Discovering Gems in the Museum of Modern Art

 The last time I was in the city, I headed to the Museum of Modern Art to see the current Georgia O'Keeffe Exhibition (until August 12, 2023), an exhibit that many friends have praised.  Unfortunately, the rooms were packed.  The crowd was mostly women between the ages of 50 and 75 in long animated conversations in front of the works.  Not a good way to see art.  

​     So, I left the O'Keeffe room and set off to find an exhibit dedicated to "The Encounter:  Barbara Chase-Riboud and Alberto Giacometti."    On my journey, I found myself in a very very small room upstairs with the collage work of Anne Ryan, an artist of whom I had never heard.  I was instantly smitten.

Anne Ryan (1889-1954) was a poet, painter, printmaker, and collage artist, thought of  as an American Abstract Expressionist in the New York school.  Her turn to collage is described as an epiphany in her late 50s.  Her Road to Damascus moment came as she viewed the collages of Kurt Schwitters, in an exhibition at a New York City gallery.   She went home after the show and immediately set to making collages and didn't stop until her death.  I understand her reaction to Kurt Schwitters.  It happens to me every time I see one of his collages.  It happened to me as I looked at her work.  

      Anne Ryan's collages are typically very small, 4 inches by 6 inches, 6 inches by 8 inches.  She creates them out of handmade papers, textile scraps, and found objects; using mostly but not exclusively subtle pastel tones.   Her works are said to dissolve the boundary between visual artmaking and writing (she was committed to poetry through her life).  Deborah Solomon, the art critic wrote that in Schwitter's work, Ryan "recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets --- discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space."   So inspired, she created art that is distinctively hers and a new kind of poetry that is a delight for the viewer.

     I did go on to find "The Encounter:  Barbara Chase-Riboud and Alberto Giacometti."  Here they are: 

     With the work of both expatriate sculptors who met in Paris, I found myself in front of the monumental --- especially in the case of Barbara Chase-Riboud.    MOMA succeeds in showing the link between the artists who both turned to the past to say something relevant for the present and offer sculpture that is very much on the move.  I enjoyed being with their work in a great space, but was also eager to get home and try my hand at a very small collage.  More on that effort later, I hope.