: The Museum of Modern Art is presenting through July 10 "Against
the Grain; Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida
Collection," an exhibition of more than 100 paintings, sculpture,
drawings and prints selected from Edward R. Broida's recent gift
to the museum of 175 works of art.
The acquisition of these works, which were selected by the
museum's curatorial staff at the invitation of Broida,
dramatically enhances the museum's holdings of many artists and
introduces important works by several artists new to the MoMA
collection. More than 30 American and European artists are
represented in the exhibition with works that date primarily from
the 1960s through the present. Among the works exhibited in the
Broida collection are the groups of works in a variety of mediums
by Philip Guston, Vija Celmins and Christopher Wilmarth, artists
who Broida collected in depth.
Broida, an architect and real estate developer who died in April
2006 at age 72, began collecting art as a self-acknowledged
novice in the late 1970s. His first purchases were two paintings
by Philip Guston (American, 1913-80), whose work had departed
from the abstraction for which he was known and returned to a
more figurative style, a development that was considered
unfashionable at the time. Broida subsequently assembled a
significant number of works by Guston in a variety of mediums,
concentrating in particular on the bold narrative style that
Guston developed in the last decade of his life. Broida was also
an early collector of works by Wilmarth and Celmins. Over the
next three decades, with an instinctively singular vision, he
developed a collection of some 700 objects notable for its great
diversity of contemporary works of art.
At the center of the exhibition are two galleries of some 30
paintings, drawings and prints by Guston, presenting a small
retrospective of the artist's career. The paintings in this
section show this great midcentury artists at a very early moment
with "Gladiators," 1940, and comprehensively from 1969 to 1980,
providing an in-depth look at Guston's move away from abstraction
and return to figurative painting late in his career. These late
works often employ recurring signature figures, such as the
seemingly innocent Ku Klux Klansmen in the paintings "Edge of
Town," 1969, and "A Day's Work," 1970.
The 40-year career of Vijay Celmins (American, born Latvia, 1938)
is traced through some 16 paintings, sculptures, drawings and
prints in a monographic gallery devoted to her work. The
installation ranges from rare works from the 1960s, such as the
painted wood sculpture "Puzzle," 1965-66, and the painting
"Flying Fortress," 1966, and later works such as the drawing
"Star Field III," 1982-83 and the painting "Web #3," 2000-02.
A gallery devoted to the sculpture of Christopher Wilmarth
(American, 1943-1978) has as its centerpiece "Tina Turner,"
1970-71, a series of four large industrial plates of glass
aligned upright in succession to occupy a nearly 15-foot area.
Mark di Suvero (American, born 1933) is represented in a single
gallery with four works dating from 1961 through 1997. Di Suvero
once referred to his sculpture as "painting in three dimensions,"
indicating that rough wooden beams were the sculptural equivalent
of the wide, confident brushstrokes of the abstract expressionist
painters. Early works by di Suvero, "Eatherly's Lamp," 1961, and
"Measure Piece," 1967, are joined in this gallery by the
large-scale "For Gonzalez," 1973, a homage to Twentieth Century
sculptor Julio Gonzalez and a more recent sculpture, "Cubo
Arcane," 1997.
Ken Price (American, born 1935) has been working almost
exclusively in ceramic since the 1950s and is represented in the
exhibition with an important group of recent works made since
1995. "Arctic," 1998, features a nose like shape with a red hole
near the center.
"Seven Virtues/Seven Vices," 1983-84, by Bruce Nauman (American,
born 1941) - the lone work in its gallery - comprises seven
limestone slabs, six propped up against the walls and the seventh
laid flat in the center of the gallery. Each stone is inscribed
with the name of one of the seven deadly sins, or vices, as
outlined in the Bible, paired with one of the four cardinal
virtues as presented by Plato or one of the three Christian
theological virtues.
Interwoven throughout the exhibition are groups of key works from
contemporary artists whose careers Broida followed.
The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. For
information, 212-708-9400 or www.moma.org.
