The holiday season is upon us and, with a wide array of spectacular art to be seen, we have rounded up six New York City museum highlights not to miss this December 2017. Our picks include a group show of postwar art at Met Breuer, Modigliani drawings at the Jewish Museum, a mid-career survey on Laura Owens at the Whitney, a David Hockney retrospective and a Michelangelo show on view at the Met Fifth Avenue and photography by Stephen Shore at MoMA.
Met Breuer: “Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980”
September 13, 2017 through January 14, 2018
Met Breuer is presenting “Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980,” a retrospective of postwar art showcasing the period as an exercise in calculated lunacy.
With roughly 100 artworks by 62 artists, the exhibition embraces the irrationality among American, Latin American and European artists during the three decades from 1950 to 1980. The artists, reacting to military conflict and social and political unrest, incorporated absurdity, disorder, nonsense, disorientation and repetition in their work. The exhibition is split into four sections—Vertigo, Excess, Nonsense and Twisted—featuring work that is linked through a common distrust of reason and the simulation and stimulation of delirium.
The show includes work by Eva Hesse, Philip Guston, Claes Oldenburg, Hélio Oiticica, Yayoi Kusama, Mira Schendel, Nancy Spero and Paul Thek.
The Met Breuer is located at 945 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10021. www.metmuseum.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
The Jewish Museum: “Modigliani Unmasked”
September 15, 2017 through February 4, 2018
The Jewish Museum is presenting “Modigliani Unmasked,” an exhibition of early drawings by the Italian artist, many of which are being shown for the first time in the United States.
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), who was of Italian-Sephardic descent, arrived in Paris in 1906, when the city was still roiled by anti-Semitism in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and was experiencing an influx of foreign emigrés. The exhibition features the artist’s early drawings, showing his struggle with understanding what portraiture might mean in a modern world of racial complexity. Featuring approximately 150 works from the collection of Dr. Paul Alexandre, his close friend and first patron, the exhibition also includes a selection of Modigliani's paintings, sculptures and other drawings from collections around the world. African, Greek, Egyptian and Khmer artworks will also be on display to show their influence on Modigliani.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 5th Ave & 92nd St, New York, NY 10128. www.thejewishmuseum.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Seated Female Nude," possibly Anna Akhmatova by Amedeo Modigliani, c. 1911. Black crayon on paper. 16⅞ x 10⅜ in. Paul Alexandre Family, courtesy of Richard Nathanson, London. Image provided by Richard Nathanson, photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates, London.
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The Whitney Museum: “Laura Owens”
November 10, 2017 through February 4, 2018
The Whitney is presenting “Laura Owens,” a mid-career survey of the Los Angeles-based artist.
In the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, the exhibition includes approximately 60 paintings dating from the emergence of Laura Owens in the Los Angeles art scene during the mid-1990s to her work of today. On view is the artist’s bold and experimental work challenging traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, and works that reveal her interest in how paintings function in a given room.
The artist’s early canvasses upended painterly abstraction by incorporating goofy personal allusions, doodles and common craft materials. New work includes large-scale paintings that use silkscreen, computer manipulation, digital printing and material exploration.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014. www.whitney.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
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Detail of "Untitled," by Laura Owens, 2014. Ink, silkscreen ink, vinyl paint, acrylic, oil, pastel, paper, wood, solvent transfers, stickers, handmade paper, thread, board, and glue on linen and polyester, five parts: 138 1/8 x 106 ½ x 2 5/8 inches overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Jonathan Sobel 2014.281a-e. © Laura Owens.
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The Met Fifth Avenue: “David Hockney”
November 27, 2017 through February 25, 2018
The Met Fifth Avenue is presenting “David Hockney,” a major retrospective of work by the British artist in honor of his 80th birthday.
The exhibition looks back at Hockney’s most iconic works and key moments in his career from the 1960s to the present, including his early experiments with modernist abstraction, his mid-career experiments with illusion and realism, and his current jewel-toned landscapes. The exhibition reveals how Hockney examines, probes and questions the means of capturing the perceived world of movement, space and time in two dimensions, while also showing his achievements across all media, including painting, drawing, photography and video.
The Met Fifth Avenue is located at 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028. www.metmuseum.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
The Met Fifth Avenue: "Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer"
November 13, 2017 through February 12, 2018
The Met is presenting "Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer," an exhibition including 133 of his drawings, three marble sculptures, his earliest painting and a wood architectural model for a chapel vault.
Also on view are works by artists who were influenced by Michelangelo that relate to the art on view in the current exhibition.
The Met Fifth Avenue is located at 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028. www.metmuseum.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
"Met Announces Night Visits for Hockney & Michelangelo Exhibitions" written by Pat Rogers.
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"Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small sketch for a Seated Figure (verso)" by Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1510-11. Red chalk with small accents of white chalk, soft black chalk or less probably charcoal, 11 3/8 x 8 7/16 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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MoMA: “Stephen Shore”
Through May 28, 2018
The Museum of Modern Art is presenting “Stephen Shore,” the first survey of the artist’s work in New York drawn from his entire career.
The exhibition will encompass the entirety of Stephen Shore’s work, from the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager to his current experimentations with social media. Shore, who is considered one of the most significant photographers of our times by the museum, has explored working with cheap automatic cameras, large-format cameras, digital photography, digital painting and social media, working both in black-and-white and in color. His work, which gained widespread recognition and critical acclaim in the 1970s, revolves around his interest in daily life and the mundane aspects of American popular culture, viewed with serial and systemic approaches, intellectual underpinning, sly humor and a restrained style.
The Museum of Modern Art is located at 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY, 10019. www.moma.org.
Click here for exhibition details.
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"Stephen Shore" installation view at The Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
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