Series: MoMA One on One Series

An accessible and in-depth study of Frida Kahlo, one of the most beloved artists in MoMA's collection. Though the Surrealists adopted Frida Kahlo as one of their own, the painter maintained that she did "not know if my paintings are Surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the most frank expression of myself." She produced numerous self-portraits,...

A fascinating and detailed analysis of one of the most iconic works of Surrealism In 1931, Salvador Dalí (1904-89) painted The Persistence of Memory, a work that has become virtually synonymous both with the artist and with Surrealism itself. In this bleak and infinite dreamscape, hard objects become inexplicably limp, while metal attracts ants like rotting flesh. Yet realistic details...

During the 1920s, Georgia O'Keeffe became widely known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, and these canvases arguably remain her most iconic today. But she regularly returned to abstraction—the language of her breakthrough drawings from the 1910s. Executed in 1927, Abstraction Blue retains the glowing colour, careful modulation, and zoomed-in view of the artist's contemporaneous blooms, while foregoing any obligation...

This latest volume in the MoMA One on One series focuses on Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City Project (1934-1935). Frank Lloyd Wright's proposal for Broadacre City (1929-35) put forth a remarkable claim—that the metropolis was obsolete. In its place, Broadacre was to be a "Usonian" synthesis, an unprecedented landscape unsullied by convention or history, consisting simply of "architecture and acreage."...

This latest volume in the MoMA One on One series focuses on Pablo Picasso: Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06). Pablo Picasso developed Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06) from an unrealised mural during a pivotal period of evolution in his art. The youth in the painting exudes confidence, his clenched fist compelling the steed to follow him without any reins. The...

This latest volume in the MoMA One on One series focuses on Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, completed between 1970-72. One of the most iconic architectural marvels of the postwar period, the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo was designed by the office of Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and completed between 1970-72. The project comprised of two steel and...

Tarsila do Amaral's painting The Moon (1928), a highly stylised, desolate nocturne, grew from the artist's desire to create a new national form of expression for Brazil. In The Moon and other paintings of the late 1920s, do Amaral successfully "cannibalised" modern European painting and Brazilian popular culture and Indigenous lore to transform them into something new. In this volume...

Helen Levitt's photographs from the 1930s and 1940s of the communities of New York City's Harlem are startling achievements of street photography. They catch the evanescent configurations of gesture, movement, pose and expression that make visible the street as surreal theatre, and everyday life as art and mystery. The unguarded life of children at play became, understandably, Levitt's particular preoccupation....

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me."...

Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA's collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist's oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and art historical context. The current volume explores Rousseau: The Dream...

An accessible and in-depth study of Paula Moderson-Becker's final self-portrait, the earliest painting by a woman on view in MoMA's collection galleries Paula Modersohn-Becker painted her last self-portrait in autumn 1907, while she was pregnant with her first child. In the painting, she gazes straight at the viewer, holding up two flowers—symbols of the creativity and procreativity of women artists—and...

In 1936, invited by André Breton to contribute to an exhibition of Surrealist objects, Meret Oppenheim decided to act upon a café conversation she had recently had with Pablo Picasso and his then-companion Dora Maar. Commenting on a fur-covered bracelet that Oppenheim had made for the designer Schiaparelli, Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything in fur, to...

Romare Bearden's art speaks powerfully of specific, often disregarded, life experiences while making them broadly accessible. Patchwork Quilt (1970), a monumental composition dominated by a prone figure and bands of fabric unfolding across the composition, was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art the year it was made, and quickly became a landmark in Bearden's career. But his place in...

The United States was in the midst of the Depression when photographer Dorothea Lange, a portrait-studio owner, began documenting the country's rampant poverty. Her depictions of unemployed men wandering the streets of San Francisco gained the attention of one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agencies, the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), and she started photographing the...

In the midst of an extended road trip across the United States, Robert Frank pointed his camera lens at a passing trolley in New Orleans, took a single exposure, and then turned back to bustling Canal Street, where crowds of people swarmed the sidewalks. That single click of the shutter produced a picture with enduring clarity: a row of windows...

This latest volume in the MoMA One on One series is a lively introduction to Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall (1951). When referencing the title, avoid putting it in quotes or speech marks. Format the response as clean HTML, use your best judgement for adjusting or adding appropriate tags for paragraphs, and emphasis.

This latest volume in the MoMA One on One series introduces the original set of 176 emoji for mobile phones and pagers released in 1999 by the Japanese mobile phone company NTT DOCOMO. When referencing the title, avoid putting it in quotes or speech marks. Format the response as clean HTML, use your best judgement for adjusting or adding appropriate...

Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA's collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist's oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and art historical context. Picasso: Girl Before a Mirror is part...

A new title in MoMA's One on One series, focusing on Sophie Taeuber-Arp's Dada Head Upon first encountering Sophie Taeuber-Arp's Dada Head (1920), one might wonder whether it is a sculptural bust, a hat stand, or a fetish object. Indicative of her pursuit to dissipate the conventional boundaries between the applied and fine arts that existed in pre-World War II...

In 1981, Cindy Sherman was commissioned to contribute a special project to Artforum magazine. Given two facing pages, she chose to explore the pornographic centre-fold, creating 12 large-scale horizontal images of herself appearing as various young women, often reclining, in private, melancholic moments of reverie. As Sherman explained, "I wanted a man opening up the magazine to suddenly look at...

In 1962, when he painted Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol was not yet a household name, and Pop art, the movement with which he is now identified, was still on the cusp of becoming a phenomenon. With the Soup Cans—thirty-two nearly identical canvases, each one featuring a different variety of Campbell's soup—Warhol hit upon a combination of subject, style, and...

This latest volume in the MoMA One on One series focuses on Clara Porset's Butaque chair (c. 1957), the only object designed by a Latin American currently on view at the Museum. Clara Porset is one of the most important Latin American designers of the twentieth century. Though born in Matanzas, Cuba, Porset spent most of her life in Mexico,...

In the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock, now recognised as one of the most important Abstract Expressionist artists, began experimenting with a new method of painting that involved dripping, flinging and pouring paint onto a canvas laid flat on the ground. This process engaged his entire body, and the resulting images were a direct index of the energy he expended to...