Eva Hesse around 1963 (image by Barbara Brown)
The cult of Sir Benedict Cumberbatch, some members of which identify as “Cumberbitches,” is drooling over the Sherlock
actor’s very dramatic reading of a letter by artist Sol LeWitt to
sculptor Eva Hesse. Written in 1965, the letter was LeWitt’s attempt to
help Hesse, whom he’d befriended five years prior, banish her
self-doubt. The letter is full of good advice for
anyone who’s ever felt creatively blocked. Parts of it sound like
something written by Dr. Seuss as a coked-up motivational speaker; other
parts recall Yoda’s Zen-inflected advice to a young Luke Skywalker: “Do. Or Not Do. There Is No Try.”:
Just stop thinking,
worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing,
hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing,
itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling,
numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling,
hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning,
horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose
sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing,
alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing,
back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding,
grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO
Reading the letter on stage at a London event called Letters Live,
the Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning actor practically foams at
the mouth. “Learn to say ‘Fuck You’ to the world once in a while,” he
yells. “You have every right to.”
The minimalist LeWitt wrote the letter to Hesse while she was at a
residency in Germany with her husband, whom she later divorced.
Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines,
more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever — make them abound with nonsense.
Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in
the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own
uncool.
… stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a
purpose and way of life, a consistant [sic] approach to even some
impossible end or even an imagined end.” You must practice being stupid,
dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to
DO
The friendship and lines of artistic influence between these two famous minimalists were chronicled in Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, a
recent exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It featured
LeWitt’s original five-page handwritten missive, with the word “DO”
illustrated in block letters decorated by sharp little arrows.
A page from Sol LeWitt’s 1965 letter to Eva Hesse (click to enlarge) (image by Jillian Steinhauer for Hyperallergic)
The letter is well worth revisiting any time you find yourself “bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling,” etc., instead of just doing.
Mark Leckey, No Longer Art’s Wunderkind, Is Now Its Wizard
Photo
The British artist Mark
Leckey inside his installation “GreenScreenRefrigerator,” in “Containers
and Their Drivers,” an exhibition of his work at MoMA PS1 in Queens.Credit
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
LONDON — Arrange to visit the British artist Mark Leckey at his home on gritty Caledonian Road here and he confirms in an email: “I’ll put the kettle on.”
Climb the steps to his modest flat and you find him surrounded by crayon drawings and plastic sippy cups.
Has Mark Leckey been domesticated?
Can this guy making tea in the kitchen be the art provocateur made famous by his 1999 short film “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,”
which traced British dance subcultures through sampled VHS footage? The
quirky guy whose massive inflatable “Felix the Cat” sculpture
captivated crowds at Frieze London last year?
True,
his long hair, piratelike beard and single pearl-drop earring still
evoke the bad-boy drifter he once was, growing up across the Mersey from
Liverpool, intrigued by the Northern soul scene of the 1960s, which was
made up of R&B and Motown, flare pants and dance marathons both
languid and manic.
But
Mr. Leckey has recently married (Lizzie Carey-Thomas, the head of
programs at Serpentine Galleries); had a daughter, April (now 3½); and
entered middle age (he’s 52 and that beard shows flecks of gray). All
this makes him more conscious of paying the bills and no longer the
wunderkind who eight years ago won the Turner Prize, for British artists
under 50.
The Tate, which administers the award, said
that Mr. Leckey’s exploration of sound, performance and sculpture
“celebrates the imagination of the individual, and our potential to
inhabit, reclaim or animate an idea, a space, or an object.” (He had
already met Ms. Carey-Thomas, then the lead curator of the Turner Prize,
and she recused herself.)
Now
that he is, for better or worse, in the pantheon of prominent artists,
Mr. Leckey has had license to — as he put it — “swagger around a bit” at
the recent Frieze art fair. And the scope of that career is currently
on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, in a survey that opened on Sunday.
Photo
An installation view of “UniAddDumThs” (2016).Credit
Pablo Enriquez (photo); via the artist and MoMA PS1
“Art
is changing — I don’t know if what I’m doing feels like it belongs to
an older era, one older white man having a show,” Mr. Leckey said,
standing by the sink throughout an interview. “The idea of celebrated
artists is being rightly questioned. So to do a show like this, though
it comes with all this excitement and energy, at the same time, it might
already be — not archaic — but belong to the past.”
The
show, “Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers,” does deal in memory,
most obviously in Mr. Leckey’s full-scale reproduction of a highway
overpass that figured prominently as a hangout in his youth. The
large-scale installation on the third floor, “Dream English Kid
1964-1999 AD,” also refers to his former home on Windmill Street in
London with videos, a model, wall paintings and an actual door from the
apartment.
“It’s
the projection of someone’s interior,” said Peter Eleey, associate
director of exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, who organized the show
with Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief media and performance art curator.
“They’re all things Mark has encountered. They’re not made up. In some
cases, they’re found objects.”
But
while the exhibition, which runs through March 5, examines his work
since the 1990s, Mr. Leckey is not only looking backward. Recent pieces
include the talking “GreenScreenRefrigerator” (2010-16), a suite of
Samsung products anchored by a sleek black refrigerator that is
accompanied by a performance and film which, according to the wall text,
“probes the inner life of the home appliance.”
Mr.
Eleey describes Mr. Leckey as sitting “on the cusp of the transition
from analog to digital, which allows us to look at the effect of
technology in a way that’s grounded in a deeper time.
“He’s
someone who feels very corrupted by advertising and television and
popular culture,” Mr. Eleey added, “who goes back to these things that
have held some outsized power for him.”
Mr.
Comer said that aspects of the show have a “dark humor,” while other
moments “feel quite sinister, foreboding.” He described the highway
overpass, for example, as “a ruin.”
Photo
Mark Leckey, background, inside the unfinished installation “Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD.”Credit
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
“It’s not a symbol of an optimistic future,” Mr. Comer said. “It’s more like a dead end.”
Mr.
Leckey lit the overpass with motorway sodium street lamps to create a
sickly, yellow glow. “When I was younger, I would take magic mushrooms,”
he said. “Everything would go orange.
“I
want people, when they come into the space, to feel both polluted and
that they’ve moved into this altered state,” he continued, “a state
that’s akin to what music does, where you get lost.”
Mr.
Leckey grew up in Ellesmere Port in North West England, an industrial
town of carmakers and oil refineries. “It’s what they call an overspill
area,” he said. “When I left school, the North started its slow
decline.”
Both
his parents worked in the department store Littlewoods — his father in
sales, his mother as a secretary. Mr. Leckey grew up getting into
trouble, leaving school at 15.
But
young Mark could draw. He favored huge battle scenes — “the epic ones,
very detailed,” he said, describing them as “autistic in that kind of
very repetitive, obsessive detailing.”
His
mother’s second husband encouraged him to go to art school, Mr. Leckey
recalled, “‘instead of heading where you’ve been heading.’”
Photo
An installation view of “Felix the Cat” (2013).Credit
Pablo Enriquez (photo); via the artist and MoMA PS1
But
art school emphasized critical theory, which Mr. Leckey found
frustrating. “I still think it was an experiment that went badly wrong,”
he said, “being asked to understand Derrida, just because you can draw.
And bad art arises from it.”
He
finished with a poor grade and wandered London before spending four
years in the United States with no green card — in San Francisco, where
he worked as a cook and did some web design; in Las Vegas, where he
worked on websites for big casinos; and in New York with the art dealer Gavin Brown.
“You
had this man who seemed to embody possibilities in art,” Mr. Brown
said. “He’s less of an artist than a curious member of our species.”
When Emma Dexter, then director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
in London, was planning a show about music videos, Mr. Brown suggested
she speak with Mr. Leckey, whose proposal became the “Fiorucci” film,
featuring images of British nightclubs from the 1970s to the ’90s.
“It
took me three years to make and I really didn’t realize it was anything
until the night of the opening,” Mr. Leckey recalled. “People liked
it.”
The
success came with expectations, raised even further by the Turner
Prize; this year he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, which went
to Anicka Yi. But Mr. Leckey said that he wasn’t complaining. “After
‘Fiorucci,’ I was in the art world proper,” he said. “I have to make
things and not disappoint people. It’s not a bad pressure.”
Those
who have followed Mr. Leckey over the years say his work has deepened.
“As he’s grown into middle age, perhaps he’s become more of a wizard
than a warrior,” Mr. Brown said. “He’s trying to understand some
profound things, which in another time could have been described as
magic — the internet and how it is a reflection of our imagination.”
While
Mr. Leckey is often referred to as a video artist, his work defies easy
categorization, as the MoMA PS1 show attests. Over here is a sculptural
Minotaur head; there, videos of his mock-pedagogical speeches;
elsewhere, a shiny chrome snare drum.
Even Mr. Leckey declined to say how he would describe himself. “I don’t like to,” he said. “I’ve tried my best to not be known.”
How to Clean a Dusty Picasso at MoMA: Use Your Spit
Photo
The artist Nina Katchadourian
at the Museum of Modern Art, where she has created an audio guide that
delves into the omnipresence of dust in the museum.Credit
An Rong Xu for The New York Times
Anny
Aviram has spent more than 40 years as a conservator at the Museum of
Modern Art, often swabbing away dust and grime on priceless Picassos and
other masterpieces.
One of the most effective tools she uses is her own saliva. (Don’t worry: This practice, centuries old, has scientific backing.)
That revelation is one of several surprises in a new audio guide to the museum produced by the artist Nina Katchadourian
that focuses on a tiny topic: dust. Wall texts encourage visitors to
listen in at a dozen locations throughout the museum, including a
tough-to-Swiffer ledge overhanging four stories of the museum’s atrium.
Photo
Ms. Katchadourian looking for dust on Picasso’s “Vase of Flowers” at MoMA.Credit
An Rong Xu for The New York Times
“Yup,
my first major project at MoMA is all about dust,” said Ms.
Katchadourian, 48, while accompanying a visitor on the tour last week.
“I like coming at the big things by what‘s immediate and observable to me,” she said.
She created the audio tour, “Dust Gathering,” as part of the museum’s Artists Experiment program, which invites contemporary artists to work with MoMA educators on public programming.
Over
two years, Ms. Katchadourian interviewed staff members across every
department, ultimately realizing that they were united by their stance
against this pervasive, invisible-until-it’s-not element.
Photo
Picasso’s “Vase of Flowers” (1908).Credit
2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
You
might expect such a tour to be as dry as … well, you know. But the
Brooklyn-based artist, who as a child dreamed of becoming a radio
journalist, narrates with a knowing, wry warmth, weaving in interview
snippets and documentary moments with MoMA staff members. It has the
feel of a scavenger hunt.
The
first stop is steps from the sculpture garden, just behind the desk
where visitors pick up audio guides: a windy microclimate that is a
magnet for more mites than anywhere else at MoMA. Ms. Katchadourian
demonstrated how to use a cellphone flashlight to illuminate, through
the white slats of an electrical closet, clusters of gray dust billowing
like tumbleweeds.
Later
in the tour she interviews an allergist on the digestive habits of dust
mites, which will appall some listeners but may appeal strongly to
certain 10-year-olds. But the soul of the audio tour is Harvey Tulcensky,
an art handler at MoMA for 42 years and an artist himself. “It’s not
about the dusting per se; it’s about the dusting of something that means
so much to me that I feel I am helping that thing,” he says with
audible wonder. “Handling the art, without wanting or trying to sound
naïve, is kind of magical.”
Photo
Ellen Moody dusting Brancusi’s “Bird in Space.”Credit
Nina Katchadourian
As entertaining as “Dust Gathering” and many of Ms. Katchadourian’s other projects may be, they are serious in intent.
“I
hate the words ‘quirky’ and ‘whimsical’ applied to me and my work,” she
said. “Joy, wonder, play, humor? All good. But I am not just making
little jokes.”
That point comes up when she discusses the work for which she is best known, “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style,”
a series of cellphone selfies taken in airplane bathrooms in which she
poses with whatever materials are at hand: toilet seat covers, sanitary
napkins and the like. When the series went viral a few years ago, she
was upset “to see them reduced to a prank.”
Photo
Ms. Katchadourian looking at the MoMA’s air filtration system with Nelson Nieves, assistant director of building operations.Credit
An Rong Xu for The New York Times
But she’s no killjoy. A case in point is “Floater Theater,”
a new exhibition she created at the Exploratorium in San Francisco,
near where she grew up. The piece consists of a red-velvet enclosure
with a screen that is optimally lighted to prompt people to notice eye
floaters and watch them dance.
“Like dust, floaters are there all the time and we sort of find them annoying or boring,” she said.
“There
is a false sense that art has to be about the big stuff, when actually
every artwork is in some way a thinking exercise — mental, aesthetic,
philosophical or whatever kind of gym the artist is putting you in to
exercise your imagination.”
In
some ways, her work is about questioning what merits attention. “You
usually come to a museum and orient yourself towards the artworks,” she
said, “and a lot of things in your literal and metaphorical peripheral
vision are ruled out as things not worth looking at.”
But
Ms. Katchadourian’s work will be at the center of attention next year,
when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin surveys her career.
Taking
her MoMA tour, you may feel silly elbowing through the crowd to examine
the dust on a ledge, vitrine or picture frame. But just as she can make
visitors to the Exploratorium consider eye floaters as art, she can
make you treat MoMA’s masterpieces as mere motes. The grand and the tiny
come together: I am the universe, and I am dust.
People
gather to watch fireworks exploding from a replica of the Eiffel Tower
after the opening of the Sands new mega resort The Parisian in Macau, on
September 13, 2016. Billionaire casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson predicted
a revival for beleaguered Macau as he launched his new Paris-themed
mega resort, with the gambling enclave betting its fortunes on mass
market tourists. ANTHONY WALLACE / AFP
A
picture shows a part of the structure of the new Rome Convention center
named "The cloud" ("La Nuvola" in Italian) designed by Italian
architect Massimiliano Fuksas on October 19, 2016 in the Eur business
district in Rome. The congress center will be inaugurated on October 29,
2016. ALBERTO PIZZOLI / AFP
An
exterior view of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during HUGO BOSS and
GUGGENHEIM celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the HUGO BOSS Prize at
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on October 20, 2016 in New York City.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for HUGO BOSS/AFP
In Simon R. Green’s From a Drood to a Kill,
a deal with the devil draws supernatural fixer Eddie Drood into a
deadly contest where the winner takes all, body and soul. Eddie wasn’t
the one who made the deal with the devil: It was someone else, but he’s
got to pick up all the pieces. It’s a great story, and a fun variant on a
familiar theme. (How fun? Like, occult James Bond fun.)
You’d think that at this point just about everyone would know that a
contract with Satan isn’t going to work out the way they want it to, but
people keep doing it. Sure, there are exceptions to the rules (John
Constantine, I’m looking at you), but chances are that anyone that
enters into a bargain with the Great Beast is going to be ruined in the
end.
But say you want to do it, anyway. Even if you think you’re lucky and
smart enough to beat Beelzebub at his own game, selling your soul isn’t
as easy as starting an auction on eBay. At least it isn’t anymore.
The first thing you’re going to have to decide is which devil you
want to do business with. I know you might have heard that there’s just
one devil, but medieval demonologists believed there were gazillions of
demons and devils just waiting to get their hooks into tasty, tasty
human souls.Don’t waste your time or their's: It’s busy in Hell, especially during the presidential election. DIAL-A-DEMON
You could waste a bunch of time thumbing through ancient texts in some
wizard’s library in a dungeon somewhere, but when it comes to finding a
fiend in a hurry, I prefer Michelle Belanger’s The Dictionary of Demons.
This compendium of cacodaemons is like Hell’s Yellow Pages, and if
there’s a demon or devil, chances are it’s in there. You can flip
through at random like that time you needed a bail bondsman in Vegas
(What, you didn’t think I knew?), but your best bet is going to be
searching by area of expertise. (Devils, like doctors, have
specialties.) It’s not going to do you very much good to call up Bathin,
the demon of herbs and precious stones, when you really just want a new
ride. For that you want Saltim, who can gift wizards with flying
thrones. Don’t waste your time or their’s: It’s busy in Hell, especially
during the presidential election. BLOOD RED TAPE
Presuming you’ve found the right devil, you’re still going to need to do
all the paperwork. Yes, as you can imagine, Hell is big on paperwork
and bureaucracy in general. It’s the national pastime in the Underworld,
so you’d better do your homework (also invented by demons). As hard as
it is to believe, it’s just about impossible to find an attorney who
works with demonic contract law, so for proper advice, we’re going to
have to turn to people who allegedly made a deal with the devil. PARTNERS IN PERFIDY: Robert Johnson (1911 – 1938)
The undisputed master of the Delta Blues is rumored to have met the
devil at the crossroads to bargain for his soul. Johnson got his wish
and became a famous bluesman, but died at only 27 years of age. The
exact location of Johnson’s crossroads is unknown, although some people
suggest the intersection of US 61 and US 49 in Clarksdale, MS. That’s as
good a place to begin your search as any. If you don’t find the devil,
there’s still a good chance you’ll find God: Morgan Freeman is a
Clarksdale native, and is not infrequently spotted hanging out at his
Ground Zero Blues Club. Expert Advice: Take a trip to the Delta and look for
the devil at the crossroads. At worst you’ll have some incredible food
and enjoy some great music. Jonathan Moulton (1726 – 1787)
Revolutionary War hero Brigadier General Jonathan Moulton took trolling
to an epic level when he sold his soul for an agreement that the devil
would fill his boots with gold every day. Unafraid to try the father of
lies at his own game, Moulton cut the soles out of his boots and placed
them on the top of his chimney. After Old Scratch came along to fill up
Moulton’s boots and found that he couldn’t, he burned Moulton’s house
down. Expert Advice: There’s no way you’re getting a
square deal out of the devil, and you’re going to Hell anyway. You might
as well try to pull one over on him. Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840)
This Italian violin virtuoso was gifted enough that people just assumed
that he had made a deal with the devil. The rumors dogged him until the
day he died — and after. Following his death in 1840, the Catholic
church in Genoa refused to give him a Christian burial. Is there any
truth to his association with Satan? Maybe, maybe not, and It’s unlikely
the devil will give you a straight answer. Expert Advice: Even if you don’t make a deal with
the devil, you might as well let people think you did. It’s obviously
good publicity if we’re still talking about it nearly 2 centuries later.
Just clear everything up with your priest, first. Theophilus of Adana (? – 535 AD)
Unhappy with his lot in life as an archdeacon in the church, Theophilus
decided to explore his options as a free agent. He hired a necromancer
to summon the devil, who offered Theophilus a position as a bishop in
the church in exchange for his soul. Theophilus signed a contract in
blood and was promoted shortly thereafter. Apparently Theophilus looked
at his chances as a mole in God’s operation and decided they weren’t so
good. He took the contract to another bishop and asked for his help. The
bishop ripped up the contract and Theophilus died on the spot …
supposedly out of joy to have gotten out of the deal, but it’s not like
he’s around to ask. Expert Advice: Whether you’re getting in or getting
out of a deal with the devil, it’s good to have a professional at your
side. You might have a hard time finding a necromancer these days, but
there’s always Craigslist. NEXT STEPS:
Grab your guitar or violin, hang a pair of boots over your chimney,
put your bishop’s phone number on speed dial, and grab the next flight
out to Clarksdale. Chances are this won’t end the way you want it to,
but you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Presuming you do make contact with
the devil, then you’re probably going to want to start thinking of ways
to get out of your contract. Here are a couple of maybe-tried and
not-so-true methods. Fiddle Contest:
Apparently, Satan can’t resist a good old fashioned fiddlin’. See this instructional video. Sell Out Fido:
Famous English Folk Hero Jack O’Kent
tricked the devil into building him a bridge by promising him the soul
of the first person to cross the bridge. He tossed a bone across it and
went running after it. Tough luck, Spot. If All Else Fails, Become a Glutton for Punishment
In “The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror IV”, Homer sells his soul to Satan
Flanders for a donut. Once he gets to Hell, Satan attempts to punish
him by stuffing him with donuts. Rather than being horrified, Homer is
delighted. Clearly the devil underestimated Homer’s appetite. Chances
are that the devil isn’t going to offer you any breakfast pastries,
though. Maybe you should develop an appetite for sulfur and brimstone
now.
George Condo, Untitled (Head #2), with an American collector for $550,000
work by Kaari Upson
Cyprien Gaillard’s Untitled, (2015) went to a UK collection for €140,000
A Karen Kilimnik painting, The fop in Scotland, (2015) sold for $110,000 to a collector from the US
Galerie nächst St. Stephan
sold three works by Daniel Knorr, from his series “Depression Elevation,” for prices ranging from €17,000 – €39,000
a large wall sculpture by Michal Budny titled Ascension, (2013) for €23,000
Lisson Gallery
works by Corey Arcangel, Lee Ufan, Joyce Pensato
Angela de la Cruz’s Recycled (Hybrid) Red, with the range of prices starting at £25,000 and going up to £250,000
Waddington Custot Galleries
sold works by Jean Dubuffet
a 1945 wood relief by Jean Arp
a sculpture by Bernar Venet
two sculptures by Pablo Reinoso
Tornabuoni Art
sold three works by Alberto Biasi—Dinamica, from 1996; Ingresso trionfale, from 2001; andDinamica notte, from 2011—for prices ranging from €50,000 to €120,000
White Cube
sold Georg Baselitz‘s Foto nuovo (2015)
Theaster Gates’s Water Proof anti-racist action painting(2016)
Miroslaw Balka’s Kouros (1988), for undisclosed amounts
The first few deals from FIAC are filtering in: Lehmann Maupin
A new work by Liza Lou soldto an American collector for six figures. Lou will have her first show with Lehmann Maupin in Hong Kong in January 2017.
Two new canvases by Angel Otero have sold
to clients in France and Singapore for five figures. Otero will have a
solo museum show at CAM Houston, opening December 2016.
Kader Attia, who won the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2016 yesterday evening, also had a sculpture sell at the gallery’s booth for five figures to a European client..
102 Latin American Artworks, and a New Institute, Will Go to MoMA
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros,
who is donating more than 100 major works of Latin American art to the
Museum of Modern Art, and Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director. Behind
them is Alejandro Otero’s “Pampatar Board” (1954).Credit
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
Before Lygia Clark was getting major museum retrospectives; before Adriana Varejão was represented by leading galleries; before Beatriz Milhazes was achieving high prices at auction, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
was collecting Latin American art, filling the walls of her home with
Modernist abstraction and contemporary works by artists from Brazil,
Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay.
Over
the last 16 years, Ms. Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros,
have donated 40 of these pieces to the Museum of Modern Art, where she
has served on the board since 1992. Now, they are giving 102 more and
establishing a research institute at the museum for the study of Latin
American art.
“This
is a transformative gift,” Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director, said
in a joint interview with Ms. Cisneros at his office on Friday. “It
comes fully developed.”
Ms.
Cisneros offered MoMA its pick out of her home collection, as long as
the museum, in addition to displaying the pieces, would regularly loan
the works to other institutions, Mr. Lowry said.
Ms.
Cisneros did not part easily with the selections she and her husband — a
member of the Cisneros family that made its multibillion-dollar fortune
in Latin American media — have been living with for 40 years.
“She said, ‘You’re taking everything in my living room,’” Mr. Lowry recalled.
A
piece by Willys de Castro, for example, enjoys pride of place in Ms.
Cisneros’s study. “Did we dare to ask for that picture?” Mr. Lowry said.
“It’s like taking the centerpiece from a room.”
Photo
Waldemar Cordeiro’s “Visible Idea” (1956), one of the pieces from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.Credit
via Museum of Modern Art
Essential
to the mission of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is bringing
public and scholarly attention to Latin American work and ensuring its
place in the pantheon of modern art.
“My
big frustration in Latin America is, we’ve always been on the back
burner in many areas, certainly in art,” Ms. Cisneros added. “It was one
of the great centers of Modernism in the ’50s, yet hasn’t been taken
into account.”
The
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art
from Latin America — to be located on MoMA’s Midtown Manhattan campus —
will offer colloquia, fellowships, publications and scholarly
conferences.
The Cisneros study center is not alone in its efforts. The International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston
has devoted 15 years and more than $50 million to initiatives in
20th-century Latin American and Latino art. A principal focus of the
International Center is a digital archive for some 10,000 documents in
the field. There will also eventually be digital archives at the
Modern’s institute.
MoMA’s
history of collecting, exhibiting and studying the art and artists of
the region dates back to 1931, and Ms. Cisneros said the original vision
of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Modern, included Latin
American art. The Cisneros gift joins more than 5,000 works by artists
from Latin America.
But
142 works do more than just add to the museum’s holdings, those
involved said; they affirm how much more integral to MoMA’s overall
program Latin American art has become. Works by artists now show up in
all sorts of exhibitions at the museum, and are lent to other museums
around the country.
“There are many more works hanging seamlessly,” Ms. Cisneros said. “Curators are traveling to Latin America.”
“I
think that part of the battle has been won,” Ms. Cisneros added. “It’s
taken 30 years, but now museums all over the world are taking Latin
America into consideration.”
Carey Dunne
