Making It Modern

 
Enjoy a reinstallation of the museum’s foundational collection of works by international modern artists in Europe and the Americas. In the 1960s, a group of renowned collectors with winter residences in the Palm Springs area initiated a gifting program to establish the museum’s holdings.

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Enjoy a reinstallation of the museum’s foundational collection of works by international modern artists in Europe and the Americas. In the 1960s, a group of renowned collectors with winter residences in the Palm Springs area initiated a gifting program to establish the museum’s holdings. These collectors—Leonore and Walter Annenberg, Lionel Bauman, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, Raymond Loewy, Walter N. Marks, Seymour Oppenheimer, and Lucile and Ted Weiner—solicited friends and artists for significant donations of modern art.

In subsequent years, generous donors contributed major works by modern artists, including Gwen Weiner who continues her parents’ legacy of donations and long-term loans. Additionally on view are a selection of photographic prints which illustrates how artists used the camera to render the world through modernist perspectives. 

The exhibition is organized around six key principles that demonstrate how modernists pioneered a new aesthetic language that defined shifting perspectives in the twentieth century. By reconfiguring concepts such as line, energy, aggregates, biomorphism, spirituality, and presence, artists imbued their work with ideas that propelled modernism forward. These descriptors represent the defining characteristics of modernism even as they offer insight into the individual artworks on view.

This exhibition is organized by Palm Springs Art Museum. 

image: William A. Baziotes, Desert Animal, 1947, oil on canvas, gift of Marion and Francis Lederer in honor of Marisa Shea’s appointment as a Trustee of Palm Springs Desert Museum, © Estate of William Baziotes