Patricia Cisneros is getting wall-to-wall coverage of her gift of 102 works to MoMA that will join her previous donation of 40 works. Here’s the Economist on the news with quotes from MoMA’s head Glenn Lowry:
The curators focused on geometric abstraction, a movement that grew up in the 1940s and took its cue from Europeans like Piet Mondrian and artists of the Bauhaus group. Made of metal, paint on wood, plexiglass or woven paper, as well as more conventional materials to study the relationship between planes and angles, Latin American modernism 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 last decade or so that their work is being studied seriously alongside that of European and American modernists. “A whole chapter of international modernism is revealed in these works,” Mr Lowry says, “allowing a more complex understanding of modern art as an international, multifaceted movement.”
The Cisneros gift includes work by 37 artists, of which 21 are entering MoMA’s collection for the first time. Some of them, such as Clark, Oiticica and Mr Maldonado, are well known. The gift will help the museum fill in that layer of people who were working at the same time, but who are less 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.”
MoMA will organise a major 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 of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. “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 gift will catalyse a rethinking of how we think about our own collection…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 Mondrian that inspired it. Because we own that Mondrian.”
Angles and planes: An important gift will transform MoMA’s holdings of Latin American art (The Economist)
