A few months ago I did a post on New York Art when Sea Levels rise and mentioned MOMA’s show Rising Currents which is now showing.   Last night I was at the Museum of Modern Art and stumbled onto Rising Currents – turned out the it was near closing time but I managed to get a few minutes of this show on video as I walked around it.

As  I mentioned – the historical importance of this Rising Current show is probably not fully recognized now – but it’s one of the first truly relevant shows I’ve seen a modern museum, or for that matter, any museum put on lately.

I’ll be at the MOMA opening of Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity next week – which is about time, since the 70th anniversary of Bauhaus Movement is this year and there was already a major show in Berlin this summer.

Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932. Oil on canvas. 63 7/8 x 45″ (162.3 x 114.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2009 Estate of Oskar Schlemmer, Munich/Germany

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS MAJOR EXHIBITION CELEBRATING THE INFLUENTIAL BAUHAUS SCHOOL

Exhibition Focuses on the Historical Moment of the School and Includes Over 400 Works, with Many on View for the First Time in the United States

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity

November 8, 2009–January 25, 2010

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, sixth floor

NEW YORK, November 3, 2009—The Museum of Modern Art

presents Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity from November 8, 2009, to January 25, 2010. The Bauhaus school in Germany—the most famous and influential school of avant-garde art in the twentieth century—brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the modern age. Aiming to rethink the very form of contemporary life, the students and faculty of the Bauhaus made the school the venue for a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that had a transformative effect on the 1920s and 1930s. The effects are still felt in our contemporary visual world. The exhibition brings together over 400 works that reflect the extraordinarily broad range of the school’s production, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting, and sculpture. It includes works by famous faculty members and well-known students including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, and Gunta Stölzl, as well as less well-known, but equally innovative, artists.

The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with a cross-departmental group of MoMA colleagues, in the spirit of the Bauhaus.

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity opens 80 years after the founding of MoMA, and 90 years after the establishment of the Bauhaus. It brings together a rich group of approximately 150 rarely seen works of art from the three German Bauhaus collections—Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar—and over 80 works from MoMA’s own collection to form the foundation of the exhibition. In addition, major loans come from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle; the Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and numerous other public and private collections in the United States and Europe.

This exhibition is the first comprehensive treatment by MoMA of the Bauhaus since 1938. That early exhibition, titled Bauhaus 1919–1928, was organized by the founder and first director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and designed by former Bauhaus student and instructor Herbert Bayer. It excluded the final five years of the school under Gropius’s successors, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For many years, the 1938 exhibition’s catalogue was the vehicle by which Americans learned about the Bauhaus. No museum was more influenced by the Bauhaus than The Museum of Modern Art itself, whose collections were organized to include an unprecedented range of mediums in both art and design. “I regard the three days which I spent at the Bauhaus in 1928 as one of the most important incidents in my own education,” recalled MoMA founding director Alfred Barr, Jr. in a letter to Gropius. MoMA’s second major Bauhaus exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity for a new generational perspective on this influential school.

I went to briefly see Other Certainties, curated by Summer Guthery and Amy Owen at NYCAMS, Friday night – felt really disconnected from the crowd, there wasn’t any wine being served and I decided 5 minutes was enough.

My basic issue with a lot of what I see in contemporary art – is “who cares”?  “Why is this relevent”? and “Do I want to spend any of my precious time to figure it out”?

My feeling, and this is a problem for Painting, perhaps more than other art forms, that the deep probing analysis that lends it self to visual art, that a painting reveals itself gradually, over time, is at a distinct disadvantage in an age where your attention, your time, is the the most important thing you have.

I attended OMMA Global this week in New York and found a panel I listened to interesting, if not for the paradox it presented -OMMA day 2 – Marketer’s Dilemma: finding and managing digital resources where I noted that:

Here’s the paradoxical issue, but it was not voiced, that all brands want “undivided” attention, while people are now “multi-tasking” and doing a few things at once.

Painting demands undivided attention – but are we ready to give it anymore?  Can we?  Do we have a right to ask for undivided attention as artists when everyone is being hit with more and more messaging, which gets better are more subtle, all the time?

I think, the answer is no.   Most of the time, the only attention a work can get is shock value – and that wears off.   I think the point is if something is “arresting” and worthy of enough people’s attention, they will want to focus in and pay attention to it.

But everything I saw at the Other Certainties opening wasn’t worthy of my attention – and just because someone creates a work of art, doesn’t mean that we are obliged to view it.

By the way, there’s a Van Gogh exhibition at MOMA that is worth seeing – and I’ll make it over sometime during the next month.

It wasn’t even clear they were considered good work at the time.

I spent Friday evening at MOMA viewing three shows which I’ll briefly cover here – Design and the Elastic Mind had a few things in it that I liked but the rest of the show looked like a free for all – a lot of work but no real emotional connection to most of it. What I did like was the “New City” installation which has it’s own Mini Theatre.

This was an image shown at the Theatre installation which people had to sit or lie down to fully view. I liked it though I’m not sure what it was actually trying to say (or was it anything worth saying ….don’t know). At any rate, most of the works in this show, while many have merit, don’t really tell much of a cohesive story – that’s probably more the fault of the curator than anything else.

Color Wheel also wasn’t a very good show except for a few pieces of work in it like the two paintings of Blinky Palermo, a German artist who died way too young, in 1977 at the age of 34. Too bad, the world lost a great artist.

Blinky Palermo, Untitled, 1969

Considering that this show was about the Color Wheel, and Color, in general, it was amazing to me how superficial the treatment of color was for most of the artists in the show. Blinky Palermo was only artist, I saw, who actually “did” something with the color – the color poped out at me and there was an intense “push-pull” that worked better, to me, than Hans Hoffman.

I also liked, but not as much, Jim Dine’s The Studio (below) but again, the treatment of color was more superfacial – but atleast there was some real feeling there – based on an emotial experience Dine had when he was younger.

Lucien Freud’s Etchings show, closing on Monday, was a disappointment – not that his work isn’t great, or worth seeing, but while I saw some interesting work, his limitations as an artist are also clear – he’s struggling with everything – and the paintings show it (maybe that’s what people like about it – but I think Lucien Freud takes the human being and makes it ugly and repulsive but somehow, manages to get you to look at it anyway.  However, didn’t Francis Bacon do the same thing, but better?

Among the show’s best piece is “Bella” painted in 1981 (below) and “Man with a Blue Scarf” painted in 2004 (also see below).

The rest of the etchings are superb – but I can’t help but feel the struggle, which in most cases, doesn’t really help me. The Man with a Blue Scarf probably had the brightest palette of any of his paintings – and yet, it too is subdued. I wonder what he’s afraid of (or maybe it’s a Freudian Slip).

At any rate, when I left MOMA (did buy a sketchbook in the Design Store) it was still raining hard and on my way home I was Tweeting (on Twitter) just how impersonal and cold a place MOMA is – where did didn’t need to be – the IAC Building designed by Frank Gehrys (see below) is a modern building and yet, much warmer to be in – a great piece of Art and an amazing building with some amazing capacities:

For one thing, the “windows” change color and transparency based on the time of day – also there age giant video screens inside and a lot of really good space and energy.

But MOMA is, for all it’s space, a building all about Process – and the feeling is, for me, of people being “herded” in and around the building – treated almost like “sheep” who are being ready to be slaughtered; that’s why I don’t enjoy going to MOMA that much, it feel dehumanizing, somehow, to be treated like a like part of a mob, that needs to be “regimented” and directed.

And while we’re at it, the Whitney Museum of American Art is also a modern building but feels a lot more plesent and human to be in. Like I said, MOMA is impresonal and cold – and the art, I feel, is colored by that – but it didn’t need to be that way.

Just because a building or a work of Art is Modern, that doesn’t mean it has to be cold, impersonal or devoid of human feeling.