The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site.
Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.
De Stijl, incorporating the ideas of Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden, consisting of artists and architects. The term De Stijl is also used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 created in the Netherlands. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.
Neoplasticism, originating from the Dutch Nieuwe Beelding, is an avant-garde art theory proposed by Piet Mondrian in 1917 and initially employed by the Dutch De Stijl art movement. The most notable proponents of this theory were the painters Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Neoplasticism advocated for a purified abstract art, by applying a set of elementary art principles. Thus, a painting that adhered to neoplastic art theory would typically consist of a balanced composition of simple geometric shapes, right-angled relationships and primary colors.
Boogie-woogie is a piano-based music style.
Victory Boogie Woogie is the last, unfinished work of the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian, left incomplete when Mondrian died in New York in 1944. He was still working on it three days before dying. Since 1998 it has been in the collection of the Kunstmuseum, in The Hague. It has been said that "Mondrian's life and his affection for music are mirrored in the painting [and that it is] a testimony of the influence which New York had on Mondrian."
Events from the year 1943 in art.
Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983) was an American journalist, abstract painter, writer, collector, benefactor and art critic. She was the daughter of Inez Royce, an artist, and Karl Henry von Wiegand. Karl Henry von Wiegand was the German-born journalist known for wartime reporting.
Harry Holtzman was an American artist and founding member of the American Abstract Artists group.
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.
Sidney Janis was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited work by the Abstract Expressionists, but also European artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. As the critic Clement Greenberg explained in a 1958 tribute to Janis, the dealer's exhibition practices had helped to establish the legitimacy of the Americans, for his policy "not only implied, it declared, that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell were to be judged by the same standards as Matisse and Picasso, without condescension, without making allowances." Greenberg observed that in the late 1940s "the real issue was whether ambitious artists could live in this country by what they did ambitiously. Sidney Janis helped as much as anyone to see that it was decided affirmatively."
Ilya Bolotowsky was an early 20th-century Russian-American painter in abstract styles in New York City. His work, a search for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced cubism and geometric abstraction and was influenced by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.
Boogie Woogie is a 2009 British black comedy film directed by Duncan Ward and produced by Eric Eisner and Leonid Rozhetskin. It is based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Danny Moynihan, who adapted his own book on the New York art world of the 1990s and titled it based on the unfinished 1944 Piet Mondrian painting Victory Boogie-Woogie.
The Mondriaan House is a museum in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, in the house where Piet Mondriaan was born in 1872. The museum lies in the historical centre of Amersfoort. The museum building also includes the structure of the Christian primary school, where Mondrian's father served as the headmaster.
Martin Samuel James was an English-American art historian known primarily for his translations, with Harry Holtzman, of the writings of Piet Mondrian into English.
Maria Martins was a Brazilian visual artist who was particularly well known for her modern sculptures.
Composition with Grid No. 1 or Composition in Grey and Ochre is a 1918 painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. It is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Woman's Head is a 1939 oil-on-canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. It is a depiction of Dora Maar, Picasso's companion at the time. Picasso donated the work to the people of Greece in recognition of their resistance against the Axis during the Second World War. Woman's Head was first exhibited in 1949, alongside other donated works, at the Institut Français in Athens. It was not shown again until an exhibition starting in 1980 at the National Gallery and was on continuous show from 2011 until the gallery closed for renovation in 2012. In January 2012 Woman's Head was stolen from the closed gallery, alongside a painting by Piet Mondrian. It was recovered from a gorge near Athens in June 2021 and the alleged thief was arrested.
New York City is an 1942 oil-on-canvas painting by Piet Mondrian, completed in 1942. It is on display in the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.
