Three shows currently on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art must not be missed, and all are closing soon. So this week The Bare Square team is headed to MoMA to see Paula Hayes: Nocturne of the Limax maximus, Abstract Expressionist New York, and On to Pop before they all come down this month.

Paula Hayes. Installation view of Nocturne of the Limax maximus (Slug at left. Egg at right) at The Museum of Modern Art. 2010. Installation: cast acrylic, hand-blown glass, cnc-milled topographical wall and ceiling attachment, full-spectrum lighting, and tropical planting. Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery. © Paula Hayes. Photo: Jason Mandella

Since the 1990s, New York–based artist and landscape designer Paula Hayes (b. 1958) has produced botanical sculptures—organically shaped vessels made from blown glass, silicone, or acrylic and filled with a rich variety of plant life—that expand upon the classic terrarium, both through their imaginative containers and the microcosmic universes within. Hayes has conceived an installation for the MoMA’s lobby that includes a fifteen-foot-long, wall-mounted horizontal sculpture for the west wall, and a free-standing, egg-shaped, floor-to-ceiling structure nearby. Paula Hayes: Nocturne of the Limax maximus comes down Monday, April 18.

Jackson Pollock. Number 1A, 1948.1948. Oil and enamel paint on canvas. © 2010 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Drawn entirely from the MoMA’s  holdings, Abstract Expressionist New York underscores the achievements of a generation that catapulted New York City to the center of the international art world during the 1950s, and left as its legacy some of the twentieth century’s greatest masterpieces. Abstract Expressionist paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, films, and archival materials combine to form The Big Picture, devoting a full floor of the MoMA to a single theme for the first time in the museum’s history. (We’ll see if they include any works by Hedda Sterne, who passed away last week. Sterne was the last of The Irascibles, a group of New York artists, primarily Abstract Expressionists, who protested the MoMA in 1950. Check out James’ article here.)

Andy Warhol. Gold Marilyn Monroe. 1962. Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2010 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

On MoMA’s fourth floor, On to Pop features familiar objects and images we encounter in our daily lives–a flag, stockings, comics, and movie stars–in works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and others. Collectively these artists came to define American Pop art, a very different kind of “American-type” panting, which by the late 1960s had eclipsed Abstract Expressionism’s dominance on the New York scene.

Both Abstract Expressionist New York and On to Pop run until Monday April 25th.

Let’s all go to the MoMA! See you there!

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-Jen Wallace

Paula Hayes: Nocturne of the Limax maximus, Abstract Expressionist New York, and On To Pop
Museum of Modern Art
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New York, NY

Hedda Sterne, artist, 1910-2011

Yesterday, the New York Times published an obituary for Hedda Sterne, an artist associated with the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. She passed on Friday. She was 100 years old.

(So, imagine if on your 64th birthday, you could sing The Beatles’ “When I’m 64″ comfortable in the knowledge that you had another third of your life, a full 36 years, to go? Just saying.)

In the photograph of artists shown below, which included art notables like Wilhelm de Koonig, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, Sterne became known as one of The Irascibles, a group of artists who criticized the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 for being “against advanced art” according to the Times.

People speculate about the reasons for an artist’s ascension to the heights of financial success and professional renown, and about the reasons for an artist’s failure to reach such heights. Although Sterne’s artwork enjoyed numerous public exhibitions and inclusions in significant collections, Sterne has no feature film like 2000′s Pollock featuring Ed Harris. Sterne has no Broadway play like Rothko’s “Red”. Sterne does have eulogists explaining her  inability to reach the fame and renown of Rothko and Pollock, appreciating her 70 years of art creation, and recounting this artist’s accomplishments in a kind of apology.

"The Irascibles" 1950 Credit: LIFE magazine

The Romanian-born Sterne, born Hedwig Lindenberg, barely escaped Europe to New York before the Holocaust in 1939. She married cartoonist and fellow Romanian Saul Steinberg in 1944. They separated in 1960 with no children. She never remarried.

Despite the notoriety gained following the LIFE magazine photograph, she eventually chose a self-imposed reclusiveness, living along on the Upper East Side, continuing to create, show, and sell work, seeing few other than her close friends, art dealers, and the occasional visitor.

She is survived by a swath of questions. Was she marginalized because she was a woman artist in a man’s world? Was she less of an artist because of her wide-ranging exploration of style and genre? Did she fail to earn valuations in the millions simply because she failed to die young?

The Bare Square does not know.

Instead, we offer this retrospective of her work, and a hope that the current generation of artists, and the next, be lucky enough to have a fraction of her longevity, her passion, her dedication, and her solace.

- James Wallace

Self-portrait, 1938

New York, NY No. X, 1948

Machine 5, 1950

Lettuce, 1967

Diary, 1976

Untitled, 1983

Untitled, pencil and pastel on paper, 2004