It’s not often that you leave a major museum exhibition with strains of Schoenberg or Webern or Debussy running through your head. It is even less often that you can listen to these and other compositions created around the same time both at the show and on a playlist, which is available on Q2, WQXR’s online contemporary classical station.
But when “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925” opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Dec. 23, paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films and photographs will be only part of the story. Music, poetry and dance will play a role, too. In addition to illustrating the radical art produced during those 15 years, the show will conclude with what curators there call a “sound chamber,” an enclosed space titled “Reinventing Music, 1910-1925,” where visitors can hear innovative music from those years.
This is the first collaboration between MoMA and WQXR. Graham Parker, WQXR’s vice president and general manager, calls the pairing perfect, especially for “Inventing Abstraction,” because the years represented were “such a critical moment.”
When Mr. Parker joined the radio station in August 2010, he learned that listeners were so interested in visual art that “we started talking with MoMA about working together around the time of their de Kooning exhibition, but that didn’t work.” For “Inventing Abstraction,” WQXR teamed up with Leah Dickerman, a MoMA curator, to conceive the show’s musical component.
“It was a very synergistic moment in time,” Mr. Parker said of the music. “On our Web site there will be a fuller playlist, everything from small pieces to large orchestral works.”
Dance is also part of the mix. The last section of the exhibition will incorporate film of performances by the pioneering dancers and choreographers Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman.
“If you go artist by artist in the show, put their names on an Excel spread sheet and ask who knew who, you will see how richly connected the field is,” said Ms. Dickerman, who organized “Inventing Abstraction” with Masha Chlenova, a curatorial assistant at MoMA. A giant map at the show’s entrance illustrates the connections among all the players — painters, sculptors, poets, composers, musicians, choreographers and dancers — sort of like the art world’s own social network well before it was technological reality.
Ms. Dickerman explains her point further by telling a story that was recorded in a memoir by the dancer Gabrielle Buffet, the painter Francis Picabia’s wife.
“Picabia says he invented abstraction in 1912,” Ms. Dickerman said. She went on to explain that in July of that year he took his car and drove from Paris to England with Debussy and Apollinaire. They stopped along the way in a cafe and had too much to drink, and together discussed what they called pure painting. “Put an artist, poet and composer in a car and what do you get?,” Ms. Dickerman continued. “Abstraction.”
The show, on view through April 15, is to begin with Picasso’s “Woman With a Mandolin,” created in 1910 around the time other artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and Frantisek Kupka, were first showing their radical abstract paintings. The walls will also be filled with work by artists like Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, and photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.
On a recent afternoon at MoMA, as workers built the bones of the exhibition, Ms. Dickerman gave a tour of the space, explaining how the show would be laid out and how art would be juxtaposed with music and poetry. Rather than piping music into the galleries, it will be contained within “sound columns,” listening areas dotted throughout the show. (These are in addition to the “sound chamber.”) “Visitors will be able to look at a Kandinsky and hear Debussy at the same time,” Ms. Dickerman said.
KOONS SHIFTS SITES
It seems to be something of a trend that big-name artists no longer have allegiances to one gallery; rather, like free agents, they show their work wherever they please and often with fiercely competitive dealers. So news that Jeff Koons is planning a big show at David Zwirner and not Gagosian or Sonnabend — where he has had longtime associations and exhibitions — has left some wondering what’s going on.
“Jeff reached out to us,” Mr. Zwirner said in a telephone interview. “He called me a while ago and said he wanted to do a show with us.” That show is scheduled for May 2013 at Mr. Zwirner’s West 19th Street space. It will feature new paintings and sculptures. Mr. Koons did not return phone calls. At Art Basel Miami Beach, the Gagosian Gallery is showing three of Mr. Koons’s important 1980s sculptures as well as a recent painting by him. Rebecca Sternthal, a director of Gagosian who works with Mr. Koons, said: “The gallery still represents Jeff Koons. He works closely with us and with Sonnabend. In the past he has had shows in different galleries but we are still actively working with him and with his studio. This month we will be showing a coloring-book sculpture and one of his new gorilla sculptures in our L.A. gallery.”
NEW ROLE AT WHITNEY
The Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf has received considerable attention for the succession of successful shows he has organized there. These include “Glenn Ligon: America,” a traveling midcareer retrospective that opened at the Whitney last year; “Wade Guyton OS,” on view through Jan. 13; and most recently, “Sinister Pop,” a show on view through March 31 that he organized with the museum’s chief curator, Donna De Salvo.
Now Mr. Rothkopf will wear two hats — becoming the Whitney’s associate director of programs. In this new position Mr. Rothkopf will concentrate on programming as the museum prepares to move in 2015 from its Madison Avenue home to a new building in the meatpacking district. He will still organize exhibitions, and is currently working on a major Jeff Koons retrospective. Set to open in June 2014, it would be the last show in the Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue before the museum moves downtown.
