Free Republic

At a press conference on the eve of Mondrian. Evolution, a Piet Mondrian exhibition at Germany’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20 museum, curator Susanne Meyer-Büser announced that New York City 1 (1941) has been displayed upside down since it was first seen in public, German publication Monopol reported Thursday. The first clue that the painting, an adhesive tape version of the similarly named New York (which hangs right-side up in Paris at the Centre Pompidou), was hung incorrectly came from a photograph of the artist’s studio in 1944, shortly after he passed away, the curator said at the press conference. In the...

A man who was denied entry to the Museum of Modern Art because his membership had been revoked became enraged, jumped over a desk and stabbed a woman and a man who work at the Midtown institution Saturday afternoon, police said. The attack, which unfolded shortly after 4 p.m., sent patrons running for the exits. Both victims were taken to Bellevue Hospital, and their injuries were not life-threatening, sources said. The suspect recently had his membership revoked from the Museum of Modern Art, according to authorities. ------- His membership was nixed as a result of two separate incidents involving disorderly...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio offered free access to some of his city’s famed cultural destinations on Thursday in a bid to coax illegal immigrants to join an identification card program aimed at helping them do ordinary things like sign a rental lease. Among the perks offered by the Democratic mayor were free or reduced-price admission to places like the Bronx Zoo, New York City Ballet, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall for all of next year. New York is joining other U.S. cities with large immigrant populations including Los Angeles and New Haven, Connecticut, with municipal ID...

NEW YORK - Some visitors to a new exhibit at New York City's Museum of Modern Art are being asked to leave because they are touching nude performers. The performers featured in Marina Abramovic's new exhibition have complained of being pushed, prodded and poked by some patrons. The museum acknowledges that it has had problems with some visitors touching the live art. It is declining to talk about specific cases, but says visitors caught doing it are escorted out. The exhibition opened March 14 and presents a view of Abramovic's career over four decades. It includes nude performers standing in...

Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesMuseum of Modern Art The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building, completing the museum’s expansion, opened Tuesday. Shown is the staircase at the end of the lobby. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesThe Museum of Modern Art’s garden, with the new building on the left and the reclad 1964 building by Philip Johnson on the right. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times A new meeting room overlooks St. Thomas Episcopal Church. The new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman education building at the Museum of Modern Art is unlikely to appease those who...

We publish an exclusive account of the memoirs of the late William S. Rubin, director of the paintings and sculpture department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for 15 years William S. Rubin, the eminent longtime curator of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), died, aged 78, at his weekend home on 22 January and has now been buried in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives. He had spent more than two decades in MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture, which he joined as curator in 1967 and of which he became director in 1973, a post he...

New York's famed Museum of Modern Art, the greatest such museum in the world, has just reopened after a 3-year hiatus in which it nearly doubled in size. It is immensely revealing. For a start, the mere fact of who was picked to design it tells a lot. The architect is the Japanese Yoshio Taniguchi, chosen over a field of prominent Western modernists and post-modernists. Japan has never been a hotbed of modern art, and the collection contains very little Japanese art. But Japan was, of course, a hotbed of architectural minimalism centuries before Mies Van Der Rohe and Le...