Entre les Chambres

Before leaving Room 501, I want to take a closer look at Paula Modersohn-Becker because she is someone new to me and a German female artist in late victorian Europe.  She was born in Dresden-Friedrichstadt in 1876 and died in 1901 of a postpartum embolism.  She is notable for being an early expressionist and modernist.  She is also notable for her subject matter of female nudes and nude self portraits not seen since Artemisia Gentileschi, three centuries earlier.

'I believe the best thing is for one to go one's own way as if in a dream.' Paula Modersohn-Becker

 Paula Modersohn-Becker 'Reclining Mother and Child', 1906

And Self Portrait, 1906

Room 501

 From the opening of 'Picture Palace, The Making of the Louvre' by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, 10/26/20:

"What happens when we try to walk at night through museums we can no longer visit?  A range of online virtual tours provides the possibility, but apart from physical problems of reproduction -- the pixel reproduction is inadequate, the movement glitchy and twitchy -- the real difference is the loss of tactile and optical tension, the missing dialogue of aching feet and happy eyes.  ...  Reproductions reproduce, and they often do it well, but they can't reproduce the sex appeal of museum going, the carnal intersection of one physical object with another, you and it.  It's a thing, there; you, a thing, here." 

Be warned this is not a trip to MoMA.  This is me with a camera getting out during a pandemic to a place of beauty.

James Ensor "Masks Confronting Death' 1888

Odilon Redon ' The Masque of the Red Death' 1883

Odilon Redon 'The Well' 1880

Medardo Rosso 'Woman With a Veil' 1895

Georges-Pierre Seurat 'Evening, Honfleur 1886

Vincent Van Gogh, 'Portrait of Joseph Roulin' 1889

Edvard Munch ' Angst' 1896

 Edvard Munch ' Melancholy lll' 1902

Vincent Van Gogh ' The Starry Night' 1889

Paul Gauguin ' Portrait of Meijer de Haan' 1889

Edvard Munch 'Two Women on the Shore' 1898

Henri Rousseau, ' The Sleeping Gypsy' 1897

Paul Cezanne, ' Château Noir' 1903-04

Paul Cezanne, ' The Bather' 1885

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ' M. de Lauradour' 1897

Paula Modersohn-Becker 'Portrait of a Peasant Woman' 1899-02 

Paula Modersohn-Becker 'Seated Old Woman' 1899-02

Paul Cezanne, 'Boy in a Red Vest' 1888-90

Edouard Vuillard, 'Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist', 1893

Room 502 next.

Pieces of MoMA

 It is such a relief at this time to be able to get out, and an extra gift to be able to get to a museum like MoMA.

This is the fifth floor of MoMA and the exhibition entitled 'Collection 1880s to 1940s'.  

Arranged in a loosely chronological order, each of the 23 galleries on this floor explore an individual topic.  A gallery may be devoted to an artist, a specific medium or discipline, a particular place in a moment in time, or a shared creative idea.

We start at the elevator exit.  All Oil on Canvas:

1914 Picasso    'Green Still Life'

1912 Juan Gris    'Still Life With Flowers'

1915 Henri Matisse    'Gourds'

1931  Bonnard   ' Dining Room Overlooking the Garden'

1912 Georges Braque     'Soda'

What is listed as Room 500 is an open space that is devoted to Constantine Brancusi.  It is roped off so they are photographed in groups.

From the left 'Socrates' 1922, 'Bird in Space' 1928, 'Maiastra' [a Romanian fairy tale] 1910-12, '

'Fish' 1930. 'The Cock' 1924

'Young Bird' 1928, Mlle Pogany 1913, 'Endless Column' 1918 

To be continued in Room 501 with:

NINETEENTH CENTURY INNOVATORS

The late nineteenth century was an era of rapid change; the emergence of a mass media, new and faster forms of transportation, noisy and bustling cities, and developments in industry, from sewing machines to the telegraph.  Vision itself was likewise was transformed, whether by new kinds of illumination - such as electric light - or by the increasingly widespread availability of photographic images.  Seeing the world differently, artists reacted to these changes; how one saw was a crucial as what was seen.

Paul Cezanne took up the challenge by looking harder and closer, conscious of the alterations in the visual experience of each moment.  Others turned their backs on industrial and technological change to look inward, focus on the domestic, or represent the unconscious, dream, and fantasy.  Vincent Van Gogh, too, attempted to visualize the effervescent - wind, stars, darkness - using thick paint to render scenes "as if in a dream, in character yet at the same time stranger than reality."