Museum of Modern Art Refused What Andy Warhol Painting?
The best paintings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Check out our guide to the best pieces on view right now at the globe-renowned Museum of Modernistic Art in NYC
Among NYC'southward art museums, MoMA'due south drove of 20th-century artworks is arguably unrivaled among other holdings, similar those of The Metropolitan Museum Of Fine art or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. MoMA, later all, has "Modern Art" correct in its name, and commencement in 1929, information technology pioneered the acquisitions of masterpieces in Postimpressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and abstraction—non to mention Popular Art and works past leading contemporary artists. Though MoMA possesses works in all mediums, its horde of paintings takes center phase in its collection, every bit you can see in our list of the best paintings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
RECOMMENDED: A full guide to the Museum of Modern Fine art
Best paintings at the Museum of Modern Fine art
one. Lee Bontecou, Untitled (1961)
In the macho scene of postwar American art, Bontecou was a rare female person presence, but when it came to making tough work, she could proceed up with the boys and and then some. This piece is fabricated with industrial canvas salvaged from a conveyor chugalug that had been tossed out on the street by a laundry located below the artist'due south Due east Village flat. The glowering grade—suggesting a wormhole into some dimension of Common cold War terror, or an eyepiece from a gas mask—was achieved past stretching cloth across a steel frame.
2. Salvador Dalì, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Dalì described his meticulously rendered works equally "hand-painted dream photographs," and certainly, the melted watches that make their appearance in this Surrealist masterpiece have become familiar symbols of that moment when reverie seems to uncannily invade the everyday. The coast of the artist's native Catalonia serves as the backdrop for this landscape of fourth dimension, in which infinity and decay are held in equipoise. As for the odd rubbery animal in the center of the composition, it is the artist himself, or rather his contour, stretched and flattened like Silly Putty.
3. Willem de Kooning, Adult female I (1950–52)
In the signature painting of De Kooning's career, the artist jokingly inserts an interplay betwixt enormous eyes and breasts (strapped down hither as if they might burst from the picture airplane and smother the viewer), taunting us with the question, which would you wait at first? The flurry of violent marks defining the figure could be easily read as misogynistic, but complaining about misogyny in New York's postwar art world is a bit similar complaining that Rembrandt didn't accept electric lights. With her verticality and frontal positioning, /Woman I/ seems enthroned: the regent of De Kooning'south imagination.
iv. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940)
This gender-angle self-portrait by the historic Mexican artist and feminist icon was occasioned by her divorce from Diego Rivera—the muralist notable non only for his ain artistic genius, but for his philandering ways. Kahlo had apparently enough of the latter, but as the painting indicates, she couldn't quite quit Rivera. She pictures herself in a chair, pilus shorn, with her signature peasant blouse and skirt replaced past Rivera's clothes—effectively transforming herself into her ex-hubby's likeness. Her locks, now scattered beyond the floor, seem to writhe menacingly effectually her, and she captioned the composition with the words from a popular Mexican love song: "Expect, if I loved you information technology was because of your hair. At present that you are without hair, I don't love yous anymore." Unsurprisingly, Kahlo remarried Rivera the post-obit year, so this weirdly compelling painting could also be described as a monument to codependency.
v. Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl (1963)
Lichtenstein's Pop icon is at in one case a coolly ironic deconstruction of pulp melodrama and a formally dynamic—even moving—limerick, cheers largely to the interplay of the subject'southward hair (swept into a perfect Mad Men–era coif) and the waves (which seem to have wandered in from a Hokusai print) threatening her. The prototype, a crop from a panel in an early-'60s comic book titled Run for Love!, shows that Lichtenstein's in total command of his manner, employing non only by his well-known Ben-Day dots, but besides assuming black lines corralling areas of deep blue. It's a complete stunner.
six. Kazimir Malevich, White on White (1918)
Though information technology was painted nearly a century ago, this painting's radical nature continues to astonish. Malevich's aim wasn't pure reductivism, though. Inspired by Russian federation'south icon tradition, the early Soviet avant-gardist believed that the Russian Revolution had ushered in a new age in which materialism would give way to spirituality. He chosen his philosophy Suprematism, and /White on White/ serves equally the supreme manifestation of the creative person reaching for transcendence.
7. Henri Matisse, The Piano Lesson (1916)
I of the artist's most personal pieces, The Piano Lesson shows Matisse's son Pierre at the keyboard. It's a composition about space, but besides nearly time, equally information technology echoes again and again the pyramidal shape of the metronome on the piano—in the band of light-green slicing beyond a casement to the left, and in the shadow falling across Pierre's face up. He is set betwixt two of his begetter's works depicting females, the matronly Woman on a High Stool and a small-scale sculpture of a sensuous, reclining nude. More than a simple description of a family unit life, The Piano Lesson serves as a meditation on manhood, and one boy'southward impending introduction to information technology.
8. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
The ur-sail of 20th-century art, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ushered in the modern era by decisively breaking with the representational tradition of Western painting, incorporating allusions to the African masks that Picasso had seen in Paris's ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro. Information technology's compositional Dna likewise includes El Greco's The Vision of Saint John (1608–14), now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The women being intruded upon by the minor still-life at the bottom of frame are actually prostitutes in a brothel. An early study for the painting featured a medical student entering from the left to make his option for the dark, only Picasso wisely decided to exit him out in the final limerick, leaving only Avignon in the title equally a clue to his field of study's origin: It's the name of a street in the artist'southward native Barcelona, famous for its cathouses.
nine. Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897)
Rousseau's career represents the commencement example, perhaps, of a self-taught outsider artist who won the admiration of insider peers, though the road to recognition wasn't easy. The story goes that Picasso get-go stumbled upon the work of this toll-collector-turned-painter while it was being sold on the sidewalk as used sail to exist painted over. Since then, Rousseau's mix of dreamy naive figuration and exotic landscapes (all imagined; he never left France) has become indelible—never more than so than in this painting, in which the juxtaposition of beauty and beast has an unearthly quality.
10. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Nighttime, 1889
Probably Van Gogh'southward near famous and popular painting, The Starry Night has inspired, among other things, a treacly 1971 carol by the musician Don McClean. For most people, the swirling, cyclonic tone of the painting is a direct reflection of Van Gogh's reputation as a turbulent soul. Indeed, he painted the scene while he was a patient at the Saint-Paul mental asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he sought treatment for depression and hallucinations.
11. James Ensor, Masks Confronting Decease, 1888
Known for paintings featuring masks and skulls, the Belgian artist James Ensor is frequently seen every bit a precursor of Surrealism, which is true up to a betoken. Though seemingly Surreal in the broad sense of the term, his work wasn't concerned with dreams or the unconscious (which would subsequently go Surrealist obsessions), but rather with the futility and irony of beingness. Furthermore, his themes were rooted in direct observation, as the ghouls and goblins that populate his imagery didn't spring from his imagination, but were based instead on props and costumes set in his studio (a legacy of the family business, a small-scale emporium that sold festive get-ups and souvenirs to tourists who came to Ensor's seaside hometown of Confirm for its annual Mardi Gras–style carnival). Such a tableau is featured in this painting where the central effigy, representing death, is actually a skull plopped on an system of empty clothes. The aforementioned goes for the masked subjects crowding effectually grim reaper, who wears an elaborate lady's hat, giving the scene an unnerving erotic undertone.
12. Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962)
No Warhol demonstrates the creative person'southward worship of glamour better than this painting, created the yr Monroe died in an credible suicide. It is the altarpiece in Andy's Pop Art church building of celebrity. Merely by the same token, the work likewise speaks to Warhol's background as an observant Catholic; it wouldn't look all that out of identify at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome or at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, where Warhol regularly attended mass (sans wig). The paradigm is based on a publicity still for the picture Niagara, in which Monroe played opposite Joseph Cotton as an unhappily married adult female, plotting the murder of her married man.
13. Paul Signac, Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of Yard. Félix Fénéon in 1890, 1890
Near the end of the 19th century, Impressionism's spontaneous mode of painting gave mode to Postimpressionism and its more than methodical forms of expression. Information technology was in this context that Pointillism emerged, and while usually associated with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac was another major effigy of the movement. His best-known piece of work is this exuberant—nigh psychedelic—portrait of his friend, Felix Fénéon. An art dealer and critic, Fénéon is seen posed in profile against an abstruse, spiral background that symbolically sets in motion the theories of Charles Henry—a mathematician, inventor and aesthete who took a scientific view of colors, proposing that rather than being composite, different hues should exist treated every bit pure independent elements and kept separate from one another. His ideas underpinned Pointillism'due south technique of applying paint as dabs of pure colour that would mix in the eye of the viewer. Signac pays homage to Henry, while the painting's long, grandiose title seems to spoof his empirical claims for fine art. Fénéon, meanwhile is portrayed equally a magician, who, superlative hat and cane in paw, brandishes a white blossom from which the pinwheel backdrop seems to emerge.
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Source: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/slideshow-top-20-paintings-at-moma
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