A glance at The Museum of Modern Art shows

Artistic dismembering or reassembling of the body

Artists from André Masson and Joan Miró to Louise Bourgeois and Robert Gober to Mark Manders and Nicola Tyson have distorted and disoriented many of the familiar of referents, playing out personal, cultural, or social anxieties and desires on unwitting anatomies.  If art history reveals an unending impulse to render the human figure as a symbol of potential perfection and a system of primary organization, these works show that artists have just as persistently been driven to disfigure the body.

In a collaborative, chance-based drawing game known as the exquisite corpse, several Surrealist artists subjected the human body to distortions and juxtapositions that resulted in fantastic composite figures. A group exhibition, entitled ‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’, considers how this and related practices - in which the body is dismembered or reassembled, swollen or multiplied, propped with prosthetics or fused with nature and the machine - have recurred in art throughout the 20th century and to the present day.

Shaping Modernity (1880–1980)

Recent acquisitions are featured in a reinstallation of highlights from the design collection covering a century of dramatic aesthetic and technological innovation—from the late 19th to late 20th centuries. Diverse types of modern design representing various geographic origins and styles are organized around period-specific themes: The International New Art 1880–1918; Metal and Glass 1920s–1950s; and Out of the Box: Italy 1960s–1980s.

Diego Rivera’s mystical murals

This exhibition brings together key works made for Diego Rivera’s 1931 exhibition, presenting them at MoMA for the first time in nearly 80 years. Along with mural panels, the show includes full-scale drawings, smaller working drawings, archival materials related to the commission and production of these works, and designs for Rivera’s famous Rockefeller Center mural, which he also produced while he was working at the Museum.

Focused specifically on works created during the artist’s stay in New York, it draws a succinct portrait of Rivera as a highly cosmopolitan figure who moved between Russia, Mexico, and the United States, and will offer a fresh look at the intersection of art making and radical politics in the 1930s.