Protofeminism in the Print Studio Lecture by Christina Weyl Sept. 21 6:30 PM EST

 

https://www.arcadia.edu/proto-feminism-print-studio?utm_source=Subscribers+%28Art+Gallery%2C+Retirees%2C+Departmental%29&utm_campaign=758fd4f153-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_20_07_29_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_07adb7ac18-758fd4f153-279293110

 

Proto-Feminism in the Print Studio

September 13–December 4, 2022
Spruance Gallery

Guest curator: Christina Weyl

Featured Artists:
Louise Bourgeois, Margaret Balzer Cantieni, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Dorothy Dehner, Sari Dienes, Jean Francksen, Francine Felsenthal, Jan Gelb, Ellen Lanyon, Norma Morgan, Louise Nevelson, Rachel Rosenthal, Anne Ryan, Miriam Schapiro, and Doris Seidler.

Minna Citron Men Seldom Make Passes on Women with GlassesMinna Citron, Men Seldom Make Passes on Women With Glasses, 1946, color etching and engraving with gauffrage, 14 15/16 x 9 15/16 in., Collection of Dolan/Maxwell

Arcadia Exhibitions is pleased to present “Proto-Feminism in the Print Studio,” a group exhibition that explores women’s participation in the midcentury printmaking community. Guest-curated by Christina Weyl and featuring 35 works by 16 artists, the show will be on view at Arcadia’s Spruance Gallery through December 4, 2022.

“Proto-Feminism in the Print Studio” centers primarily around the women artists who were members of Atelier 17, the avant-garde printmaking studio located in New York City between 1940 and 1955. Featuring artists—well known and un(der)known—such as Minna Citron, Worden Day, Jean Francksen, Louise Nevelson, and Miriam Schapiro, the exhibition draws on visual and archival material to suggest how these women made technical advances within the graphic arts while simultaneously contributing to the growth of feminist networks and practices of collective action and collaboration.

During the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of American women artists gravitated toward making prints, partly because the medium provided forms of access and agency not as readily available within painting and sculpture. Working in a range of styles, they studied at various print studios—including independent outfits and university classrooms—and exhibited their work in the era’s countless print annuals.

At a time when women struggled against structural sexism to earn solo exhibitions at top-tier galleries, these group print shows offered women artists a rare opportunity to garner critical notice. Women’s participation in the midcentury printmaking community also had significant collective impact. Through these networks, women met others with professional ambitions, compared notes about their struggles, and formed a sense of solidarity as marginalized members of the art community. In this way, women’s involvement with printmaking at midcentury fostered a range of proto-feminist attitudes and practices, such as collaboration, network building, and collegial support.

Dorothy Dehner Bird Machine IIDorothy Dehner, Bird Machine II, 1953, engraving 8 x 13 7/16 in., Collection of Dolan Maxwell

About the Curator:
Christina Weyl is an independent scholar and curator with expertise on twentieth-century American printmaking. She received her BA from Georgetown University (2005) and completed her MA and PhD in art history at Rutgers University (2012, 2015). Her recent book, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York (Yale University Press, 2019) highlights the nearly 100 women artists who advanced modernism and feminism at Atelier 17, the avant-garde printmaking studio located in New York City between 1940 and 1955. With the support of a major grant from the Getty Foundation, she is currently co-curating an exhibition with Lauren Rosenblum for the International Print Center of New York focusing on Margaret Lowengrund and her pioneering effort to establish The Contemporaries as a hybrid printmaking workshop/gallery. She has published in Art in Print, Print Quarterly, and Archives of American Art Journal and contributed to several anthologies and exhibition catalogues. From 2014-2018, she served as Co-President of the Association of Print Scholars, a non-profit professional organization she co-founded in 2014. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked for Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, which represents the publications of the Los Angeles–based artists’ workshop Gemini G.E.L.

Link to Christina Weyl’s 2019 publication The Women of Atelier 17.

More information about Feminist Art Coalition.

Exhibition Events

Lecture

Christina Weyl
Networks of Sisterhood: Women Printmakers at Midcentury

September 21, 2022

6:30PM
Great Room, University Commons
Reception afterwards in Spruance Gallery. Both events are free and open to the public.

Pre-register for this event. 
This in-person event will also be available for remote audiences via Zoom.

Podcast

Pine | Copper | Lime

Episode 70 : Christina Weyl and the Women of Atelier 17

“Women have always been fighting this struggle to make themselves known, to speak some truth to a community that may not want to hear it, but they’re there. They’re there and they need to be heard.”

In a podcast with Pine|Copper|Lime, independent scholar, curator, and writer Christina Weyl discusses her upcoming exhibition with Arcadia University. Their conversation was prompted by the Feminist Art Coalition.

The wide-ranging interview focuses on Weyl’s research for her recently published book with Yale University Press, The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York.

Weyl is a wealth of information on twentieth-century printmaking, as well as this groundbreaking studio. We learn about how World War II was the catalyst that moved the studio from France to New York, the atelier’s connections to The New School and to the Surrealists, and the famous (and infamous) women who came out of it, from Miriam Schapiro to Louise Bourgeois.

Weyl also touches on the struggles of twentieth-century women artists that are especially relevant today, including the challenges of balancing work with family life, providing child care, and staying productive during a global pandemic.

Publication
 

The Women of Atelier 17
Yale University Press
2019

Fluxus Sex Ties / Hier spielt die Musik!

https://www.kunstverein-wiesbaden.de/en/event/opening-fluxus-sex-ties-hier-spielt-die-musik

 

Fluxus Sex Ties / Hier spielt die Musik!

15. July 2022 – 30. October 2022

 

Opening / Thursday, July 14th, 2022, from 6 pm

Mary Bauermeister / Andrea Büttner / Sari Dienes / Esther Ferrer / Simone Forti / Guerrilla Girls / Dorothy Iannone / Alison Knowles / Shigeko Kubota / Annea Lockwood / Charlotte Moorman / Ann Noël / Yoko Ono / Takako Saito / Andrėja Šaltytė / Carolee Schneemann / Mieko Shiomi /…

 

Funded by Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain as well as Stiftung Kunstfonds as part of NEUSTART KULTUR

 

In 1962 the former Städtische Museum Wiesbaden hosted the Fluxus – International Festival of Newest Music, culminating in the legendary destruction of a grand piano. What was then understood as an affront against bourgeois traditions and is still remembered to this day, turned out to be the beginnings of world-wide, ground-breaking upheavals in the visual arts.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Wiesbaden concerts which are regarded in art history as the birth of Fluxus, a meandering river of exhibitions will originate from the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden from July 14th, 2022. As in a musical canon, historic and contemporary melodies, voices and actions will overlap.

In the “Piano Nobile” of Nassauischer Kunstverein, pianos, grand pianos and cellos from the Archivio Conz, made by Sari Dienes, Esther Ferrer, Dorothy Iannone, Alison Knowles, Charlotte Moorman, Ann Noël, Takako Saito and Carolee Schneemann, transform the exhibition into a visual body of sound, framed by smaller cabinet exhibitions. A room dedicated to Mary Bauermeister, for example, shows very early and personal works by the considered “Mother Gaia” of Fluxus. Two other rooms, created in cooperation with Yoko Ono and Takako Saito, to further rooms playfully invite visitors to immerse themselves in the poetics and politics of Fluxus. While the literature on Fluxus emphasises the equal presence of female artists, sixty years of exhibition history nevertheless prove that they have largely disappeared or have been overlooked. The exhibition and research project FLUXUS SEX TIES / Hier spielt die Musik! gives voice to these female Fluxus artists in the shape of a participatory spatial installation, presenting a wide artistic kaleidoscope.

In parallel, contemporary voices complement the historical context. While Ann Noël manifests hitherto unknown Fluxus stories and memories with her textbook The Gospel According to St. Ann, which is based on her meticulous diary entries, Andrea Büttner‘s 5-channel video installation Piano Destructions reveals the (art-)historical gender dichotomy with powerful images and sounds. With a scolding chorus, Andrėja Šaltytė musically transports visitors back to the present and questions the politicisation of language and spaces with her latest video work Kijewer Zunge / I‘m not calling you to use foul language. God forbid!

 

 

slide 1 of 1

 

Sari Dienes: McClain Gallery Houston June 11-July 30

SARI DIENES & ADDIE HERDER

 JUNE 11–JULY 30, 2022
Installation View
Selected Works

 

 

Sari Dienes, Shard Straps, 1950

 

SARI DIENES & ADDIE HERDER

 JUNE 11–JULY 30, 2022

SARI DIENES & ADDIE HERDER - JUNE 11 – JULY 30, 2022 - Viewing Room - McClain Gallery Viewing Room

SARI DIENES & ADDIE HERDER - JUNE 11 – JULY 30, 2022 - Viewing Room - McClain Gallery Viewing Room

Sherwood Studio Building, 58 West 57th Street. Photo c.1902-03.

McClain Gallery presents two simultaneous solo exhibitions of historic works by Sari Dienes (1898–1992) and Addie Herder (1920–2009).

Dienes and Herder’s distinctive creative paths overlapped in the storied Sherwood Studios during the 1950s and 1960s. Sherwood Studios at 58 West 57th Street, New York, NY was built as a home to artists and writers in the nineteenth century and remained active until 1960. Both artists were adventurous in their approach to material experimentation, incorporating found objects in a way that exposed their keen awareness of the urban environment they inhabited. We are grateful to Pavel Zoubok Fine Art for their collaboration on these exhibitions.

SARI DIENES

During a career that spanned over six decades, Sari Dienes worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and costumes for theater and dance, sound-art installations, mixed-media environments, music, and performance art. This exhibition focuses on Dienes’ work from the early 1950s and traces her evolution through the 1960s when she rejected her formal training to begin experimenting with new materials and techniques. The shift in her practice from painting and drawing towards “rubbings,” layering urban textures of

SARI DIENES & ADDIE HERDER - JUNE 11 – JULY 30, 2022 - Viewing Room - McClain Gallery Viewing Room

Sari Dienes, Menomonie 7, c. 1966, rubbing on fabric, 35 x 28 inches

 

manhole covers and sidewalks and assemblages of found objects into all-over abstraction can be firmly located in the Sherwood Studios. Upon taking up residency there in 1945, Dienes met and began a lifelong friendship with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. She quickly established herself in the epicenter of the art world during the 1950s, influencing artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Ray Johnson. Though widely exhibited during her lifetime, Dienes’ legacy is dominated by her powerful monoprints of subway grates and manhole covers. This exhibition articulates a formal sensibility that permeated all she created, tracking the development of her body of work through exuberant explorations in frottage, collage, and assemblage.

Dienes was born in Debreczen, Hungary, in 1898. From 1928–1935, she moved to Paris and then London where she studied with Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, André Lhote, and Henry Moore. In 1939, Dienes relocated to New York, where she would remain until her death.

SARI DIENES & ADDIE HERDER - JUNE 11 – JULY 30, 2022 - Viewing Room - McClain Gallery Viewing Room

Sari Dienes’ Sidewalk Rubbings in Bonwit Teller windows, New York, 1955 – photos Virginia Roehl

Dienes exhibited nationally and internationally from the early 1940s, with notable exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City and later as a founding member of the Feminist collective, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been included in major museum exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Recent exhibitions at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; The Drawing Center, New York, New York; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, New York; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills, California; the Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and McClain Gallery, Houston, Texas as well as new scholarship on her work have renewed interest in her life and work. Visit the Sari Dienes Foundation website for a narrative timeline.

“Armed with an ink roller, she mapped her urban haunts as well as her body’s movement; uneven and ghostly skeins of pigment document her repetitive application of a standard-size brayer across the surface. Dienes placed drawing at the center of her practice while simultaneously challenging traditionally held views about the medium.”

–text excerpt from Sari Dienes’ 2014 solo exhibition at The Drawing Center, NYC, New York.

SARI DIENES 

Slide-Show Thumbnails
Sari Dienes Hawaiian Petroglyph III, ca. 1957 Petroglyph rubbing 11 x 26 inches

Sari Dienes

Hawaiian Petroglyph III, ca. 1957

Petroglyph rubbing

11 x 27 inches

Inquire

Sari Dienes Love Always Gloria Swanson, 1955 ink rubbing on Webril 39 x 44 inches

Sari Dienes

Love Always Gloria Swanson, 1955

ink rubbing on Webril

object: 39 x 44 inches

frame: 41 1/4 x 46 1/4 inches

Inquire

Sari Dienes Pavement, c. 1953 ink rubbing on Webril 36 x 24 inches

Sari Dienes

Pavement, c. 1953

ink rubbing on Webril

36 x 24 inches

Inquire

Sari Dienes at the The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts Oct. 22- Dec. 10 2021

 

 

 

Sari Dienes

Oct 22-Dec 10, 2021
Art Alliance
The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is pleased to present the first Philadelphia exhibition of works by Sari Dienes.

A brief litany of Sari Dienes’ life only begins to point to her importance. She was born Sari Chylinska in Hungary in October 1898. In her late teens she studied dance under Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora. She married Paul Dienes at age 24. After moving to Wales for work, she began working in textile design. In her 30s, she decided to become a visual artist and studied with Fernand Leger, Ande L’hote and Amadee Ozenfant.

She was later appointed assistant director of the Ozenfant School in London, where she hired the young Henry Moore. During a trip to the United States in 1939, she was stranded due to World War II. In the 1940s, Dienes exhibited at the New School, studied printmaking with Stanley Hayter, and taught at Parsons School of Design, the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and in her own studio. She attended The Club and showed her abstract work at Betty Parsons Gallery.

Dienes’ experimental work vastly expanded what was permissible in the visual arts. She was an early influence on younger artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who assisted Dienes in her practice of making textural rubbings in Manhattan.

Her junk constructions were included in MoMA’s Art of Assemblage exhibit. In her 70s, Dienes moved to Stony Point near John Cage and Merce Cunningham. She experimented with color Xerox, made silkscreen murals for the New York State House and became a founding member of AIR Gallery, the first women’s cooperative in New York.

In addition to Dienes’ works, the second floor of the Art Alliance includes analogous efforts by several artists. A small Rachel Rosenthal ink drawing will be juxtaposed with a sensitive linear drawing by Dienes. Rosenthal and Dienes were influential in introducing Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to each other in the late 1950s, and all enjoyed soirees in Dienes’ 57th Street loft.

Suzi Gablik - Victorian Still Life

The  exhibition includes mail art correspondence by Ray Johnson, who was a friend of all of the above, and a Dienes frottage of Johnson’s arms quite similar to later rubbing examples by Johns in his prints. There is an early collage painting by Suzi Gablik who attended Black Mountain College with Johnson and Rauschenberg and later helped curate the important show Pop Art Redefined with John Russell. Paintings by Carlos Bunga exhibit some of the same material sensibilities as exemplified by Dienes. And, not last, is a marvelous assemblage portrait of Sari Dienes by Lenore Tawney.

The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts is grateful to Pavel Zoubok Gallery and the Sari Dienes Foundation for their assistance in implementing this exhibition.

Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts
251 S 18th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103

Top image:
Sari Dienes, Central Park, c. 1954.
Ink rubbing on Webril mounted to four-panel screen
38 1/2 x 120 inches
Copyright © Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York, NY. Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, NY.

Second Image:
Suzi Gablik, Victorian Still Life, 1961.
Collage and oil paint on canvas, 12.25 x 11.5 inches (13 x 12 inches frame size).
Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Anonymous Donor.

Sari Dienes Film Festival September 22, 2021 6:30-8

sponsored by Women in the Arts via Zoom

Meeting invite

WIA Monthly Meeting Newsletter  SEPTEMBER 2021  

 3 pages

 

Wednesday September 22, 2021 6-8 PM

Is our first meeting of the Fall season

WIA presents a very exciting season filled with speakers, and events. Meeting Dates to remember: October 20, November 17,  December 15, January 19, 2022.

 

Agenda: September 22, 6- 8 PM

  Zoom INVITE: we use the same hashtag for both meetings

   so be mindful of the joining time

 Tobey Soller is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: WIA Board and Monthly Meeting
Time: Sep 22, 2021 05:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85442194821?pwd=V2tlN0UyK2YyaURsU0ZkZFFSc1plUT09

Meeting ID: 854 4219 4821
Passcode: 784606
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Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kUmV3p4lK

 

2 films:

Hats, Bottles and Bones by Martha Edelheit

Sari Dienes: A Life In Art Part 1A

Women In the Arts at Ceres Gallery 71-21 50th Anniversary

Join us for a 6:00 gallery walk through                        Webinaire Thursday July 15th  6:00 – 8:00 P

followed by a 7:00 screening of an interview by painter Ce Roser, founder of

Women In the Arts.

Please click the link below to join the webinar:
> Passcode: 848217
> Or One tap mobile :
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Forbes review by Jonathan Keats of Nothing is So Humble features Sari Dienes

|449 views

From Pantyhose To Manhole Covers, These Printmakers Are Transforming Overlooked Objects Into Artistic Masterpieces

Jonathon Keats

Jonathon KeatsContributor
Arts
critic-at-large

When the Dalles Dam was constructed on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, the rising waters washed away countless ancient Native American petroglyphs. Anticipating this catastrophic loss, a Hungarian woman named Sari Dienes traveled to Oregon in the mid-1950s. Working with the University of Washington, she made a set of monumental rubbings that are now the sole enduring record of several hundred sacred images.

Dienes brought considerable expertise to Oregon, though not as an archaeologist. Her skill at making rubbings originated in New York City, where she’d taken her practice as an abstract artist out of the studio and into the streets. Enlisting colleagues including Jasper Johns and John Cage as assistants, Dienes would lay down paper or cloth atop manhole covers and subway gratings, making direct impressions of the urban fabric with an ink-laden brayer. These textures became elements in sprawling compositions that literally grounded the formal language of Abstract Expressionism. For Dienes, the move was not only aesthetic but also philosophical. “Nothing,” she contended, “is so humble that it cannot be made into art.”

Sari Dienes (1898-1992), HPFS, c. 1953. Ink on Webril, 32 3/4 × 36 in. (83.2 × 91.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Print Committee 2017.199. © 2020 Sari Dienes Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Sari Dienes (1898-1992), HPFS, c. 1953. Ink on Webril, 32 3/4 × 36 in. (83.2 × 91.4 cm). Whitney … [+]

Sari Dienes

One of her urban rubbings is now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as part of a modest but notable exhibition that takes her proclamation as its title. Nothing Is So Humble showcases myriad ways in which artists have made prints using ordinary things over the course of the past seventy years. Examples include a relief print of sliced potatoes made by Ruth Asawa in 1951-52, a collagraph of wood scraps made by Zarina in 1969, and impressions of pantyhose made by Julia Phillips in 2016. Each of these works reveals attributes of common objects that might otherwise be overlooked while also transforming those qualities into an independent aesthetic experience.

PROMOTED

Prints occupy the artistic terrain between sculptures and paintings, leaving the trace of three-dimensional artifacts on a two-dimensional picture plane. This space between the physical and the imagistic is especially apparent when the source remains recognizable. The transformation of the humble into the numinous is not unique to prints. (After all, a sculpture may be made out of junk, and a drawing can be inscribed with a stub of pencil.) What is special about prints is that they mirror the complex relationship between the human body and the senses.

Julia Phillips (b. 1985), Expanded VI, 2016. Relief collagraph with blind embossing, 29 7/8 × 22 3/8 in. (75.9 × 56.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Stephen Dull 2019.295. © Julia Phillips

Julia Phillips (b. 1985), Expanded VI, 2016. Relief collagraph with blind embossing, 29 7/8 × 22 3/8 … [+]

Julia Phillips

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Prints of recognizable objects can also provide insight into the relationship between figuration and abstraction. For instance, Phillips’ stunning compositions are clearly made by stretching nylon hosiery, but hosiery is hardly their subject. The sensation of looking at her work is the opposite of perceiving a man in the moon or a scorpion in the scatter of stars. The act of abstraction entails sense-breaking, the converse of apophenia. Perhaps it can even be an antidote to QAnon conspiracy-mongering.

With her rubbings of recognizable Manhattan infrastructure, and her juxtaposition of urban textures on the page, Sari Dienes pioneered the practice of denaturing the commonplace. However the rubbings she was concurrently making on the shores of the Columbia River provide an important counterpoint. Confronting material that was anything but humble, she responded with artistic humility, allowing her rubbings to become proxies for the petroglyphs, the only lasting trace as the physical source of the images was eroded away.

“Four Years”: Sari Dienes at Kunstmuseum Basel curated by Josef Helfenstein

Four Years

Gifts and Acquisitions

Neubau / 05.09.2020–21.03.2021 / Curator: Dr Josef Helfenstein

In the four years since Josef Helfenstein took the helm as director of the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2016, we have recorded almost a thousand accessions to the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the public art collection of Basel; the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) alone has added over eight hundred works. Presenting a selection from these riches, the exhibition at the Neubau also offers insight into the institution’s collection-building efforts.

The Öffentliche Kunstsammlung has been growing steadily for centuries. Generations of museum leaders, donors, and artists contributed and still contribute to its flourishing. Yet it is the rare exception when a new accession attracts the attention of the wider public.

Basel has been blessed with a tradition of vigorous philanthropic commitment to the common weal since the sixteenth century, complemented by a strong affinity for culture and scholarship that has benefited the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung at several crucial junctures. A period of dedicated collection-building focused on the international modernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began after the First World War. Our holdings continued to grow after the Second World War in no small part thanks to the largesse of private benefactors including Raoul LaRoche, Maja Sacher-Stehlin, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, Richard Doetsch-Benziger, Max Geldner, and Martha and Robert von Hirsch, who gifted or bequeathed their—in some instances, sizable—private collections to the museum. Financial donations, meanwhile, made it possible for the museum to enlarge its galleries; in particular, the munificence of Maja Sacher-Stehlin enabled us to establish the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in 1980. A second new exhibition building, the Neubau, was inaugurated in 2016 thanks to the providence and generosity of Sacher-Stehlin’s granddaughter Dr. h.c. Maja Oeri.

Working with limited funds, all directors in the Kunstmuseum Basel’s history assiduously sought to enlarge its collections at a high level of quality, retrospectively closing gaps while also looking to the future in integrating contemporary positions. Tendencies in art history as well as social developments have always informed the museum’s collection-building policies. A key challenge for today’s acquisition program is to honor the collection’s longstanding international renown while diversifying our holdings and expanding the traditional canon, including by enlarging our stock of works by outstanding women artists.

One field in which we were able to welcome major new accessions in the past four years, in part thanks to financial support from foundations, is American postwar art, with acquisitions of important works or ensembles by Lynda Benglis, Sari Dienes, Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, the Guerrilla Girls, Martha Rosler, and Kara Walker—all of them artists who had been missing from the canon of the Basel collection. 

The Kunstmuseum owes many of these accessions to the generosity of donors, who often give works that would exceed our financial resources. Some of the new arrivals promptly made their Basel début in our collection presentation, including the Christoph Merian Foundation’s sensational gift of seven eminent works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, and Jean Dubuffet from the Probst Collection in the spring of 2019, which have been on view in the Hauptbau’s second-floor galleries since July 2020. The collection presentation also features paintings by Lucas Cranach, Caspar Wolf, Auguste Renoir, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Moreover, the Kunstmuseum’s holdings would not be anywhere near as abundant as they are without the largesse of the artists themselves. It is a tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century, when Samuel Birmann, in his will, established an endowment fund that even today enables us to acquire works by Swiss artists. Among the most celebrated gifts made by artists are those of Pablo Picasso (1967) and Jasper Johns (1994). We are enormously pleased that this tradition is alive and well today.

The Kupferstichkabinett, too, has benefited handsomely from the munificence of donors in the past four years. Several patrons who had unstintingly supported us before demonstrated their devotion to the Kunstmuseum with fresh gifts, some of which have closed major gaps in the collection. A salient example is Dr. h.c. Eberhard W. Kornfeld’s second donation of prints by Rembrandt—this time, a set of thirty-one etchings of outstanding quality, which will be on display in a separate focused presentation in the main building that is scheduled to open in October. With two drawings by Hans Weiditz the Younger and Antonio Tempesta, the Kupferstichkabinett also boasts significant new additions to its holdings of sixteenth-century art.

MoMA Degree Zero Drawing at Mid Century Through June, 2021

Tomb, c. 1950

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5223

  • MoMA, Floor 2, 2 South The Paul J. Sachs Galleries

For Tomb Dienes combined her two signature practices, ink rubbing and the use of found objects. Influenced by the Surrealist process of frottage, Dienes first made rubbings of natural objects and household items during a residency in upstate New York in 1953. She quickly deployed this technique outside the studio, creating haunting imprints of colonial tombstones in New England cemeteries. After taping a large piece of paper onto the headstone, she used a roller to apply ink to the sheet to transfer the decoration; the uneven impression captures the idiosyncrasies of the surface and her interaction with the stone.

Dienes viewed her rubbings as more than documents of her environment: “My use of rollers and natural surfaces . . . is a kind of jumping off place for my imagination.” Tomb embodies her inspired amplification of the technique: after Dienes completed the rubbing, she stapled a weather-worn fabric American flag over it and encased the design within two sheets of torn mat board, heightening the sense of decay already palpable in the imprint. In juxtaposing a tombstone with a symbol of American patriotism and democracy, Dienes radically upended the traditional meaning of both icons, inviting numerous new interpretations. Among other possibilities, the work may describe the Hungarian-born artist’s relationship with her adopted country or respond, more specifically, to threats to American democracy at the time, from the Korean War to McCarthyism.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum
of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)