Oil November 8, 2004 The Museum of Modern Art celebrated its seventy fifth an niversary. At almost the same time, it completed the largest and most comprehensive building program in its history. The conjunction of these two events, though partially coincidental, provides an opportunity to reflect on both the Museum's history and on the direction in which it is going today. Alfred H. garr, Jr.The Museum of Modern Art's founding Director, spoke of the Museum's collection as being metabolic and self renewing. While he meant this in terms of the Museum's acquisition processes, the idea of an institution capable of considering and reconsidering itself in response to an on going and continuous inquiry about modern art is central to any understanding of the Museum.
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New York's Museum of Modern Art, which dates from 1929, has helped to bring the history of modern art to vivid life through its unparalleled collection of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century painting and sculpture. A veritable who's who of modern art is represented in the Museum's collection: Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dali, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, Pier Mond- rian, Jackson Pollock, to name but a few. Its new building, which opened in 2oo4, has added dramatic and exciting spaces in which to display the works of these and other artists.
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Museum's pamtmg and sculpture collection, through more than three hun dred color plates and texts drawn from the Museum's archives and publications. These lively, diverse, and often surprising inter pretauons of a work of art, sometimes from the artists them selves, both enrich and expand the literature on the history of modern art. Accompanying these texts is an introduction by John Elderfield, Chief Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, which offers a personal account of the collection's his tory and its installations.
Preface / Glenn D. Lowry
The Front Door to Understanding / John Elderfield
Texts and Plates
Modern Pioneers: From 1880 into the Twentieth Century
Matisse, Picasso, Modernism: Art in Europe through World War I
Fauvism, Symbolism, Expressionism
Picasso and Cubism
Futurism
Matisse
Crosscurrents
Dada
Suprematism and Constructivism
Mondrian and de Still
Realisms
Surrealism
Transatlantic Modern: Europe, America
Abstraction and Figuration
Abstract Expressionism
After Abstract Expressionism
Crosscurrents
Art of the Real: Pop, Minimal 1960s
Pop Art
Abstract and Minimalist Painting and Sculpture
After Minimalism
Untitied (Contemporary):
Modern Art since 1970
Notes to the Texts
Selected Bibliography
Chronology
Index
Photograph Credits
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
