Thursday, March 21, 2013

Bushwick Galleries Update

By Charles Kessler

Bushwick Art Galleries, Restaurants and Bars
This map, and detailed information to go with it, can be downloaded HERE and on the right sidebar.
Not one Bushwick gallery closed since my last update, two changed their names (Bogart Salon became ArtHelix, and Weeknights became Associated), and five new galleries opened — making an amazing total of forty-three galleries now. Here is a brief description of each of the new Bushwick galleries:

2 St. Nicholas Ave., #25 (at Jefferson), Brooklyn, NY 11237
(917) 623-8374 or (917) 805-7710 (Sometimes you need to call to be let in.)
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.
Auxiliary Projects installation view of Michelle Forsyth's  Letters to Kevin (courtesy of Auxiliary Projects via michelleforsyth.com).
Auxiliary Projects is a very small space run by two smart and talented artists, Jennifer Dalton & Jennifer McCoy. The gallery has a unique and admirable focus. They only do solo shows of artists that have been working for a long time but who are under-represented. And they are committed to showing some work in every exhibition that sells for under $300. They say that they want to “facilitate the production and distribution of art that can be owned by the non-wealthy, a kind of entry point into the art world.”

17-17 Troutman #258, Queens, NY 11385 (The numbers on Troutman change in Queens, the gallery isn’t as far away as the address suggests.)
(347) 460-7360 
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.
Harbor is another of Bushwick’s many artist-run galleries dedicated to exhibiting and supporting emerging artists. They are in the same building with three other galleries: Regina Rex, Parallel and Bull and Ram. 

92 St. Nicholas Ave, Brooklyn NY 11237 
(718) 578-3281
Hours: Friday, 1 — 5 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.
Email Mary Judge at: info@schemaprojects.com
View of the storefront of Schema Projects
Scheme is dedicated exclusively to all forms of work on paper — the first gallery in Bushwick to do so. They share a storefront space with Blonde Art Books.

TSA (Tiger Strikes Asteroid)
44 Stewart Ave, #49, Brooklyn NY 11237 (above Flushing, near Wyckoff)
Phone: (347) 746-8041
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.
Artist members of TSA
TSA has ten members, all artists, and is related to Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia. Their focus is on emerging artists.

1109 Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11221 
Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12 – 6 pm, and by appointment.
They don’t have a phone number or email address listed — but they have a good Tumblr blog.
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Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Chelsea from 21st Street through 25th Street


By Charles Kessler

Maybe it’s to take advantage of all the collectors who came into New York for the art fairs, but there’s an exceptional amount of good shows to be seen in these five blocks. Foremost among them is
Helen Frankenthaler from 1950 - 1959, Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street (until April 13th).
Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1951, oil on canvas, 56 ⅓ x 84 ½ inches.
This is the first time the work of this period has been shown as a group since my co-blogger and mentor Carl Belz’s 1981 exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis. (Belz’s catalog essay for that exhibition has been reprinted in the catalog for this exhibition.) The show is a revelation and should establish once and for all that Frankenthaler, despite being a generation younger, belongs along side Pollock, De Kooning, Still and the other great first-generation Abstract Expressionists of the 1950’s.


Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, Luhring Augustine (until March 23rd).
Installation view, Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, Luhring Augustine Gallery.
This 64-minute installation is composed of nine large videos of friends of the artist singing The Visitors, an old ABBA song. Each of Kjartansson's friends is shown on a separate screen, alone in one of the rooms of a beautiful old Hudson Valley farmhouse, each equipped to hear the others. At first they are setting up equipment or just waiting, but eventually one or two at a time start to sing or play an instrument. As they do so, people in the gallery walk around to watch the screens.

Eventually all of the friends sing and play both by themselves and improvising with the others. Toward the end, one screen after another goes dark, until the audience, gathering around the last screen, watches as all the friends leave the farmhouse singing together as they go for a frolicsome walk on a long field, their singing fading out as they walk farther and farther away. The work is sweet and surprisingly touching, perhaps made more so by the association of us as an audience/group with the group of friends in the video.
Installation view, Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, Luhring Augustine Gallery.
This show was packed when I went, even though Chelsea was pretty empty, so I guess word got out.
Update: Ben Davis has a good review here.


Andrea Rosen, Gallery 2, 544 West 24th Street (until March 23rd).
Like many of the big galleries in Chelsea, Andrea Rosen has expanded, opening a small but beautifully lit and proportioned space across the street from the main gallery. The show, what they’re calling a “shared installation,” is kind of lame though. Basically Olivier Mosset got approval from Lawrence Weiner and Jacob Kassay to hang a work by each on a wall Mosset painted yellow. Nice space though.


Two Feature Inc. artists are showing on 25th Street with other galleries: B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures (opens March 21st until April 27th) and Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone (until April 27th). Masullo looked better in the more intimate and less formal Feature Inc. space in the Lower East Side; the work gets lost in this vast space, and ganging them together makes no difference.
Installation view, Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone Gallery.
When are collectors going to wise up and buy the art of Feature Inc. gallery artists before they leave for Chelsea?


Al Held: Alphabet Paintings, Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street (until April 20th).
Installation view, Al Held, Alphabet Paintings, 1961–67, Cheim & Read Gallery.
I have a theory that, big as these paintings are, they’re felt to be even bigger because of their association with letters. I mean, that’s really big for a “D.”


Jean-Michel Basquiat at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street (until April 6th).
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1981, acrylic, oil stick and pencil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
(© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013).
Gagosian’s huge space is filled with this work, most of it quite large. (I would have shown an installation view, but Gagosian doesn't allow photography, and their website has become stingy about providing images.) The work is bursting with ideas and energy, but at the same time it started to look all the same. Weird.


Thomas Nozkowski, Recent Work, PACE,  508 West 25th Street (until March 23rd). I'm happy to report that the PACE website has vastly improved.
Installation view, Thomas Nozkowski, Recent Work, PACE Gallery.
I’ve written before about Nozkowski’s work — here most recently. Typically, my initial reaction to one of his shows is the opposite of what I had with the Basquiat exhibition. Because the paintings are all the same size, and they’re usually regularly lined up like soldiers (I wish he’d stop installing them like that), the work seems all alike. But I always end up being blown away by how much is going on — how many quirky surprises and beautiful riffs there are.
Thomas Nozkowski, untitled (9-9), 2012, oil on canvas on panel, 22 x 28 inches. 
Note, for example, how a vertical rectangle is formed on the right side of this painting (above) by cutting off the circles and by making the green slightly lighter; then look how the rectangle continues down turning blue and dissolving into the darker blue shape (which itself has some of the adjacent pink showing through, as if the pink continues under it). Here's a close-up detail:
Riffs and tricks in themselves mean nothing, of course, but Nozkowski uses them to set up delightful, intimate, self-contained worlds that are a joy to behold.
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Sunday, March 10, 2013

Once More With Helen

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Seas, 1952, oil on canvas, 86 ⅝ x 117 ¼ inches (on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington).
By Carl Belz

(Writer’s note: The exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler paintings from the 1950s currently at the Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street naturally triggered memories of the Frankenthaler exhibition I did at the Rose Art Museum in 1981. I described the curatorial development of that exhibition in one of my Curatorial Flashbacks here on Left Bank a couple of years ago. What follows now is a brief description of my experience installing the exhibition, which turned out, not altogether surprisingly, to be a memorable collaboration with the artist herself. It was written in 1986 for a show celebrating the 10th anniversary of the museum’s patrons and friends program, which sponsored an annual major exhibition and included “Frankenthaler: The 1950s.” I have edited it slightly for the occasion.)
Helen Frankenthaler,  Jacob's Ladder, 1957, oil on canvas, 113 ⅜ x 69 ⅞ inches (MoMA, Gift of Hyman N. Glickstein. © 2013 Helen Frankenthaler / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).
Helen Frankenthaler was a perfectionist. Her concern extended to every mark on every picture she made and to every detail of every significant project she engaged in relation to her work. Nathan Kolodner, a former student at Brandeis who became director of the Andre Emmerich Gallery, told me as much when we first discussed an exhibition of her 1950s work in the spring of 1980, and I learned it firsthand during the various stages that led to the completion of the show a year later. For me the culminating experience in the process was the installation of the 48 paintings and works on paper that comprised the exhibition, a selection of images that I had discussed at length with the artist, that I had visited in public and private collections throughout the northeast, and that I had come to feel I knew as well as the painter who made them. Armed with confidence, I spent a week arranging the pictures in advance of Helen’s arrival preceding the Saturday evening preview of the exhibition, though I didn’t actually hang them, for I anticipated she might suggest a few changes.

Helen Frankenthaler, Eden, 1956, (Photo: Robert McKeever/© 2013 Estate of Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York). 
We walked through the show together, Helen looking quietly at the pictures, remembering them, for in many cases she had not seen them in the flesh since they left her hand more than 20 years earlier. Certainly she had not seen them assembled as she was seeing them at that moment, and I began to realize that what I assumed was a triumph--the full spectrum of her first decade of achievement--was also her vulnerability, a laying bare of her initial urge in the direction of genuinely ambitious painting. She admitted as much, acknowledging the nervousness she had felt on her way to the museum, but she also said she was deeply satisfied with how everything looked, and she congratulated me for my knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the work, asking in conclusion if I would mind if we rearranged a few pictures.
Helen Frankenthaler, Mother Goose Melody, 1959, oil on canvas, 81 ¾ x 103 ½ inches (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis). 
During the next three hours we moved every picture at least once, many of them several times, and a show gradually emerged that I had not seen before. While I had tried to indicate subtly the work’s chronological development, Helen pretty much discarded that textbook approach. Treating the entire museum space like a stretch of raw canvas and each image like a gesture to be expressed within it, she created an environmental painting right there on the spot. And a wondrous painting it was, allowing each part to stand on its own but at the same time generating among those parts an internal rhythm that revealed each more fully. I received a lot of credit for that installation. That I could not accept it was fully compensated for by what I had learned in watching it happen.


Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 
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Sunday, February 24, 2013

Sculptures of Bulls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Charles Kessler

Often, as if there's a theme for the day, one thing or another seems to stand out when I visit a museum. I already wrote about how one day I noticed the backs of sculptures; another time I spotted what I called the "awww, how charming" motif; and once, at the National Gallery, several of the paintings suddenly struck me as hilariously funny. And now, on my latest trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I noted a surprising number of sculptures of bulls.

It makes sense that bulls would be depicted a lot since they're large, powerful animals that demand attention, and they're vitally important to agrarian societies. But the way bulls were portrayed in ancient times was very different from the terrifying, sexually aggressive monsters that Picasso and other modern artists created.
Pablo Picasso, Dying Bull, 1934, oil on canvas, 13 ¼ x 21 ¾ inches (1999.363.67).
The bull sculptures I saw at the Met seemed calm, contented and sometimes even playful. Perhaps pre-modern people were more at ease with nature, including their own animal nature, than we have become.

So here, in chronological order, is a selection of my favorite sculptures of bulls currently on view at the  Met. I included the acquisition numbers in the captions so you can easily find more about them in the Met's comprehensive collection database.
Kneeling bull holding a spouted vessel, Southwestern Iran,  Proto-Elamite,  ca. 3100 - 2900 B. C., silver, 7 x 2 ½ x 4 ¼ inches (66.173).
Standard with Two Long-horned Bulls,  Central Anatolia, Early Bronze age ca. 2300 - 2000 B. C.,  copper alloy,  6 ¼ x 5 ¾ inches  (55.137.5).
Bull's head, Mesopotamia, Neo-Sumerian, ca. 2100 - 2000 B. C., steatite or serpentine, 2 ½ x 2 ¾ x 2 ⅔ inches (1973.33.2).
Vessel terminating in the forepart of a bull,  Hittite Empire,  Central Anatolia,  ca. 14th - 13th century B. C.,  silver,        7 x 5 x 8 ½ inches (1989.281.11). 
Terracotta bull,  Mycenaean, Late Helladic IIIA,  ca. 1400 - 1200 B. C.,  3 ¼ x 4 ½ inches (36.11.6)
Bronze bull, Late Minoan III,  ca. 1400 - 1200 B. C. or later, 2  3/16 x 2  5/16 inches (26.31.492). 
Bull, Southwestern Arabia, ca. mid-1st millennium B. C.,  bronze, 8 ¾ high (47,100.85).
Standing Bull, Southwestern Arabia, ca. mid- to late- 1st millennium B. C.,  copper alloy and shell,  8 x 9 ½ inches (2002.34).
Part of a throne with deity on a bull, Urartu probably from Toprakkale, Iron Age III,  ca. 8th - 7th century B. C.,  5 3/4 inches high (50.163).
Striding bull,  Neo-Assyrian, Mesopotamia,  ca. 8th - 7th century B. C.,  ivory and gold,  3 x 1 ½ x 1 inches (54.117.10).
Bronze bull, Greek, Archaic,  ca. 7th century B. C.,  2 inches high (1972.118.82). 
Jug in the form of a recumbent bull, Iran, ca. 7th - 6th century B. C., ceramic and paint, 6 ½ x 12 inches (43.89.1) .
Terracotta bull,  Greek, Archaic,  ca. 3rd quarter of the 6th century,  4 ⅛ inches high (62.67).
Bull's head from column capital, achaemenid period,  ca. 5th century B. C., limestone, 18 ½ inches high (47.100.83).
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Thursday, February 21, 2013

Art News - February 2013

By Charles Kessler

Tourists packing the Sistine Chapel (Photograph: Oote Boe Ph/Alamy, December 21, 2012, The Guardian).

OY! According to ArtWatchUK:
The Vatican authorities are in conservation crisis today because they stripped the Sistine Chapel frescoes bare in the 1980s and 1990s. They did so against material and historical evidence that Michelangelo had finished off his frescoes with additional glue or size-based a secco painting. That original, autograph material was removed in full knowledge that the stripped-down bare fresco surfaces would thereafter be attacked by atmospheric pollution unless given some other protective covering. An attempt to coat the frescoes with synthetic resin (Paraloid B72) was abandoned leaving some surfaces clogged and the rest unprotected. The authorities then promised to install hi-tech paraphernalia that would somehow prevent the polluting atmosphere from making contact with the Chapel’s painted walls and ceiling. As was shown in our previous post, that cockamamie promise was not delivered. Today, in a chapel increasingly over-crowded with paying visitors, these stripped-down frescoes stand in greater peril than ever.
***

From Artinfo is a a brief summary of  20 Must-Watch Artist Documentaries. I saw Ballets Russes three times, and it's an absolute delight — but every one of the movies I saw (nine of them) was at least interesting. Sometimes the movies were better than the artists they documented (Gerhard Richter  - Painting and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry), and in one case (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) the art was much better than the movie. One documentary I would add to the list (in spite of the movie's narrow focus and John Baldessari’s pomposity) is “The Cool School” (2008) about the LA art scene in the 60’s and 70’s.

***

Also via ArtInfo is this heartening article in the Wall Street Journal about the Peabody Essex Museum successfully building an endowment in order to be relatively independent of the ups and downs of annual donations. Seems like the responsible thing for all non-profits to attempt, but, to quote from the article:
It sounds simple enough. But conventional wisdom in the museum world dictates that raising endowment money is too tough to tackle. "It's a self-supported vicious circle that we have gotten ourselves into as a field," Mr. Monroe [Dan L. Monroe, director of the museum] says, "that people will only give to a new building where they can put their name on it." When annual contributions come up short, both museum staffers and trustees tend to look first at ways to increase earned income—raising the price of admission; staging blockbuster exhibitions to draw more visitors; building destination restaurants; renting out event spaces and "renting" works from their permanent collections to other museums. 
***

The Outsider Art Fair, 2013 (it ended February 3rd) has stirred some interesting discussions. Roberta Smith, Jerry Saltz (in his strident manner) and others make the case for integrating folk and outsider art into museum collections.
Outsider Art Fair, Dia Building at 548 West 22nd Street.

Here is Smith making a persuasive argument:
 … pre-20th-century folk art is every bit as good, as a genre, as academic art of the same period, and in some ways far more original and vital. Its strengths lie not in its adherence to reality but in its enlivening deviations from it. For another, the distinction between folk and academic can be blurry, more a matter of degree than either-or. Third, this segregation results in galleries of academic 19th-century American art that are predictable and monotonous, effectively deadening the works on view and shortchanging the viewer.
Parked in front of the entrance to the fair were two "outsider" artists peddling their wares — one wonders how sophisticated outsider artists really are now.  

Also on the subject of Outsider art is this Hyperallergic article by Jillian Steinhauer about Henry Darger’s 15,000-page novel.
Henry Darger, the complete writings, mid-20th century (American Folk Art Museum).
***

The Google Cultural Institute's mission is to help preserve and promote culture online. It can keep you happily occupied for a very long time. Here are some of their projects and collaborations:

And in another technological achievement, the British Museum has fully digitalized its Leonardo da Vinci manuscript, the Codex Arundel, 1478-1518.

***

Progress on new Whitney Museum building designed by Renzo Piano located near the High Line. Due to open in 2015, the Met will take over the Whitney's uptown building for exhibitions and educational programming.
***

 The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones decries British provincialism in Why American modern art blows British talent out of the water:
,,, the very British modern art of Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst earns mileage from the fact that people don’t know enough about a giant such as Rauschenberg. Indeed, Emin’s bed was a rehash of a work by Rauschenberg. The same American giant was using stuffed animals to hilarious, provocative effect in his art decades before Hirst pickled a shark.
***

Installation view of "Piero della Francesca in America" at the Frick Collection.
The United States has very little of the art of Piero della Francesca, one of the great founders of the Italian Renaissance, and almost all of Piero's paintings in the United States come from one altarpiece Piero painted for the Church of Sant’Agostino in Sansepolcro — an altarpiece that was disassembled around 1555. This small jewel of an exhibition, "Piero della Francesca in America" at the Frick Collection (until May 19th), remarkably reunites six of the seven existing panels (including one panel from Lisbon) from this altarpiece. 
Piero della Francesca, Saint Augustine, 1454-69, oil and tempera on poplar panel (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon).
Serving as the cherry on top is an imposing painting, also from Sansepolcro but not part of the altarpiece, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute's rarely lent masterpiece, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels.
Piero della Francesca, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, 1460-70, oil (and tempera?) on poplar panel, transferred to fabric on panel (Sterling and Fancine Clark Institute, Williamstown).
If you can't see this exhibition, be sure to explore the Frick's informative exhibition website. There you will be able to view high-resolution images plus and excellent interactive hypothetical reconstruction of the Sansepolcro altarpiece.
Hypothetical reconstruction of Piero della Francesca's altarpiece for the Church of Sant’Agostino in Sansepolcro.

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Thursday, February 7, 2013

Yale's New Art Museum

By Charles Kessler
The Yale Art Gallery — all of the above: The modern building on the far left, opened in 1953, was designed by Louis Kahn. The Florentine Gothic building in the center, including the bridge over High Street, is called "The Old Art Gallery." It was designed by Egerton Swartwout and opened in 1928. On the far right is "Street Hall." The oldest of the three, it opened to the public in 1864.
South exterior elevation. Left to right: Louis Kahn building, Old Yale Art Gallery building with a two-story addition, Street Hall (© Ennead Architects).
It's officially called "The Yale Art Gallery," but calling it an art gallery when they have 200,000 works in their collection, and 4,000 of them on display, is like calling Whole Foods a bodega. It's really an encyclopedic museum, one of the oldest in the country; and, since December 12, 2012 when the new renovation and expansion (by Ennead Architects) opened to the public, it's one of the best small museums. Even though I read several articles about it before I went (two good ones are here and here), I was surprised at how extensive the changes were, and how extraordinary Yale's collection is.

At first the museum didn't look any different than the last time I was there, when I saw Picasso and the Allure of Language. They had just restored the Louis Kahn building which had been their main exhibition space since 1953. It was Kahn's first major commission and Yale's first modern (i.e., not Gothic) building. Over the years, several "improvements" altered and screwed it up, so restoring it back to the original was a good thing. I don’t think it’s very successful as an art museum though because the interior is dark and low, and the coffered ceilings are a distraction. Still, the building is among the earliest examples of curtain-wall construction, and it's important as a piece of architecture.
The Louis Kahn building from the Yale campus; and a view of the interior of the building, the Indo-Pacific gallery.
When I saw it in 2009, in addition to the Louis Kahn building, part of the collection was housed in half of the "Old Yale Art Gallery" — a 1928 dark and dreary Gothic building with a black floor and gray walls. Now it has been cleaned and restored, classrooms and offices have been moved out, and two stories have been added on top.

Who knew what a gorgeous building it was! The black floors and gray walls, once cleaned, are a luxurious cream color, and the light from the Gothic windows is glorious. Here's a before and after picture:
The new addition on top of the Old Art Gallery couldn't be more beautiful. The proportions are large enough to be spacious but remain comfortable and intimate; and the light is calm, even and airy. When I first entered these rooms I wanted to close my eyes and inhale the refreshing, soothing air — a perfect place to experience modern art.
Contemporary art gallery in the new addition on top of the Old Art Gallery. 
And there's more! The Art History Department was moved out of Street Hall (don't worry about them — they moved to a nice new building), and that building was also converted (converted back actually — it began as an art gallery) to exhibition space for Yale's prized collection of American painting, sculpture and decorative arts.
American Art Galleries, Street Hall. 
Seamlessly integrating a new addition and three entirely distinct buildings while keeping the unique identities of each of them was a real tour de force. (The Los Angeles County Art Museum should hire these guys.) Not only are the buildings diverse, but each of the eleven curatorial departments got to design its own space. Here's another example:
Newly refurbished European Painting Galleries in the Old Yale Art Gallery.
However impressive and public the collection, this is a truly educational institution in many ways.  They provide free brochures about the art, instructive wall labels in every gallery, and free lectures (usually about one of the current exhibitions, but also on other topics). They have a very extensive website; and there are smart, informative and enthusiastic guards and docents everywhere. There are also numerous classes for all ages taught on site, in front of the art. They even have a gallery devoted to a teaching collection, the Levin Study Gallery on the top floor of the new addition. All faculty members, not just those in the arts, can select and display work from the Yale collection to support a particular class. (For more about this, see Randy Kennedy's article in the New York Times.)

Of course, most educational are the exhibitions they organize and the scholarly exhibition catalogs they publish. During my visit, the main exhibition was  Société Anonyme: Modernism for America (until July 14, 2013). It surpassed even my high expectations. (Yale has another website devoted to the exhibition that uses Flash.)
One of the new galleries devoted to Société Anonyme: Modernism for America. 
The Société Anonyme was an organization founded in 1920 by Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp with some additional help from Man Ray. It was America’s first contemporary art museum, and their mission was not only to collect and exhibit contemporary art, but to promote it and educate people about it. By the time they disbanded, they published about thirty publications, curated more than eighty exhibitions, and organized at least eighty-five scholarly programs — all to bring modernism to America.
Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp in the library at The Haven, her estate in West Redding, Connecticut, 1936, shortly after Duchamp repaired his Large Glass in the foreground. 

It's entirely fitting that this should be their first exhibition in the new space because in 1941 Dreier donated almost the entire Société Anonyme collection to the Yale University Art Gallery — more than 1000 works by about 100 artists including such well-known artists as Constantin Brancusi, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Joseph Stella, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters; and of course Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray; as well as lesser-known artists including one of my favorites, Louis Eilshemius. 
Louis Eilshemius, The Pool, ca. 1920, oil on printed sheet of music paper, laid down on laminated chipboard, 10 11/16 x 13 5/8  inches  (click to enlarge). 
And this surprise by an artist I didn't know — a 1920-21 abstract shaped painting:
Laszlo Peri, Room (Space Construction), 1920-21, tempera on composition board, 39 x 30 inches (Gift of Collection Société Anonyme).
After fourteen years and $135 million, three important buildings were restored and united, the exhibition space was expanded from about 40, 000 to 70,000 square feet, and the lighting and functionality of the museum was vastly improved. Good job, Yale. Now we'll have to see what Harvard comes up with in 2014 when additions and restorations to their three art buildings are supposed to be completed.
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