Men Without Women | |
---|---|
Artist | Stuart Davis |
Year | 1932 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Location | MoMA on loan to Radio City Music Hall, New York City |
Men Without Women is a 1932 mural by the American painter Stuart Davis executed in what the critic Hilton Kramer termed a "modified Cubist style". The work was commissioned for the Art Deco-style Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center in New York City, where it hangs in the downstairs men's lounge. [1] [2] [3] It was named by the Rockefeller Center art committee after Ernest Hemingway's second short story collection of the same name, which had been first published in the same year. [4] [5]
Originally conceived for a show curated by Lincoln Kirstein at the Museum of Modern Art named "Murals by American Painters and Photographers", the Radio City Music Hall mural was an outgrowth of the exhibition wherein Davis was one of four artists commissioned from the survey to create a new work for Rockefeller Center, the new "skyscraper city within a city" (the other three having been Henry Billings, Louis Bouche, and Henry Varnum Poor).
In 1975 it was given to the Museum of Modern Art as a gift. [6] [7] This was an arrangement which included the restoration of the work after decades of casual damage to it, including countless wafts of cigarette and cigar smoke that had stained the canvas. [8] The work was then loaned back to the music hall in 1999 in conjunction with the restoration of the arts facility. [3]
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.
Rockefeller Center is a large complex consisting of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres (89,000 m2) between 48th Street and 51st Street in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. The 14 original Art Deco buildings, commissioned by the Rockefeller family, span the area between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue, split by a large sunken square and a private street called Rockefeller Plaza. Later additions include 75 Rockefeller Plaza across 51st Street at the north end of Rockefeller Plaza, and four International Style buildings on the west side of Sixth Avenue.
Radio City Music Hall is an entertainment venue and theater at 1260 Avenue of the Americas, within Rockefeller Center, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Nicknamed "The Showplace of the Nation", it is the headquarters for the Rockettes. Radio City Music Hall was designed by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey in the Art Deco style.
30 Rockefeller Plaza is a skyscraper that forms the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, United States. Completed in 1933, the 66-story, 850 ft (260 m) building was designed in the Art Deco style by Raymond Hood, Rockefeller Center's lead architect. 30 Rockefeller Plaza was known for its main tenant, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), from its opening in 1933 until 1988 and then for General Electric until 2015, when it was renamed for its current owner, Comcast. The building also houses the headquarters and New York studios of television network NBC; the headquarters is sometimes called 30 Rock, a nickname that inspired an NBC sitcom of the same name. The tallest structure in Rockefeller Center, the building is the 28th tallest in New York City and the 65th tallest in the United States, and was the third tallest building in the world when it opened.
Edward Stuart Davis was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz-influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures in the early years of the 20th century. With the belief that his work could influence the sociopolitical environment of America, Davis' political message was apparent in all of his pieces from the most abstract to the clearest. Contrary to most modernist artists, Davis was aware of his political objectives and allegiances and did not waver in loyalty via artwork during the course of his career. By the 1930s, Davis was already a famous American painter, but that did not save him from feeling the negative effects of the Great Depression, which led to his being one of the first artists to apply for the Federal Art Project. Under the project, Davis created some seemingly Marxist works; however, he was too independent to fully support Marxist ideals and philosophies.
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Man at the Crossroads (1933) was a fresco by Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Originally slated to be installed in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City, the fresco showed aspects of contemporary social and scientific culture. As originally installed, it was a three-paneled artwork. A central panel, depicting a worker controlling machinery, flanked by two other panels, The Frontier of Ethical Evolution and The Frontier of Material Development, which respectively represented socialism and capitalism.
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Henry Varnum Poor was an American architect, painter, sculptor, muralist, and potter. He was a grandnephew of the Henry Varnum Poor who was a founder of the predecessor firm to Standard & Poor's.
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Henry Billings was an American artist. He was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and art instructor active in New York City. He was a grandson of John Shaw Billings, a surgeon and the first director of the New York Public Library.
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