Author, Lecturer, Broadcaster & Cultural Arts Expert;
President of Art Collage JANG/J Music/J Art/J Books & Media.
Author of over 40 books published on Amazon, including The Crimson Horror series and The Great and Immortal Painters’ Stories series.
Dedicated to sharing insights into art, culture, literature, and creative expression through writing, lectures, media, and content creation.
The
12th place I would like to introduce for this week is The Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA).
The
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New
York City, United States.
MoMA
plays an important role in the development and collection of modern and
contemporary art, and is often regarded as one of the largest and most
influential modern and contemporary art museums in the world.
MoMA's collection
offers a broad overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of
architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints,
illustrated books, and artists’ books, film and electronic media. The
MoMA Library has approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, more than
1,000 periodicals, and more than 40,000 ephemera files about individual and
group artists. MoMA's archives have main resources related to the history of
modern and contemporary art.
The
works of Modigliani currently in the possession of The Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) are as follows.
Currently, I am
introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the
title “Interesting
Art Stories”.
The 67th story is “I and the
Village”by Marc Chagall.
Portrait of Chagall, Yehuda (Yuri) Pen
“I and the Village” is an
oil on canvas painting by the Belarusian-French artist Marc Chagall in 1911.
Titled by the poet Blaise Cendrars, a close friend of Chagall, the painting was
inspired in part by the developing Cubism at the time. As the title suggests,
this painting is a "narrative self-portrait" featuring memories of
Chagall's childhood in the town of Vitebsk, Russia, and it shows Chagall’s
distinct vocabulary of abstraction.
Marc Chagall's childhood home, Vitebsk, Belarus
This painting can be divided into
several sections. The upper right shows Chagall's hometown, which includes a
church, a series of houses, a black-clothed man holding a scythe and a female
violinist in front of the man, and further emphasizes the dreamlike feel of the
painting with the woman and some houses in the village upside down. Below that,
there is a green-faced man, with a hat and a necklace with a cross, that some
say Chagall. At the bottom, there is a hand holding a glowing tree. The object
next to it is an object that some say a child's bouncing ball, which appears to
be a toy Chagall played with as a child. Finally, there is a milkmaid milking a
goat on the top the head of a lamb, a motif common to Chagall.
Chagall Art Centre, Vitebsk, Belarus
It is noteworthy
that this painting is a reflection of Chagall's dreams and memories, and its
significance is that it combines various elements of Eastern European
folktales, both Belarusian and Yiddish.
This painting is one of Chagall's
earliest surviving works, and in the painting, he focused on color, form and
shape instead of ignoring the laws of gravity and perspective.
Painted a year after Chagall moved
to Paris from Russia, this painting is currently exhibited at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
Sculpture of Marc Chagall outside Chagall House, Vitebsk, Belarus
Currently, I am introducing
the stories about various artists and their paintings with the title “Interesting Art
Stories”.
The 63rd story is “The Potato
Eaters”by Vincent van Gogh.
"The Potato Eaters" is an
oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in 1885.
Self-Portrait, Vincent van Gogh (1889)
During March and early April 1885,
van Gogh sketched studies for the painting, and corresponded with his younger
brother Theo. He finished most of the work on the painting from 13 April to
early May, although he made minor changes at the end of the same year.
Van Gogh, who was trying to
represent peasants as they really were in the painting, deliberately chose
coarse and ugly models to portray the peasants in a natural and unspoiled way.
Shortly after painting it, his
friend Anthon van Rappard criticized the painting, and the incident was a blow
to Van Gogh's confidence as an emerging artist. However, in a letter to his
sister Willemina in Paris two years after the painting, he still considered it
as his most successful painting.
Anthon van Rappard
Wilhemina Van Gogh
Van Gogh is known to have admired
the Belgian painter Charles de Groux, and especially his painting “The blessing
before supper”. De Groux' work depicts a peasant family praying for God's grace
before supper, closely linked to Christian representations of the Last Supper.
The Blessing before supper, Charles de Groux (1861)
Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters" was inspired by this painting of de
Groux, and several versions of "The Potato Eaters" are as follows.
Study for The Potato Eaters
Study for The Potato Eaters, Private collection (1885)
Second Study for The Potato Eaters, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (1885)
Van Gogh made a lithograph of the
painting before embarking on the painting proper, and in a letter to his
friend, he wrote that he made the lithograph from memory in a day.
The Potato Eaters, Lithography, Vincent van Gogh, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (April 1885)
Van Gogh is known by many as a
Post-Impressionist, but his actual artistic roots are much closer to artists of
the Hague School such as Anton Mauve and Jozef Israëls.
Before van Gogh painted "The
Potato Eaters," Israëls had already treated the same subject in his
"A Peasant Family at the Table," and when referring to a letter to
Theo on March 11, 1882, van Gogh, who saw this painting, seems that he was
inspired to draw his own version of the painting.
A Peasant family at the table, Jozef Israëls (1882)
The painting is now in the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam and considered one of Van Gogh's masterpieces. The original
oil sketch for the painting is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo,
Netherlands, and lithographs of the image are in collections including the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Currently, I am
introducing the stories about various artists and their paintings with the
title “Interesting
Art Stories”.
The 48th story is “Christina's
World”by Andrew Wyeth.
“Christina's
World” is one of the most famous American paintings of the mid-20th century,
painted in 1948 by American painter Andrew Wyeth.
Andrew Wyeth
It is a tempera work painted
in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a
treeless field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon adjoining a barn and
several small outbuildings.
Today, it is one of the permanent collections of
the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York City, USA
The woman in the painting is
Anna Christina Olson, who was unable to walk from about 30 years old due to a
degenerative muscular disorder, but because she was resolutely opposed to the
use of a wheelchair, she would crawl everywhere. Wyeth was inspired to paint
the painting when he saw her crawling across a field as he was watching from a window
in the house.
Christina and Andrew
Wyeth, who had a summer home
in the area, maintained a friendly relationship with Olson, using her and her
younger brother as the models of his paintings from 1940 to 1968.
The house depicted in the
painting is known as the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, USA, and is open to the
public, operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum.
Olson House, Cushing, Maine
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
First exhibited in 1948 at the
Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan, the painting received little attention from
critics at the time. However, Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum
of Modern Art (MoMA), purchased the painting and promoted it at MoMA, which
gradually gained popularity over the years.
Today, it is considered an icon of
American art and is often perceived as the embodiment of a strong sense of longing.
The painting has been used
in various fields of popular culture.
In Arthur C. Clarke's novel
“2001: A Space Odyssey," it is one of two paintings hanging on the living
room wall of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite, to which the astronaut David
Bowman is transported after passing through the Star Gate.
2001 A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
The painting is also
referenced in one of the posters of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)”.
A poster of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The cover of issue #43 of
Garth Ennis's comic series “Preacher” is a variation of the painting, and a
scene in the 1994 film "Forrest Gump" was inspired by the painting.
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