April 3, 2016/Comments Off on The Met Breuer Shows Off its Quirky Side
Pablo Picasso, Spanish, Malaga 1881-1973 Mougins, France. Portrait of Olga, 1921. This work is one of several female heads that Picasso rendered during a summer stay in Fontainebleau with Olga and their newborn son.
Have you been to The Met? The Met Breuer, I mean.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary art program have expanded their artful wings by including a new series of exhibitions, performances, artist commissions, residencies, and educational initiatives in a building designed by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue and 75th Street. The museum official opened to the public on March 18, 2016. However, High End Weekly™ was fortunate enough to attend the press preview on March 1st. The Met Breuer is a strikingly contemporary building that provides additional space to explore the art of the 20th and 21st centuries through the global breadth and historical reach of the Met’s unparalleled collection. Their exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible opened on March 18th, and will end on September 4, 2016. With over 190 works dating from the Renaissance to the present—drawn mainly from the Museum’s collection, supplemented with major national and international loans—the exhibition demonstrates the type of groundbreaking show that can result when the Museum mines its vast collection and curatorial resources to present modern and contemporary art within a deep historical context.
Located on the 3rd and 4th floors, at Madison Avenue and 75th Street, this exhibition is undoubtedly one of the finest museum show I’ve seen so far this year. Other programs featured as part of the inaugural season of The Met Breuer include the largest exhibition to date dedicated to Indian modernist Nasreen Mohamedi; and a month-long performance installation, by Resident Artist Vijay Iyer. Upcoming exhibitions include a presentation of Diane Arbus’s rarely seen early photographic works (July 12-November 27, 2016), and the first museum retrospective dedicated to Kerry James Marshall (October 25, 2016-January 30, 2017).
Opening remarks from Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum during The Met Breuer Press PreviewAn unfinished Pablo Picasso painting showcased at Marcel Breuer’s iconic building on Madison Avenue.Press day at Marcel Breuer’s iconic building on Madison Avenue which now housed The Met Breuer.Urs Fischer, Swiss, born Zurich, 1973. Cast bronze, oil paint, palladium leaf, clay bole, chalk gesso, rabbit-skin glue. “Many of Fischer’s works court the tension between permanence and impermanence. Some are designed to self-destruct, while others only appear to be disintegrating; 2, 2014 falls into the latter category.”Pablo Picasso, Spanish, Malaga 1881-1973 Mougins, France. Harlequin, 1923.
“Unfinished is a cornerstone of The Met Breuer’s inaugural program and a great example of the Met’s approach to presenting the art of today. Stretching across history and geography, the exhibition is the result of a cross-departmental collaboration, drawing on the expertise of the Met’s outstanding faculty of curators. We hope the exhibition will inspire audiences to reconsider the artistic process as they connect to experiences shared by artists over centuries.” Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum.
A collection of unfinished old masters are now in view at The Met Breuer until September 4, 2016.Leonardo da Vinci, Italian, Vinci, ca 1452-1519 Amoise. Head and Shoulders of a Woman (La Scapigliata), ca. 1500-1505. Oil, earth, and white lead pigments on poplar.Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, Duquesa de Huescar (1740-1784), 1775 by Anton Raphael Mengs.Kerry James Marshall speaking to the audience during Press Day at The Met Breuer. The artist uses painting, sculptural installations and photography to comment on the history of black identity in the US.An utterly striking, yet unfinished work by Alabama-born artist Kerry James Marshal. In Marshall’s powerful allegory of painting, an artist sits holding her oversize palette, turned away from an unfinished self-portrait on her easel. The painting within a painting – or, more precisely, the painting about painting – is a time-honored motif taken up by many of the greatest artists in the Western tradition to which Marshall now contributes.George Romney, British, Beckside, Lancashire 1734-1802 Kendal, Cumbria. George Romney, 1784. Oil on canvas. This unfinished self-portrait was begun for the artist’s friend and biographer William Hayley during a trip that Romney and the artist John Flaxman made to Hayley’s villa. The painting was both praised for its vivacity and questioned for its incomplete state by those who knew the story of its making.Sir Joshua Reynolds, British, Plympton 1723-1792 London. A Young Man, ca. 1770. The sitter may be a man who worked for the artist and appeared in other paintings by him, but precise identification is difficult.Alice Neel, American, James Hunter Black Draftee, 1965. Oil on canvas.Vincent van Gogh, Street in Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890.Gustav Klimt, Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III, 1917-18. Oil on Canvas. Death stands at the beginning and at the end of this work’s history. The young woman, Maria (“Ria”) Munk, committed suicide on December 28, 1911, after the writer Hanns Heinz Ewers called off their engagement. Klimt, the most sought-after portraitist in Vienna at the time, was commissioned to paint her posthumous portrait. He struggled with the task ,and the first two portraits did not meet the family’s approval. While still working on this third portrait of Ria, Klimt himself died.
