介绍： Art from Latin America: A time of gifts
A donation to MoMA will transform the study of Latin American Modernism
From The Economist 20161022

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LATIN AMERICAN art has long been a feature of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Ever since 1931, when Alfred Barr, the th...

介绍： Art from Latin America: A time of gifts
A donation to MoMA will transform the study of Latin American Modernism
From The Economist 20161022

Audio:

0:00




LATIN AMERICAN art has long been a feature of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Ever since 1931, when Alfred Barr, the then-director, followed an exhibition of Henri Matisse with a one-man show of the Mexican modernist, Diego Rivera, the museum has collected design, photography, film, architectural drawings, paintings and sculpture from the region. In 2014 it put on the first American retrospective of Lygia Clark, a radical Brazilian who died in 1988, bringing together 300 works grouped around three themes: abstraction, Neo-Concretism and what was termed the “abandonment” of art. Now the museum can do even more, thanks to a donation from an important private collector.

The gift of 102 works comes from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a MoMA trustee who has been buying art for more than half a century. The family has already given the museum 40 works. This most recent donation will increase MoMA’s holdings of Latin American paintings and sculpture by half as much again. It also includes plans for a Cisneros Institute to be opened in MoMA’s midtown Manhattan campus, which will focus on research, conferences and publications on art from Latin America. ““It’s the most important gift we’ve ever had,” says MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry, “And in terms of size it’s the biggest.”

The seed of the idea was sown in the first week of Mr Lowry’s directorship in 1995, but it was not until nine years ago that the two began discussing specifics. Mrs Cisneros offered the museum anything it wanted from her collection. The curators focused on geometric abstraction, a movement that spread in the 1940s, and evolved in four countries—Brazil, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay—into an aesthetic all of its own. Artists such as Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero and Tomás Maldonado have long been regarded as modernists, but it is only in the past decade or so that their work has been studied seriously alongside that of European and American artists. “A whole chapter of international modernism is revealed in these works,” Mr Lowry says.


The Cisneros gift includes work by 37 artists, of which 21 are entering MoMA’s collection for the first time, many of them little-studied. “What is truly important,” Mrs Cisneros says, “is that it allows us now to tell the story of geometric abstraction as a whole. It brings the movement together.”

The museum will arrange an exhibition of the Cisneros gift after its new extension is opened in 2019. It will also allow the museum to reassess its own modernist collection. “Our interest from the outset is about the ongoing dialogue between different artists who were grappling with similar sets of problems all over the world,” says Mr Lowry. The museum has important holdings of works by Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. “Now we can do a room devoted to Lygia Clark, Alejandro Otero or Willys de Castro. In fact, we can show de Castro’s ‘Modulated Composition, 1954’ alongside the Piet Mondrian that inspired it. Because we own that Mondrian.”


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