Intimate at MoMA
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The singularity of an artistic work — or even an artist’s oeuvre — can lose its impact when placed amid the immensity of a large museum collection. To remedy this dilution, the Museum of Modern Art is now devoting a portion of its gallery space to a series of one-room installations, each featuring a selection of works by a noteworthy artist. These small-scale exhibitions are opportune ways to see artworks from the museum’s holdings that are not always available for regular viewing and that provide valuable insight into an artist’s creative trajectory. The latest artists in MoMA’s “Focus” series are among the 20th century’s most influential: Ellsworth Kelly and Alexander Calder.
Thirteen paintings, reliefs, collages, and drawings by Mr. Kelly, ranging from the most delicate ink and gouache studies to his monumental shaped canvases, highlight the artist’s creative processes. As a practitioner of hard-edged painting, Mr. Kelly aims to reduce nature to its most abstract form. The results are simple geometric or organic forms painted in broad, flat color and delineated by precise, sharp edges, like his canonic “Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red.” Born in Newburgh, N.Y., in 1923, Mr. Kelly served in the Army during World War II and returned to Paris as an art student after the war’s end. He admired Constantine Brancusi and Jean Arp, the latter especially for his exploration of chance composition. Along with Mr. Kelly’s paintings and wall relief, many of the collages Mr. Kelly constructed during the 1950s — small rectangular pieces of painted paper that he assembled in random fashion to explore the formal relationships of space, composition, and color — are on display. During that decade, Mr. Kelly also produced a series of 40 ink-on-paper and gouache-on-paper drawings for a book project meant to capture the grammatical underpinnings of art. The spare pictorial elements in the ink drawings — a single line divides a rectangular piece of a paper, for example — demonstrate the essential and endless dynamic between line and surface.
Those in color, such as the small blue circle floating on a red rectangle, reveal the operational forces of color and form. The end result of Mr. Kelly’s visual acuity is seen in his major work from 1986, “Three Panels: Orange, Grey, Green.” The large, irregularly shaped planar canvases painted in oils span more than 30 feet across the wall. Due to their anti-volumetric plasticity and bright colors, they appear to float in space, more spirit than matter.
One flight up, another exhibition room is dedicated to the early wire sculptures and mobiles created by Calder. Calder, who died in 1976, was a leading exponent of kinetic art, in which scientific invention is fused with artistic imagination to create forms that dance, spiral, and gently glide through the air. A one-time engineering student at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Calder left school to study art, first in New York and then in Paris. There, he became enthralled with the biomorphic surrealism of Joan Miró as well as the powerful choreography of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham. Harnessing the performative potential of the mechanical sciences, Calder began composing motion, first by building motorized sculptures and then by deducing ways to set objects into autonomous motion. MoMA’s “Lobster Trap and Fish Tail,” which spans more than 9 feet, is typical of the monumental scale of Calder’s hanging sculptures.
Two of the earlier works on display reflect Calder’s fascination with the solar system and with the movement of the heavens. From 1934, “A Universe” is a sculpture made up of painted iron pipe, steel wire, and wood with string, which once was motorized to propel two round orbs, one white, one red, up and around the curved wires. It reportedly mesmerized Albert Einstein, who watched the entire 40-minute cycle of movement. Mounted high on a nearby wall, “Constellation with Red Object” (1943) was made the year of Calder’s first retrospective at MoMA, when he was the youngest artist to be the focus of a major exhibition.
“Swizzle Sticks” is part mobile, part wall relief. A large vermillion rectangle hangs on the wall, from which is extended a delicate mobile comprised of willowy pieces of wood weighted with small pieces of lead. As the air currents move the elements, the pieces of wood slowly cross and separate, acting out the calligraphic motion of crosshatching found in renaissance drawing. On the opposite end of the room, “Snow Flurry I” is suspended over a flat white rectangle laid on the floor beneath it. The mobile is a tripartite structure, with delicate flat white circles dangling from steel wire. Viewers can wait for the air currents to set the mobile in motion or gently blow on the forms to animate the sculpture. As the shadows glide across the bare white plinth, the elements compose themselves harmoniously into a mesmerizing dance of circles, lines, and shadow. The effects are truly magical: a wonder and a delight.
Kelly until January 7; Calder until February 18 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).