Established | 1974 |
---|---|
Location | New York University New York, New York |
Coordinates | 40°43′49″N73°59′44″W / 40.73025°N 73.99568°W |
Type | University art museum |
Website | Official website |
The Grey Art Museum, known until 2023 as the Grey Art Gallery, is New York University's fine art museum. [1] As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art's historical, cultural, and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object's environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization.
NYU's art collection was transformed into the Grey Art Gallery in 1973 following a major gift of one thousand works from Abby Weed Grey. [2] The museum opened to the public in 1975. The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art at NYU comprises some 700 works produced by artists from countries as diverse as Japan, Thailand, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. [3]
The Grey Art Gallery also oversees the art collection of New York University. Founded in 1958 with the acquisition of Francis Picabia's Resonateur (1922) and Fritz Glarner's Relational Painting (1949–50), the NYU Art Collection comprises approximately 5,000 works, mainly dating from the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Pablo Picasso's Bust of Sylvette (1967), currently installed at University Village (Manhattan); Joseph Cornell's Chocolat Menier (1952); and works by Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Ilya Bolotowsky, as well as Romare Bearden, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Kenneth Noland, Jane Freilicher, Ad Reinhardt, and Alex Katz, among many others. [4]
Until 2023, the Gallery was housed in the Silver Center (formerly Main Building), on the site on NYU's original home, the legendary University Building (1835–94), where artists and writers, including Samuel Colt, Winslow Homer, George Inness, and Henry James, worked.[ citation needed ] It was also here that Professor Samuel F. B. Morse established the first academic art department in the U.S. [5]
Between 1927 and 1942, the space that became the Grey hosted Albert Eugene Gallatin Gallery (later Museum) of Living Art—the first American museum exclusively devoted to modernist art.[ citation needed ] In exhibiting work by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, and artists associated with the American Abstract Artists group, Gallatin created a forum for intellectual exchange and a place where visitors could view the latest developments in art.
In 2023, NYU announced that when it reopened in March 2024 following renovations and a closure for the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum would be known as the Grey Art Museum and would move to 18 Cooper Square where it would have larger galleries as well as a study center. [2]
NYU lacked a permanent museum until 1975, when a private donation gift from Abby Weed Grey enabled the historic venue's renovation and improvement of the historic venue, and the doors reopened as the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center in 1975. [5] Weed Grey collected some 700 works of modern art on her travels throughout Asia and the Middle East. [6] [7] [8]
In 1983, Grey Art Gallery was the first organization in the United States to show a major Frida Kahlo exhibit. [2]
The gallery was endowed by Abby Weed Grey, who also donated some 700 works of modern art that she acquired during her frequent travels in Asia and the Middle East. The Abby Weed Grey Collection constitutes the largest institutional holdings of modern Iranian and Turkish art outside those countries. [9] Grey was especially supportive of Iranian art, which comprises one-fifth of her collection at NYU. She also donated significant holdings of works by artists from Turkey and India. Many of the artists whose works she collected adapted their culture's indigenous aesthetic traditions to contemporary circumstances, and they often blend representation and abstraction. [10]
The New York University Art Collection, of which the Grey Art Gallery is now guardian, [2] was founded in 1958 with NYU's acquisition of Francis Picabia's Resonateur (c. 1922) and Fritz Glarner's Relational Painting (1949–50). Today the collection (which includes approximately 6,000 objects) is primarily composed of late-19th and 20th-century works, ranging from Pablo Picasso's monumental public sculpture Bust of Sylvette to a Joseph Cornell box, Chocolat Menier, from 1952. The collection's particular strength is American painting from the 1940s to the present. European prints are also well represented, with works by Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Picasso, to name a few.
Artists in the NYU Art Collection include: Milton Avery, Ilya Bolotowsky, Sonia Delaunay, Arshile Gorky, Édouard Manet, Francis Picabia, and many others. The collection is especially rich in works by artists working in New York in the 1950s and '60s, such as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Al Held, Romare Bearden, Ching Ho Cheng, Hans Hofmann, Alex Katz, Nicholas Krushenick, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Bernard (Tony) Rosenthal. [11]
This list comprises a selection of the exhibitions organized by the Grey Art Gallery at New York University from its opening in 1975 through today. [12] [13]
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement begun in Paris that revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and influenced artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form—instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.
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.
Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, and typographist closely associated with Dada.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was a German-born art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubist movement in art.
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic of the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or Postmodern art.
Jacques Villon, also known as Gaston Duchamp, was a French Cubist and abstract painter and printmaker.
The 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories.
Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies was a Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist.
Marcos Grigorian, also known as Marco Grigorian was an Iranian-Armenian and American artist and gallery owner, and he was a pioneer of Iranian modern art.
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi is an Iranian painter, calligrapher and sculptor, known as a pioneer of Iranian modern art and as one of the earliest artists to incorporate Persian calligraphy elements into his artwork. He is a pioneer of the Saqqakhaneh School of Art, a genre of neo-traditional modern art founded in Iran that is rooted in the history of Persian coffee-house paintings and Persian Shia visual elements. He lives in Paris and New York.
Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator living in New York City. He is the author of numerous books, monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists.
291 was an arts and literary magazine that was published from 1915 to 1916 in New York City. It was created and published by a group of four individuals: photographer/modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz, artist Marius de Zayas, art collector/journalist/poet Agnes E. Meyer and photographer/critic/arts patron Paul Haviland. Initially intended as a way to bring attention to Stieglitz's gallery of the same name (291), it soon became a work of art in itself. The magazine published original art work, essays, poems and commentaries by Francis Picabia, John Marin, Max Jacob, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, de Zayas, Stieglitz and other avant-garde artists and writers of the time, and it is credited with being the publication that introduced visual poetry to the United States.
Jaime Davidovich was an Argentine-American conceptual artist and television-art pioneer. His innovative artworks and art-making activities produced several distinct professional reputations including painter, installation artist, video artist, Public-access television cable TV producer, activist, and non-profit organizer. He is the creator of legendary downtown Manhattan cable television program The Live! Show (1979–1984). Billed as "the variety show of the avant-garde", The Live! Show was an eclectic half-hour of live, interactive artistic entertainment inspired by the Dada performance club Cabaret Voltaire and the anarchic humor of American television comedian Ernie Kovacs.
Abby Leigh is an American artist based in New York City. Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; among others.
Lizzie Plummer Bliss, known as Lillie P. Bliss, was an American art collector and patron. At the beginning of the 20th century, she was one of the leading collectors of modern art in New York. One of the lenders to the landmark Armory Show in 1913, she also contributed to other exhibitions concerned with raising public awareness of modern art. In 1929, she played an essential role in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. After her death, 150 works of art from her collection served as a foundation to the museum and formed the basis of the in-house collection. These included works by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani.
Léonce Rosenberg was an art collector, writer, publisher, and one of the most influential French art dealers of the 20th century. His greatest impact was as a supporter and promoter of the cubists, especially during World War I and in the years immediately after.
Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912); and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).
Prabhakar Barwe was a pioneer of Modern Indian painting. He was active in Mumbai, India from the 1959 until his death in 1995. Influenced by the esoteric tradition of Tantric painting, Barwe along with G. R. Santosh, P. T. Reddy, K.C.S. Paniker, Biren De, Om Prakash, K. V. Haridasan, Prafulla Mohanti and Mahirwan Mamtani was considered part of the modernist movement Neo-Tantra.
DevyaniKrishna was an Indian painter, print-maker and a teacher. She was also involved in research work about Indian toys, folk motifs and batik work. Devyani was regarded as 'India's foremost woman artist' of the day by the art critic Richard Bartholomew for her diverse body of works that she showcased in India and Europe.
Abby Weed Grey (1902–1983) was an art collector and patron for whom New York University's Grey Art Gallery is named. Grey had a particular interest in non-Western modern art and art of the Middle East was particularly well-represented in her collection.
inaugurates the university's relocated and renamed art space; it has moved from Washington Square, where it was known as the Grey Art Gallery