September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012

This is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning, widely considered to be among the most important and prolific artists of the 20th century. The exhibition, which will only be seen at MoMA, presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the artist’s development over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. Bringing together nearly 200 works from public and private collections, the exhibition will occupy the Museum’s entire sixth-floor gallery space, totaling approximately 17,000 square feet.

Two Figures in a Landscape | 1967 Oil on canvas 70 x 6′ 8″  - Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Representing nearly every type of work de Kooning made, in both technique and subject matter, this retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. Among these are the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—among them Pink Angels (1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus in-depth presentations of all his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid 1950s to the artist’s return to figuration in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. Also included is de Kooning’s famous yet largely unseen theatrical backdrop, the 17-foot-square Labyrinth (1946).

Woman II - 1952 Oil on canvas 59 x 43″ (149.9 x 109.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller

Methods & Materials

Organized by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture.

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis.

Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Additional generous funding is provided by Anne and Kenneth Griffin, Sid R. Bass, Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation, Inc., Donald L. Bryant, Jr., The Dubin Family, Glenstone, Robert B. Menschel, Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Gary and Karen Winnick, and Peter G. Peterson.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Sofia Speaking | August 26, 2011, Friday

Another movie with a stunning set is Match Point. Luxury interior design and Artpieces from the beginning to the end makes this Woody Allen movie a must see for art lovers. Besides the suspenseful Hitchcock like plot, I also loved that the Tate Modern, and the Saatchi Gallery were both important settings of the movie.

The setup of the plot is familiar, almost old-fashioned, so it’s entirely appropriate that the style of the movie fall right in line. Much like Altman’s Gosford Park was a throwback to an earlier age of whodunit film, so Match Point recalls the simple, character-driven elegance of fifties noir. Sometimes familiarity breeds disinterest, but here it feels — mostly — like a welcome presence. It’s the enduring quality of a story told well.

That story is something of an extension of pretty much everything Allen has done. He’s a dab hand with the fish-out-of-water scenario, but here he takes it a bit further; the fish has climbed out of the water and is beginning to evolve legs and lungs, and finding that he rather likes a life with gravity. Chris’ ambition is shielded in a remarkably comfortable skin, despite the social disparity between his youth and his manhood. When his ambitions begin to crystallize in marriage, employment, and luxurious living, his mild obsession needs a new direction, and finds it in Nola, the fish wearing stilts to pretend it has legs.

Watching “A Perfect Murder”, for at least the 30th time, I thought it was about time to acknowledge the Perfect Movie Set by having Art pieces as the center piece of the love triangle suspense thriller.

“A Perfect Murder” was released in 1998 starring Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen (also a visual artist). It’s loosely based on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film, “Dial-M for Murder”. Directed by Andrew Davis and Writer Frederick Knott (original play), Patrick Smith Kellu (screenplay), the story is one of the oldest in history. Infidelity, jealousy, greed, and millions of dollars set the tone of a sinister plan for murder. But what has drawn me to the movie so many times is actually the perfect movie set packed with art pieces. Love all of them, especially the ones by Viggo himself.

“The Perfect Murder” production designer Philip Rosenberg and set decorator Debra Schutt

He’s now working on a new show format, actually it’s a 1 day pop-up show where he brings back the flair of the performances he used to do with Helio Otiticica, back in the 70’s and 80’s. It’s called “Parece que foi ontem”, something like ‘It seems like yesterday’.

“When we view Ivald Granato’s paintings, we often get the impression they were made quickly. Some could not have taken more than a day to come to being. That is indeed the truth. They were created in exactly forty years and a day.

Throughout the last forty years, Ivald Granato has been a constant and forceful presence in Brazilian art. During this time he did practically everything an artist can possibly do in the XX and XXI centuries: painting, drawing, sculpture, objects, ceramics, installations, performance, postal art, works in progress, muralism, art books, urban interventions, alternative journalism. It is through such restless and intensely participative activity that one can understand the history of our art simply by observing Granato’s work throughout its course. It is difficult to understand the history of Brazilian art without acknowledging the presence of Ivald Granato.

As an artist, Ivald Granato is gifted with a rare peculiarity. He organizes movement, gesture and energy and his creative process is similar to the result of painting. His ahs a particular method, of energetic impulse and a visceral dive into the construct of the figure. Notice how his figures – the core of his work – convey incessant movement as if the brush had a frenetic life of its own. The figure takes shape without prior drawing, without the need of a single stroke of contour, as it is established by the relationships among the internal pictorial volumes.

Ivald Granato is a gestural artist. Ivald Granato is an artist who immerses himself in the act of creation. For Ivald Granato, the creative gesture is also a body movement, a dance, particular and unique. And paradoxically, Ivald Granato, a member of our vanguard, an icon of the contestation movements and of the pursuit of new languages, is a classicist, given that the manner by which he constructs the figure – through the relationships among internal volumes – is best exemplified by the emblematic work of Paul Cézanne.”

Jacob Klintowitz

BEIJING — A phalanx of Beijing police officers confined the prominent artist and activist Ai Weiwei to his north Beijing home on Friday, a move he suggested came at the behest of unnamed but powerful political figures in Shanghai who feared that he was about to embarrass them.

If so, they were correct.

Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Shanghai on Friday to prepare a Sunday goodbye party at his million-dollar art studio meant to draw attention to its pending destruction. In telephone interviews this week, Mr. Ai said he built the studio only after Shanghai officials, on a campaign to burnish the city’s cultural credentials, implored him to. But in July, they ordered the finished building demolished at the command of anonymous higher-ups.

Mr. Ai’s response was the party, to be attended by eight rock bands and up to a thousand supporters from around China. But on Thursday night, he said, the officers came to his home and asked him not to go to Shanghai.

On Friday, after he said he was going anyway, the officers placed him under house arrest — reluctantly, Mr. Ai said.

“They’re sorry, very sorry,” he said by telephone from his home. “They say they understand me and really agree, but this is really beyond what they can do.”

Mr. Ai said the officers told him that “Shanghai is very nervous” about the party. Like Mr. Ai, however, they did not know precisely who in Shanghai was nervous, or how they managed to arrange his confinement in a city 650 miles away.

Mr. Ai said he did not even know why the unnamed Shanghai officials had ordered his studio demolished, although he had his theories.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The artist Ai Weiwei inside his ‘Sunflower Seeds’ installation piece at the Tate Modern in London in October. The installation comprises 100 million hand-painted seeds made of porcelain.

This is not the first run-in with the authorities for Mr. Ai, an artistic polymath who seems to be alternately tolerated and hectored by higher-ups. An internationally known sculptor, filmmaker, architect and performance artist, he helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, then renounced his role after deciding that Chinese leaders had politicized the Games.

He was allowed to fly to Munich last year to stage a major exhibit that excoriated the government’s handling of children’s deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Yet months before, he was so severely beaten by the police in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, where he had gone to testify in the trial of a fellow activist, that he needed surgery to drain blood from his brain.

Mr. Ai’s latest run-in with Shanghai officials appears to exemplify that love-hate relationship.

As he tells it, he was approached more than two years ago in Beijing by the mayor of one of Shanghai’s districts — a government unit not unlike an American city ward — and beseeched to build a studio on an abandoned plot of farmland. Initially suspicious — “I told my assistant we’re not going to deal with government anymore,” he said; “there’s no honesty there” — he relented when the mayor flew to Beijing for a personal appeal.

Mr. Ai said he worked closely with the district to rehabilitate an abandoned warehouse on the site, spending about $1 million to create a vast working space fronting on a lake with a sawtoothed roof and sides laced with a concrete grid. Other artists began building their own adjacent studios.

Then last July, as work was wrapping up, there came a city order to tear down the warehouse.

“They said only we received the notice,” he said. “The other artists did not. We said, ‘Why?’ and they said, ‘Well, you should know, because of Ai Weiwei’s activities.’ ”

Which activities offended someone is, of course, not known. But Mr. Ai said he suspected he rankled officials in 2008, when his blogging on the case of Yang Jia, who murdered six Shanghai policemen after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, created a national sensation. Mr. Yang was later executed. He said that officials also might resent his documentary this year on Feng Zhenghu, a lawyer and activist who spent more than three months in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Shanghai officials denied him entry to the country.

Whatever the reason, Mr. Ai said, the district official who first recruited Mr. Ai returned to Beijing this week, apologizing profusely and promising to compensate him for the cost of the renovation if he would leave.

“I said, ‘Why? It took so much effort and energy, and you didn’t give us a clear reason,’ ” he said. “But they cannot really answer these questions. So I realize it’s inevitable. They’ll destroy the building.”

At the planned goodbye party for the studio, in lieu of chips and dip, Mr. Ai planned to serve river crabs — a sly reference to the Mandarin word hexie, which means both river crab and harmonious. Among critics of China’s censorship regime, hexie has become a buzzword for opposition to the government’s call to create a harmonious society, free from dissent.

In short order, 800 supporters from across China made plans to attend, and eight bands volunteered to play at the event. “They already call it Woodstock,” he said Wednesday in an interview. “I think it’s nice. It shows a kind of understanding and solidarity.”

On Friday, Mr. Ai said he thought the unnamed Shanghai powers were taken aback by the attention to the demolition and the party and reacted in typical fashion. And by doing so, they created a piece of performance art that called more attention to the embarrassment they were seeking to suppress.

“They put you under house arrest, or they make you disappear,” he said. “That’s all they can do. There’s no facing the issue and discussing it; it’s all a very simple treatment.

“Every dirty job has to be done by the police. Then you become a police state, because they have to deal with every problem.

“I think they hate me,” he said. “But I never imagined they would destroy an entire building.”