinn Sullivan and Lily Bliss were hip ahead of their time they had a huge ambition and a huge sense of mission for this Museum their new Museum was going to need a skilled director with enormous Zeal the right man for the job turned out to be a 27-year-old art teacher Alfred Bar many of the things that were shown here originally were a bit shocking not only to my father but to many other [Music] people Alfred Bar the founding director believed in a museum which would Encompass all the visual mediums so that included uh prints and drawings and painting and sculpture photography architecture and design and film and media and it was this idea of a total work of art where the environment the objects everything is pulling together to achieve a single purpose bar saw that Moma itself could be the launching pad for a Thoroughly Modern America the 24-year-old architect Philip Johnson shared his vision Philip Johnson occupied probably more roles at this museum than anyone else as a trustee as the head of our architecture and design Department as one of our greatest uh collectors and doners and also as an architect of the museum in 1932 bar asked Johnson to establish mom's Department of architecture and design beginning with an exhibition featuring Walter gropius's model for the bow house the famous School of Art architecture and design in Germany before World War II Europeans like Dutch architect Jared reitveld ruled modern architecture and design inside and out his famous red blue chair and this model for the Schroeder house in the Netherlands reflect the 1920s Trend towards simplified geometric even abstract forms which bar dubbed the international Style only a few American designers like Tiffany or Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright were known internationally after the war you have a whole bunch of new materials that had come into common usage during the war and so there was this huge explosion of American design Charles and Ray e a husband and wife team gave some sense to this huge shift from Urban living to Suburban living what says 1950s Suburbia better than a lounge chair they ran a studio that was really about experimentation fiberglass plywood spun aluminum all of these things that were uh sort of byproducts of the war effort they really were committed to this notion of the lowcost democratic household uh the good design was accessible to all and not just a privilege of the very wealthy the biggest object in Mom's architecture and designed collection is the museum building itself Moma is a soaring light filled Museum home to six floors of art endless views of the surrounding City and the Serene sculpture garden no matter where you move through the museum you always have a visual reference back to the Garden one of the more beloved spaces in New York City the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller sculpture garden was designed by Philip Johnson as a room with without a ceiling the Westerly end of the garden is where our house 10 West 54 Street was and where I was born so um I have memories that go way back two Rockefeller family homes were donated and demolished to make way for moma's first building designed by Goodwin and stone in the international style in 1939 new Museum president Nelson Rockefeller and Moma trustees celebrated moma's 10th birthday with the opening of the new $2 million building and a Picasso retrospective I don't think it's possible to understand Modern Art without recognizing the extraordinary achievements of Picasso mom's collection traces Picasso's 70-year career he really was one of a very small number of artists who shifted the direction of Modern Art and who really shaped the dialogue about modern art for decades even today his work looms over just about every other artist cubism the first Earth shattering art movement of the 20th century was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and George Brock matis dismissively referred to their efforts as paintings of little cubes the name stuck the point of Cub ism is not to paint solid Cub likee forms but to actually Splinter them and fragment them and provide that sense of looking at the forms from different sides cubism begins in this painting of five prostitutes perhaps Picasso's single most important painting the demoiselle davo is one of those very rare works of art that literally Chang the course of art history there is a way in which people just stare at this picture because of the picture staring at the at the viewer there is something terrifying about the Gaze of all these people it's also a painting about a shift in sensibility no longer about beauty but about something hard and Jagged fractured and even uh perhaps angry he kept changing the means of his painting as he did it and this I think is puzzling to anyone who expects aain painting to all be painted in the same way clearly it's it's in different styles after seeing examples of African tribal art and masks Picasso returned to the demoiselle canvas and restyled two of the figures interestingly for all the apparent savagery and spontaneity of the picture there are more drawings studies for this picture than exist for any other picture in the whole history Revolt I can remember uh it was quite a struggle to buy it we were thrilled when we acquired the painting Because by the late 1930s it had become evident that the demoiselle Davon which had been painted some 25 years earlier was indeed the great work of Picassa pretty hard to argue that you shouldn't get this no matter would the greatest way to appreciate art is to look and look and look the more you look uh the greater it'll be for you it's just an endless source of pleasure that's the aesthetic experience for me what's really important is that the Museum of Modern Art can show the richness and complexity of all of the different strains that have gone into creating what we think of as Modern Art many modernists were real s for the most part they worked independently but within the evolving traditions of modernism like Edward Hopper Georgia O'Keefe Andrew wyth and Jacob Lawrence sometimes we think about 20th century art as being quote art about art and it should just be about the colors and The rhythms and the beauty Lawrence went against that cliche and felt that no art can tell a story and that's where of course the great African-American storytelling tradition fed into his visual goals Jacob Lawrence's migration series portrays the experiences of the more than 1 million African Americans who migrated from south to North between 1915 and 1920 in search of jobs and Better Lives he was a product of Harlem and he made I think his greatest works in these narrative series such as the migration series working for example with modernism's emphasis on a very flat surface not a whole lot of depth and um illusion this is a teacup saucer and Spoon covered in fur Meritt oppenheim one of the great surrealist artists uh is really fascinating woman with an obvious flare for the unreal it's a cup that could bite back everyone who looks at it is mesmerized because of course it's so in congruous what's the fur doing inside the teacup what does it mean how would you use it could it be used and of course each one of those questions triggers the imagination to think about all sorts of strange and wonderful things the word surrealism I think is the only um word for a modern art movement which really has entered the common vocabulary you know that we all talk about things being surreal meaning I guess um you know so unusual as almost to be you know not real the surrealist Manifesto of 1924 defined the style as pure psychic automatism surrealism is about the mind it's about the imagination it's about the unconscious or the subconscious when people saw miro's birth of the world in 1925 they had no doubt that its inspiration was not of this world the background suggests an infinite expanse inhabited by a black triangle and a thin yellow line attached to a balloon or a sperm Meo made a practice of uh making an abstract language so even though you see what looks at First Sight like a totally AB ract composition it usually is based on uh some aspect of reality as we as we know it so here you have um a family scene with a parent perhaps the the mother a father figure here interestingly the woman is more prominent and a little child here a sun some clouds mome stuck close to reality and Humanity so even though you might not be able to figure out what his sign language uh really meant to him it was some kind of a symbol of either Humanity or the cosmic forces these intriguing elongated sculptures are the creations of another surrealist the Swiss artist jati who was summoned to a surrealist Tribunal for slipping back into working from a live model joedi who considered himself a realist anyway position the figure in empty space in order to see it better Salvador do is synonymous with surrealism in the late 1930s when dolly was formally kicked out of the group for his politics he declared I am surrealism he was right the beauty of dar's early paintings is this almost photographic painting style which we associate with realist art being used to persuaders that these utterly unlikely things are real do was the one that introduced me to Art to Fine Arts he's my most favorite artist of all I love do Salvador DOL painted the Persistence of memory in his 20s one thing which surprises many people is how small this picture is I mean tiny its smallness is part of the way in which it convinces I mean it's like looking through a PE what appears to be one thing morphs into something else and the whole thing is this view onto a totally not merely improbable but impossible world the molting clock i' say it intrigued me a lot and when I saw the portrait of him his picture his mustache was up and so I I I started to like him even more you know because he looked weird and that's what I like about him because he's so weird high school students are very excited by an artist's ability to turn the world upside down or inside out as a teenager that's part of what you're struggling with why sometimes you feel that the world is a very bizarre place if you think about it high school students age 17 a young artist bursting onto the art scene at the age of 20 they're actually almost peers they question the world around them they look at the world differently than the rest of us part of the reason that Contemporary Art Is So Exciting and stimulating and provocative is because of that what modern art is about is it's a kind of rough and tumble exchange where anything out there anything that you as a visitor may have experienced is fair game for the artist to to undertake there's not one answer you know and I think that anybody who tells you that this one answer is wrong you know there just can't be one answer if there are a thousand people in the music Museum that day there should be a thousand different experiences and the Deep ones are the ones that are the most unpredictable that's what the Museum's there [Music] for we have one motorcycle this was given to us by James dublan III and the tropical gangsters motorcycle racing Club people look at this motorcycle and say boy that's beautiful that's a beauty now they don't mean beautiful the way they mean a painting's beautiful it's a different kind of beautiful that really is part of the world of design up until the Black Shadow motorcycles were really bicycles that had been motorized Vincent Black Shadow no longer has anything to do with a bicycle it's now about a highly refined machine for Speed The Mechanics have gotten rid of every Superfluous element including the frame the motor motor is actually structural it connects the front of the bike to the back of the bike to us this is really the motorcycle the highest achievement of the mechanic they were not trying to make something beautiful they were trying to make something that did what it was supposed to do better than anything and anyone else ever did Vincent Black Shadow it's a great work of art at MoMA the superstars of Modern Art matis Picasso Pollock and Warhol share the stage with a jet engine fan blade chairs and a wet suit ball bearings housewares and an Apple iPod everything is designed by someone someone makes certain decisions about the way a thing is going to work how it's going to look what it's going to be made of then the objects tell you something about the people that made them the people that design designed them the people that use them the Peter Baron fan Baron thought very carefully about the torque in the angle of the blade it's this exquisitely shaped propeller and it marries beautifully with the shape of the stand I particularly like this wheelchair um it was designed by kazuo Kawasaki this looks to me more like uh something that was really designed with the personality of the individual in mind it's uh interesting to me how beautifully it sits with all these other objects the object that I think people note in this gallery that uh there's so many of is chairs why are there so many chairs for designers it's one of the most important and in a way personal objects chairs have seats they have backs they have arms they have legs they're obviously our size because they have to hold us so in many ways a chair is a mirror of who who is supposed to sit in it this is a chair generically that's called a Morris chair and this by many people's account is the first modern share um what's modern about it well one of the interesting things is it's machine like it actually moves the back is adjustable this Rod is adjustable the sits machine chair literally the machine for sitting one of the things that we've put front and center is this wonderful chair called Miss blanch by cherl kuramata kuramata was a postmodern designer in in the best sense of the word postmodern designers emphasized how does this make me feel Miss blanch evokes a kind of Tennessee Williams image of a Southern gentility and there's these plastic roses suspended in uh acrylic as the sunlight passes through the clear acrylic the Roses cast their Shadows on the ground Miss blanch is Moody she's Melancholy by by Design when the museum was founded in 1929 it was still adventurous to make a museum for the modern arts in the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture and drawing and and and print making but it might have been even more ambitious to say that the museum also needed to collect and study the distinctly modern mediums of film and Industrial design and photography this material had so transformed uh modern visual culture and Modern Life that it needed to be in a modern museum whether or not these things were works of art some say that photography is what made the modern world modern the Modern Art of Photography exploded in the 1920s and 30s when a whole new generation of people came along and they said no no no it's okay A a photograph can be a work of art uh even if it just looks like a photograph fundamentally it hadn't been an art it had been a business in the 1920s Eugene at J was in the business of making postcards here the park of St clue near Paris in any given circumstance you can make a thousand different pictures that all look different from each other and therefore mean and feel something different the viewers of the picture experience only what the photographer is directing them to experience the photographer's art is to choose very precisely what interpretation he or she wants to deliver our photography galleries present an ongoing history of photography in all of its manifestations from photojournalism to the magisterial work of Andreas gersi the documentary work of Robert Frank the pop approach of Andy Warhol the movie mythology of Cindy Sherman her Untitled film Stills is a series of portraits with Sherman playing familiar but fabricated movie roles the young goodlooking country girl who comes to the city to find Adventure the tough seasoned woman who's going to stand up to her man the woman who's just been brought to tears the audience at large when they encounter these pictures they feel right away as if they recognize that role and of course that's the genius of the work our perception of ourselves uh is created by the art of the age the only visual art to be invented in the late 19th early 20th century was film we were the first art museum in the world to actually treat film as one of the Fine Arts so many artists are turning to uh video digital production as well as film to to create powerful images and moving image works are shown not only in theaters but in Galleries and actually wherever they might happen to fit in a museum environment moma's first official curator of film Iris Barry began collecting film in the 1930s she went to Hollywood in 1936 traveled all around Europe and the Soviet Union in the in the 30s as well looking for films and rescuing films mom's collection of 22,000 moving image Works in includes the original camera negatives of the earliest American filmmakers such as the Edison Company they were about to be thrown away so Iris Barry said I'll take those we are here in the Titus 1 theater this theater was built in 1939 with the original Museum the undulating walls go back to the original 30s as it does the ceiling but one thing we're very uh proud of retaining was our original exit signs they're quite distinctive in this space we want people to come and see films within the context of a modern art museum when 100 years from now film no longer exists as a commercial medium you will still be able to come to the Museum of Modern Art and sit in a theater like this and have a film projected onto a screen so that you know what people experienced in the 20th century that's very important to us the very first acquisition of the Museum of Modern Art when it opened in 1929 was an etching by Max beckmont so it was a print the printing press goes back to the 15th century and right from the beginning artists saw the possibility of using a printing press to make artworks the most obvious thing it can do is it can make more than one uh of an artwork the print collection at MoMA contains over 50,000 prints and Illustrated books and covers all the major medium etching wood cut screen print lithography these are mediums that artists love and they can express things differently in these mediums from what they can express in painting a sculpture for instance in a way moma's print department is a collection of record for the artists it represents we can collect the early middle and late work of an artist not just one or two representative works so if someone were to come to study Picasso for instance to really understand Picasso's work as a whole it would be very important to study his print making the print room and study center are open by appointment to anyone who wants an up close and personal look at the collection Picasso some consider the greatest print maker of the modern period he made over 2,000 prints and in the 1940s he was introduced to lithography in Li phography the artist Works directly on a heavy stone with a greasy paint or crayon the oily printer Inc only sticks to the greasy image which is transferred to paper through a printing press and so when he was experimenting on this bull series he kept going back to the same Stone and reworking it and reworking it and simplifying it and the printers were appalled how he was approaching the sacred lithography Stone and the printer said oh no no no you can't do that that's not possible that's Breaking All the Rules of lithography but he came out with a really remarkable work and I'm showing you here four uh impressions of the bull starting with a very realistic depiction you see him uh dissecting it in effect making it more and more simplified until he comes to the final State just a linear depiction of a bull and I think that this is a dramatic presentation of how Picasso attacked the lithography Stone and what that leaves us is really a record of watching Picasso standing behind Picasso and looking over his shoulder as he made this uh bull Series so it's it's a remarkable opportunity in print making here are three prints from an evolving etching of a falcon by Kiki Smith she chose etching because etching is so effective at recreating the feeling of the feathers of a bird in this case Kiki Smith scratches on a copper plate in just the way Rembrandt would have done centuries before with etching the paper is actually pressed into the ink filled grooves of the metal plate which makes a raised impression it actually stands up a little bit off the sheet of the paper but it gives a very crisp Line That's Unique to etching screen printing has the potential to make dense saturated surfaces that one would find in advertising and so the pop artists who were mining popular culture and um the media for imagery found that screen printing was the perfect vehicle for them it was also perfect for matis matis used pooa a French stencil technique like screen printing to create these circus images in his Landmark book Jazz matis was able to achieve that vibrancy with those incredibly uh saturated colors it's throughout the whole book I mean as you can see the text is written um in the hand writing of matis and that was the idea of the publisher oh there you can see the word cir oh that's a sword fler which is very nice well those always seem to me to be trapezes which seems so much like uh typical matis cutouts these screen prints are some of mati's most recognizable images today print collecting is a popular and more affordable way to collect original works of art but the idea of using a carved piece of wood to print multiple images originated in China more than a thousand years ago woodcut allows dramatic contrasts um uh Strokes that are very uh Vivid and slashing and so expressionism can really be communicated through the woodcut Edvard Monk's desperate affair with a married woman in the late 1890s may have inspired this woodblock the kiss wood block is something easy to understand because it's a little bit like a potato print everyone's made as a child you C something into a block of wood and cover it with ink put a piece of paper on the top and you can actually rub it with a spoon and then peel off your piece of paper and you have a wood block print these three prints by Monk are called anxiety edad monk made these prints in the 1890s so he really had the artists forward-looking idea of something that all people in Modern Life would be concerned with and that is anxiety so this was his experiment in Black Ink and here is his experimentation in red ink um monk left some of the scratches and irregularities that were part of the block earlier in the 19th century when an artist made wood Cuts or wood Engravings they made them with particular care and would never have allowed those scratches to show but monk was thinking that the process of what he was doing that is of carving the wood block was something that was important to communicate not something to erase and if you jump forward many many decades you get to artists like Jackson poock for whom process was uh entirely part of their uh work bursting onto the scene in the s Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists believe that the act of painting itself should result in powerful emotion on the canvas with these four panels painted in 1914 the Russian Kandinsky invented abstraction which he defined as the purposeful playing upon the human soul by the 1950s abstract expressionism belonged to the Americans the 1950s in American painting was a decade of high seriousness the aim of art was very moral very ethereal um and Abstract Mark Rothco sought to express the big emotions tragedy ecstasy Doom the Dutch born American duning spent two years tediously painting and carving and repainting this portrait of a woman ferocious sexual Primal with bulging eyes and bared teeth and fleshy shiny pink skin and Barnett Newman's 18t canvas titled man heroic and Sublime reflects great pride that American art finally had an identity of its own I think that Newman set out to make paintings that were important and that would redefine painting but I think he was actually profoundly disappointed that nobody seemed to get it and I think the reason it was so misunderstood and still today puzzles people is it hardly looks as if he did anything in fact I think what Barnett Newan wanted you to do is immerse yourself when you get up to the painting and you start letting yourself be surrounded by the feel of all that color and all that paint which indeed is carefully brushed on in many many layers it's really a whole physical experience Chief among this hard living generation of self-involved artists was Jackson Pollock the Museum of Modern Art is very fortunate in having perhaps the finest collection of Pollocks in the world and one number 31 in my opinion is his single greatest work of art it is an absolutely explosive work of art the power of those lines as they Zig and zag and swirl across the surface create a kind of dynamic energy that's punctuated by sharp little points of color and there is a tension within that work that is palpable it's one of those paintings that literally changes the way we understand art and opens up possibilities for whole new generation of artists people see Pollock as this great heroic figure who was a drunk and made these strange paintings but when one looks closely at his works of art you realize that there is any enormous control there this is in fact where where he had control in his life undoubtedly in 1947 Jackson Pollock found a revolutionary way of working he placed his canvases on the ground then stalked around them pouring dripping and splattering paint like a madman I think that one of the challenges is that it looks very simple to do in fact one of our conservators did actually try to mix them and they don't look anything like Pollocks wasn't so much an e to fake a poic these things were ways in which we could read more deeply into the actual application of paint on the on the Pollocks themselves Jim cottington and other Moma conservators studied films of Pollock in action the range of uh lines that you see in a poock for instance uh some are big fat heavy lines those are the result of him taking a tube of paint and squeezing it then you see some lines that are poured paints uh that will go on and on and on and on and he comes up and down to the canvas to make a thicker line a thinner line all of these things are part of a pollock and they're part of understanding not just Pollock's technique but his total engagement with the canvas when he's working his images have a power have a way of engaging us that far exceeds that of any of his contemporaries and there was a reason for that abstract expressionism was the first American art movement to take the World by storm as a result in the 1950s New York replaced Paris as the center of the art [Music] world the heart of the Museum of Modern Art is its collection it always has been and the development and refinement of the collection is something that we think about literally every day at the Museum what we buy and and what we therefore have available to put on display are things that challenge us into thinking about oh here's a new way to see the world to put an image into the world that hasn't existed before Gordon Mata Clark was one of the most influential artists of the 1970s Gordon Mata Clark took as his medium buildings specifically buildings that were abandoned or slated for demolition and in Bingo we have three sections of the facade of a house located up near Niagara Falls and he went up there and after cutting the facade of the house like the grid of a bingo card and that's the title of the sculpture took three of the sections rearranged them and called it a sculpture and it almost feels like you're looking at the walls of pom there's still that same poetic sense of the memories of the people who lived in the house the activ activities that those walls saw and heard so it seems like oh on the one hand here's an artist using leftovers to make art and yet what comes from that is something that's actually very moving Mata Clark's work hearkens back to the Dada or anti-art movement in 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn in a Flash artist Marcel duon obliterated the idea that art had to be the unique creation of the artist's hand he called his Creations readys the choice of these ready Maes was based on visual indifference a total absence of good or bad taste in fact a complete anesthesia disillusioned by World War I the dadaists reveled in reverence revolt and absurdity their focus on factory-made objects found its way into the works of Robert renberg Jasper Johns and the pop artists of the 60s so you have people like Roy lonstein and Andy Warhol and clous oldenberg taking as their subject Soup cans rillo boxes um comic books Andy warhol's 32 Soup cans is one of those iconic works of art pop art really grows out of warhol's experimentations with those Soup cans of taking the everyday object and transforming it into a work of art of the highest order indeed you have one little small painting for each kind of soup that Campbells made at that time in a way that had its own sense of outrageousness not because there's anything outrageous about tomato soup but there was something outrageous about the combination of a can of soup and something that was supposed to be very elitist like an oil on canvas painting the Collision of those two things is what gave pop its pop Andy wall is unusual in that he used silk screen not only for conventional prints on paper but also on his canvases in his prints Warhol varied the colors using the same screens for remarkably different effects the black one seems so ferial and the pink one seems so much about celebrity Marilyn Monroe was an icon made especially so by the fact of of her early death gold Marilyn is a painting which Warhol combined with commercial silk screening to create a crisp artificial look so having this face of Marilyn Monroe almost like you would have the head of a saint in some Russian icon same gold background Warhol was putting his finger on something about America's society that um was very profound our movie stars are who we have as our kings and queens pop art was a very influential movement the idea of painting not being something that was pristine and elegant but maybe got its hands dirty its message that you can use the real world as your subject the influence of that continues to this moment the real world according to artist Ryan mcginness looks like this he actually manipulates the idea of branding in corporate culture and corporate logos uh kind of gone off the deep end by all these combinations of screens sometimes Turns Upside Down sometimes right side up sometimes falling off the sheet it's the graffiti of the corporate Cosmos he used the same screens but in different colors in just the way Andy wall would we live in a society that is Laden with visual experiences that is Media dense if a visitor's experience to the museum can somehow heighten their understanding of the visual world then in our minds we've we've done something very important in their lives the art of our time is dynamic provoc ative and seemingly Limitless we're really living the same lifetime as the artists who are working around us we're influenced by the same ideas we're um drinking the same water Momo works with PS1 the Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City just a subway ride away from Moma in Manhattan on display at PS1 are works by emerging artists that might find a place on the Contemporary Art floor at MoMA itself what we're giving our public is our best thoughts of what is best right now and therefore will endure and the way that we will know what really mattered is only to wait for time to tell since 1929 Time Has Told that Moma the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is as much a part of the story of Modern Art as the art it self I think that the the the collection represents the most creative the most significant the most beautiful the most important works of art done by Leading artists around the world all of it is part of that dialogue which makes these works so alive and so able to connect to our lives the greater the work of art the more it gives to you year after year after year when you come back to see it for us the greatest thing we can do for the public is to engage them with our extraordinary works of [Music] art learn more about America's great museums at Great museums.org the great Museum's collection is available on DVD to order this episode or another call 1 800 593 4420 or visit great museums.org museums hold the treasures and tell the tales of the people and places that make America [Music] great [Music] major funding for great museums is provided by the Eureka Foundation dedicated to the educational power of television and new New Media exercise your curiosity explore America's great museums

Channel: Great Museums

Views: 687,807

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Id: 0oly6d0zlZM

Length: 56min 37sec (3397 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2009