International Art News

Jean Cocteau avec un revolver 1926 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 35,5 x 28 cm. Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc

From 21 February 2012 until 29 April 2012 – Musee du Jeu de Paume
With Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), urban experience is at the heart of the exhibition: in an America shaken by the Wall Street Crash, her images of 1930s New York convey her fascination with an urban landscape in the throes of dramatic change. Also known for championing the work of Eugène Atget, Abbott, who originally wanted to be sculptor, proved to be a great photographer of matter, space and light.
This is the first exhibition in France to cover every stage of Berenice Abbott’s career, featuring over 120 vintage prints by this American photographer as well as a series of documents never previously shown. The selection of portraits, architectural photographs and scientific plates shows the many facets of a body of work all too often reduced to a handful of familiar images.

Berenice Abbott came to the French capital in the 1920s and was trained by Man Ray before opening her own studio, where she began a successful career as a portrait photographer. Mixing in the artistic and intellectual circles of the day, she photographed a cosmopolitan cast including Eugène Atget, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, André Gide, Foujita, Max Ernst, and Marie Laurencin.

Park Avenue et 39e rue, New York 8 octobre 1936 Berenice Abbott Épreuve gélatino argentique, 19 x 24,5 cm. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

The exhibition also features a substantial selection of images form her Changing New York project (1935-1939), for which she is best known. This undertaking was Abbott’s own initiative but was financed by the Works Progress Administration, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts to combat the Great Depression. Conceived as both a record of the city and a work of art in its own right, this ambitious government commission focuses on the contrast between the old and the new in the rapidly changing city.
The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition is presenting a never previously exhibited selection of these) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.”
In the 1950s, Abbott produced a set of photographs illustrating the principles of mechanics and optics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Combining aesthetic and educational concerns, these abstract, experimental images echo her photograms of the 1920s.
An active participant in the avant-garde circles in the 1920s, a determined opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, famous for bringing Eugène Atget to international attention, Berenice Abbott spent her whole career exploring the notions of documentary photography and photographic realism. This retrospective at Jeu de Paume brings out the richness of her approach, and both the diversity and unity of her work.

Museum Hours

Diego Rivera. Agrarian Leader Zapata. 1931. Fresco, 7' 9 3/4" x 6' 2" (238.1 x 188 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund

Untill May 14, 2012 – The Museum of Modern Art
Diego Rivera was the subject of MoMA’s second monographic exhibition (the first was Henri Matisse), which set new attendance records in its five-week run from December 22, 1931, to January 27, 1932. MoMA brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the exhibition’s opening and gave him studio space within the Museum, a strategy intended to solve the problem of how to present the work of this famous muralist when murals were by definition made and fixed on site. Working around the clock with two assistants, Rivera produced five “portable murals”—large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime, and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, to great publicity, Rivera added three more murals, now taking on New York subjects through monumental images of the urban working class and the social stratification of the city during the Great Depression. All eight were on display for the rest of the show’s run. The first of these panels, Agrarian Leader Zapata, is an icon in the Museum’s collection.

This exhibition will bring together key works made for Rivera’s 1931 exhibition, presenting them at MoMA for the first time in nearly 80 years. Along with mural panels, the show will include full-scale drawings, smaller working drawings, archival materials related to the commission and production of these works, and designs for Rivera’s famous Rockefeller Center mural, which he also produced while he was working at the Museum. Focused specifically on works created during the artist’s stay in New York, this exhibition will draw a succinct portrait of Rivera as a highly cosmopolitan figure who moved between Russia, Mexico, and the United States, and will offer a fresh look at the intersection of art making and radical politics in the 1930s. MoMA will be the exhibition’s sole venue.

Museum Hours

George Ault, Bright Light at Russell's Corners, 1946, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Lawrence

March 11, 2011 – September 5, 2011 – Smithsonian American Art Museum
During the turbulent 1940s, artist George Ault (1891-1948) created precise yet eerie pictures—works of art that have come to be seen, following his death, as some of the most original paintings made in America in those years. The beautiful geometries of Ault’s paintings make personal worlds of clarity and composure to offset a real world he felt was in crisis.

To Make a World captures a 1940s America that was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by a global conflict. Although much has been written about the glorious triumph of the Second World War, what has dimmed over time are memories of the anxious tenor of life on the home front, when the country was far distant from the battlefields and yet profoundly at risk. The exhibition centers on five paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads of Russell’s Corners in Woodstock, N.Y. The additional twenty-two artists represented in this exhibition include some as celebrated as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, while others are scarcely known to today’s art audiences. Taken together, their artworks reveal an aesthetic vein running through 1940s American art that previously has not been identified. From their remote corners of the country, these artists conveyed a still quietude that seems filled with potentialities.

To Make a World brings viewers back into the world of the American 1940s, drawing them in through the least likely of places and spaces: not grand actions, not cataclysmic events, not epoch-making personalities, posters, and headlines, but silent regions where some mystery seems always on the verge of being disclosed.

Museum Hours