Ann Temkin

In 1955 MoMA became the first US museum to acquire one of Monet's paintings of his garden in Giverny. This volume by Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, recounts the history of Monet's Water Lilies paintings at the Museum and underscores their resonance with the art of the last half-century.

In June 2012, Jasper Johns encountered a photograph of the painter Lucian Freud reproduced in a Christie’s auction catalogue. Inspired not only by the photographic image, but also by the physical qualities of the object itself, Johns took this motif through a succession of cross-medium permutations. He also incorporated into his art the text of a rubber stamp he had made several years ago, to allow him to efficiently decline the myriad requests and invitations that come his way: ‘Regrets/Jasper Johns’. But the stamp’s text also calls to mind the more familiar connotations of regret, such as loss, disappointment, and remorse, invoking an enigmatic sense of melancholy. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of this recent series of paintings, drawings and prints, created over the last year and a half through an intricate combination of techniques, this publication presents each of the sixteen new works in full colour. An essay by Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, MoMA, examine the importance of process and experimentation, the cycle of dead ends and fresh starts, and the incessant interplay of materials, meaning, and representation so characteristic of Johns’s career over the last sixty years.

During a career spanning half a century, Ileana Sonnabend helped shape the course of postwar art in Europe and America. Both a gallerist and a noted collector, Sonnabend promoted some of the most significant art movements of her time. Artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, A. R. Penck, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol worked with Sonnabend, whose support for difficult avant-garde work was legendary. Published in conjunction with an exhibition that pays tribute to Sonnabend in honour of the Sonnabend family’s gift of Robert Rauschenberg’s well-known Combine Canyon (1959) to The Museum of Modern Art in 2012, Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New features approximately fifty works presented in Sonnabend’s eponymous galleries in Paris and New York from 1962 through the late 1980s. A biographical essay by Leslie Camhi, artists’ recollections of working with Sonnabend, and individual entries on the selected works provide further reflection on Sonnabend’s taste and lasting influence.

Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA’s collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist’s oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and arthistorical context.

More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in The NewYorker in 1946, first used the term‘Abstract Expressionism’ to describe the richly coloured canvases of Hans Hofmann. The name stuck, and over the years it has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman,Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. The achievements of this generation, which put NewYork City on the map as the centre of the international art world, are some of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces. Beginning in mid-1940s, under the aegis of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., works by then little-known American artists – including Pollock, de Kooning, Smith, Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb – began to enter the Museum’s collection. These ambitious acquisition initiatives continued throughout the second half of the last century and produced a collection of Abstract Expressionist art with a breadth and depth unrivalled by any museum in the world.With an essay by Ann Temkin, Abstract Expressionism at The Museum of Modern Art celebrates the Museum’s holdings from this epochal moment in the history of art and the institution like no other book.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) devoted the last 25 years of his career to paintings of the Japanese-style pond and gardens of his house in Giverny, France. Two of these luminous panels "Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond", a mural-sized triptych, and "Water Lilies", a single canvas are among the most well-known and beloved works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. These late works were for many years less appreciated than Monets classic Impressionist works, being considered unstructured, even unfinished, but with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, Monet became an extraordinarily relevant predecessor. In 1955 MoMA became the first American museum to acquire one of Monets large-scale water lily compositions. In 1958, when a fire destroyed this and another water lily painting, the publics widespread expression of loss led to the acquisition of the works currently in the collection. This lively volume recounts the history of Monet's water lilies at the Museum and, through interviews with contemporary artists, underscores the paintings resonance with the art and artists of the last half-century.

This visually exciting book presents a selection of signature works by European and American artists of the postwar generations, drawn from the UBS Art Collection, one of the richest and most varied holdings of international contemporary art in the United States. This unique publication accompanies an exhibition of seventy-four of these outstanding works of art, including forty-four works that were a gift to The Museum of Modern Art in 2002. The works reproduced here include paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and mixed-media works by a wide and varied array of important artists, including Joseph Beuys, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Rothenburg, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and others. In addition, Ann Temkin has interviewed eleven of these artists for the book, producing illuminating conversations about how they work, the origins of their ideas and other topics. The artists interviewed include Vija Celmins, Damien Hirst, Susan Rothenburg, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Lorna Simpson and others. Finally, the book also contains an interview with Donald B. Marron, a former President of MoMA and the person who as Chairman of UBS began the collection.