Artist Frank Stella discusses Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White of 1918.
Stella refers to Alfred Barr’s chart for his 1936 “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition at MoMA.
Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of Modern Art, discusses Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Vive la France currently on view in Inventing Abstraction.
Contemporary artist Josiah McElheny speaks about three works in Inventing Abstraction.
Vladimir Tatlin, Model for Monument to the Third International, 1920
Kazimir Malevich, Gota Architecton, 1923
Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition I, 1925
Josiah’s Project at The Museum of Modern Art in 2007
Artist Amy Sillman discusses Aleksei Kruchenykh’s illustrated book Vselenskaia voina. Ъ (Universal war. Ъ), published in 1916, currently on view in Inventing Abstraction.
See our earlier post about this work
Artist Sarah Sze discusses Vladimir Tatlin’s model for Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International), currently on view
in Inventing Abstraction.
Artist R. H. Quaytman discusses the sculptural work Kompozycja przestrzenna 1 (Spatial Composition 1) by Katarzyna Kobro, on view in Inventing Abstraction.
“The solid is just a pretty tale from the past” - Katarzyna Kobro
Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, speaks about Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Contrast of Forms: Sun and Moon of 1913, currently on view in Inventing Abstraction.
This video is part of a series created in celebration of the landmark year 1913, highlighting important works from 1913 in the Museum’s collection.
During the exhibition we’re inviting artists, curators, and guests to select a work to record an audio response about. Artist Senga Nengudi spoke about Vasily Kandinsky’s work, specifically his Impression III [Concert].
Lean more about Kandinsky in Inventing Abstraction
Throughout the run of the show we’ll be asking artists, curators, and other special guests to pick an artwork and briefly speak about what they find compelling about it. Recently Gabriel Orozco shared his thoughts about Augusto Giacometti’s Chromatische Phantasie (Chromatic fantasy) from 1914, a vibrant canvas with thick layers of bright paint applied with a palette knife.
The New York Times film critics David Carr and A.O. Scott “go rogue” in the exhibition.
Tomorrow Friday February 8th at 3pm, the poet and founder of ubu web, Kenneth Goldsmith will read Blaise Cendrars’ poem La Prose du Transsiberien in the galleries of Inventing Abstraction.
At 4:30 Masha Chlenova, of the exhibition’s curatorial team, will lead a public tour of the exhibition.
Poetry and abstraction
Guillaume Apollinaire with a wound from his service in French artillery in World War I.
Many artists in the exhibition wrote experimental sound poetry or had important relationships with writers who did. Ubu Sound, an online archive maintained by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, contains a wealth of historic recordings of the artists and poets whose work is included in Inventing Abstraction. One can hear Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and a rare collection of interviews with Marcel Duchamp.
Artists have also created diagrams of the history of modern art, within which they positioned their own work. Here is a chart of Dada movement made by Francis Picabia in 1919. He made it for the Dada Anthology issue of the Zurich magazine Dada, edited by Tristan Tzara, where it was reproduced on pink paper.The original drawing is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
We heard that the original image of the 1930 Uffizi brochure we uploaded was not of high enough resolution. Here is as good a version as tumblr would allow, alongside the front and back covers of the booklet in which the chart was published.
Fortunato Depero, Pianoforte Motorumorista (Mobile noise-making piano), 1915
Almost as soon as abstraction was invented, artists began to explore how to make it move. A number of artists in the show designed kinetic works including the Italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero. In 1915 he made a group of mobile three-dimensional devices that he described as “phonoplastic, tonoplastic and psychoplastic equivalents of color, sound, movement and states of mind and nature.”
