MOMA – New York

MOMA in New York is my second most favourite gallery – second to the Musée d’Orsay.  MOMA stands for the Museum of Modern Art. 

It houses over 150,000 artworks – so it is clearly impossible to take it all in.  There are some massive Monet Water Lilies – which have to be seen in person – you just don’t get the same impression in a small reproduction.  Some of the other most striking art from my point of view is:

Joan Miro - Hirondelle Amour

Picasso - Girl Before a Mirror

Matisse - La Danse

Van Gogh - Starry Night



Jasper Johns - Flag

Kandinsky - Painting No 200

Paul Klee - Two Tents

Mondrian - A Composition

It also has a great store where you can buy a huge range of prints and modernistic gadgets like a super iPad stand.  They do have an online site although it seemed a bit unstable when I tried it recently.

Picasso exhibition – Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

This exhibition was a great opportunity to see a lot of works from the Musee National Picasso Paris a lot closer to home.  The museum in Paris is under renovation and this meant that the exhibition was able to go to Sydney for several months.  Unfortunately it ends on the 25^th March.

It then moves to Toronto, Canada from 28 April to 23 August.  And won’t be back on show in Paris until mid 2013.

The exhibition was arranged by time.  It was interesting to see his early works, then his adoption of very abstract modernist forms, then his later more figurative (relatively speaking) stuff.

My favourites were:

Torso – done at age 12

Olga – his first wife, a ballerina

The bathers – 1918

The Reader – his mistress Marie Therese with whom he had a daughter

The acrobat 1930 – weird but wonderful

Portrait of Dora Maar.  Another mistress who he lived with for 10 years and had 2 children.

Jacqueline – who became his second (and last wife) – don’t you love the long neck.  He married her when he was 70.