Cold War Modern: Raymond Loewy in the US and the USSR

Juliet Kinchin, Curator of Architecture and Design, in consultation with Alexandra Sankova, Director of the Moscow Design Museum, looks into the Cold War transnational connections in Raymond Loewy’s work. “Scallops St. Tropez” was Raymond Loewy’s contribution to a book of celebrity recipes published in 1958. The book’s editor, Helen Dunn, introduced Loewy, as “perhaps the…

Xu Bing’s “Series of Repetitions”

In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Xu Bing relocated to the countryside for two years. The 1987-8 woodcuts in MoMA’s collection reflect this pastoral atmosphere while anticipating the artist’s later turn to Conceptual art. The set of woodcuts by Xu Bing (Chinese, born 1955) in MoMA’s collection depicts rural…

Environmental Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica

This 1966 essay is renowned for its early use of the term “postmodern.” Unlike later theorizations, the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa deploys the concept to discuss how immersive environments replace distanced visual perception in the artworks of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. New attention to the essay—where the text is interpreted as an alternate theoretical…

Photography and Modern Indian Architecture (1949-1990s)

Ram Rahman (photographer, designer, curator and activist) discusses key examples of modernist architecture in post-colonial India. Using photographic documentation and archival materials, he surveys the landscape of architects, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals working (primarily in New Delhi) between the 1950s and 1990s. This presentation is excerpted from a closed-door session with MoMA’s C-MAP Asia…