iSolomon R. Guggenheim MuseumUpper East Side
Collection in Focus: Modern European Currents
Early 20th-century European avant-garde painting drawn from the collection, with works by Kandinsky, Goncharova, Franz Marc and others who reimagined painting for a rapidly changing world.
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Franz Marc's Yellow Cow (1911) has a full udder, and the wall label tells you why: Marc held that yellow was "the female principle, gentle, gay, and sensual." His White Bull, from the same year, is here too.
This is one gallery of the museum's own collection, mostly painted between 1910 and 1918 by artists from the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. You can follow Kandinsky from four landscapes of the Bavarian village of Murnau to Painting with White Border (1913), where his native Moscow is still recognisable but most of the canvas has gone abstract. Goncharova, Popova, Malevich and Schiele cover the more radical turns. The watercolors rotate because they are too fragile to stay out, so what's on paper depends on when you go.
In the Wall Street Journal, Judith H. Dobrzynski called it "enlightening". It's small, nearly twenty paintings and watercolors by the museum's count, and included in general admission ($30, under-12s free, pay what you wish Tuesdays and Sundays 4 to 5:30pm).
Look for
Franz Marc's Yellow Cow
A yellow cow with a full udder, painted to Marc's idea that yellow is "the female principle, gentle, gay, and sensual", as the wall label explains.
Kandinsky's Painting with White Border
Look for signs of Moscow, which Kandinsky had just revisited in 1913, half-dissolved into the abstract colour that fills most of the canvas.
Kandinsky's Murnau landscapes
Four views of the Bavarian village, in colours as intense as Gabriele Münter's but with freer, less blocky shapes.
Marc's White Bull
A white bull from 1911, painted when Marc and the Blue Rider artists wanted art to express the spirituality of nature and animals.
Campendonk's Farmer with Horse and Wagon
A farmer with his horse and wagon, painted in 1918 and never shown since it entered the collection in 1948.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want a big show: it's one gallery of nearly twenty paintings and watercolors.
With kids
Children under 12 get in free.
Also at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
On now nearby
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Image credits
8
- Collection in Focus: Modern European CurrentsPhoto: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- The SubstituteCourtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
- There Are No Words: Si Lewen's ParadeCourtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumAjay Suresh, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumEpicgenius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Neue Galerie New YorkFrancesca.hyanna19 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- The Metropolitan Museum of ArtHugo Schneider, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
- American Museum of Natural HistoryIngfbruno, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0