Architecture is seldom the stuff of museum exhibitions. Unless displayed in diminished form as models or drawings, architectural creations are usually viewed only from sidewalks or the windows of jetliners.
This month, however, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Columbus, Ohio, Wexner Center for the Arts are staging “Fabrications,” a joint exhibition of actual standing architecture, or as MOMA puts it: “the reality of the built structures themselves.”
Adhering to a theme of “the poetry of construction and the process of making,” each museum is showing four full-scale works of diverse form and inspiration.
At MOMA (11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400) through April 28, you’ll find a minimalist resting place or shelter with two walls made of woven steel and a reflective canopy, and another steel and glass canopy that houses rubble from an adjoining old townhouse.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (151 3rd St., 415-357-4000) is showing through April 28 what it calls “Bodybuildings,” constructions that represent or involve the body in action, repose, a somatic state and equipoise–revealing, the museum claims, “hidden truths.”
Through April 12 the Wexner Center in Columbus (1871 N. High St., 614-292-3535) contributes a ramp made from an old school bus, a bleacher from which to view other art objects, a completely self-sufficient wilderness cabin and a retreat for reading and reflection.
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Leger’s humanlike machines at MOMA
New York MOMA has two other hot shows up this spring. Through May 26, it’s featuring “Chuck Close,” with some 90 paintings and other works by the highly contemporary portraitist noted for the rather alarming intimacy he establishes between viewer and subject. Employing a nearly photographic painterly technique, he exposes not only the unvarnished reality of his subjects’ exteriors, but seems to lay out their inner selves for all to see as well.
Through May 12, MOMA is showing a major retrospective exhibition of the great French modernist painter Fernand Leger (1881-1955). A contemporary of Picasso, Leger combined abstraction and figurative painting in wonderfully colorful and evocative ways. Leger was a thoroughly modern man who loved machines. If his humans seem a little mechanical, his machines are very human.
Spanish war posters scream of conflict
The Spanish Civil War stood out among 20th Century military conflicts for the passion and viciousness of its combatants and the stridency and verve of its propaganda. A selection of more than 40 often screaming “Posters from the Spanish Civil War” are on view through March 28 at New York’s Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery (Broadway at 116th St. 212-854-2877).
Toying with Warhol
Much of Andy Warhol’s weirdness stemmed from his childlike approach to life and art, as is obvious in “Paintings for Children,” an exhibition of the artist’s work–and toys–running Wednesday to May 31 at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (117 Sandusky St., 412-237-8300). The show includes 20 of his famous “Toy” paintings on “Fish” wallpaper that used his own personal tin monkeys, parrots, fish, dogs, pandas and circus clowns for models and inspiration.
Dali’s object illusions
Salvador Dali was just as weird as Warhol–and often just as cleverly commercial. The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. (1000 3rd St.South, 813-823-3767) has up through April 19 a show of the artist’s singular jewelry, glassware and furniture designs, as well as magazine illustrations for which he was handsomely paid in his glory days. The highlight is his Schiaparelli “Tear-Illusion Dress and Head Scarf” from the 1930s–an evening gown that’s been painted to appear torn to shreds, though it really isn’t.
Surreal views
Dali is one of 23 artists whose Surrealist prints are on view at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art in Chestnut Hill, Mass. (140 Commonwealth Ave., 617-552-8100) in a new show through May 17 called “Visionary States.” Among the others represented in this mesmerizing, 120-piece collection are Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Rene Magritte, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and the irrepressible American expatriate Man Ray.
Papal treasures
The deepest meanings of the Easter season, as well as some of the more excessive agrandizements of organized religion, come to the fore in “Vatican Treasures: Early Christian, Renaissance and Baroque Art from the Papal Collections,” a stunningly sumptuous exhibition on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art (11150 East Blvd., 216-421-7340) through April 12.
Ranging from the 6th through 18th Centuries, these 39 masterpieces of spiritual conspicuous consumption include the gem-encrusted, 1,400-year-old Cross of Justin II, a gift from the Byzantine emperor on loan from the Vatican’s Sancta Sanctorum, and Caravaggio’s 10-foot high painting, “The Entombment of Christ.”
Israel at 50
One of the major cultural events in the world this year is the Israeli Festival, better known as “Art of the State, Israel at 50,” running all through March until April 3 at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Similar in scope and variety to the German and Australian Festivals held at the Kennedy Center a few years ago, though far more somber in tone in many of its aspects, the Israel extravaganza will include theater, music, dance, literature readings, visual art and film.
Highly recommended are the American premiere presentations of “The City,” a theatrical rendering by Israel’s famed Gesher Street Theatre of Isaac Babel’s short story portraits of Jewish Odessa during Russia’s revolutionary period (March 25 through 28); and (April 1 through 3) “Aide Memoire,” a program of dances exploring the effects of the Holocaust on humanity by Israel’s Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, which was founded by Holocaust survivor Yehudit Arnon.
Sent to a concentration camp as a teenager, Yehudit was ordered to dance by her Nazi captors but refused. Punished by being made to stand motionless in the snow for hours, she dreamed of freedom and the liberty to dance of her own free will.
For information on the Israeli Festival, call 202-467-4600. For group ticket sales, 202-416-8400. Some of the performances are free.
Americans at play
The 22nd Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays runs through April 4 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (316 W. Main St., 502-584-1265).
The bill this year includes “Ti Jean Blues,” by JoAnne Akalaitis, an avant garde dramatization of the writings of Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac; “Mr. Bundy,” Jane Martin’s new play about a child molester moving into a neighborhood; and Stuart Spencer’s “Resident Alien,” a comedy about a man who can persuade no one that his 12-year-old son Billy actually was beamed up into a spacecraft.
