Explore the quintessence of American contemporary art from New York Dada to pop art and postmodernism at “The American Art: Masterpieces of Everyday Life from the Whitney Museum of American Art,” which is underway at the National Museum of Art in Deoksugung, a branch of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (MOCA), in central Seoul.
As American art is not so familiar to the Korean audience, the exhibition is designed to introduce not only American art but American culture in general.
Bringing in the masterpieces
The Whitney Museum of American Art provided 87 works by 47 artists, including Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and Dan Flavin, for this exhibition. Established in 1931, the Whitney is dedicated to American art. Unlike other celebrated contemporary art museums like The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney has a broad collection of works only by American artists in any form and produced after the 20th century.
It took some five days to bring in the artworks and install them in the Seoul museum. Around 20 people worked during the installation, including a curator, a registrar, an art handler and a coordinator from the Whitney, five staff members from MOCA and experts from a fine art transportation company.
The pieces were put into 50 crates and arrived in two separate shipments to prevent loss of all the works together in case of unexpected events such as a plane crash. The crates were opened in two days. Officials from the Whitney and MOCA inspected and photographed each piece after unpacking them. The works were then brought to the designated spots and laid on soft blankets.
Where the works will be displayed is usually decided before the pieces arrive, but some changes can be made on-site according to the decision of curators.
For instance, the curator can decide how to arrange “Giant Fagends” of Oldenburg, which is composed of an enlarged ashtray and several cigarette butts.
“They can be placed in various ways as long as they stay in the room. This is a long space and I want visitors to go through the butts,” Whitney curator Carter Foster said.
The American Art
The exhibition presents the American masterpieces in three sections — “American Icon and Everyday Life,” “Object and Identity” and “Object and Perception.” There was no such distinction in the original collection, but Park Young-ran, senior curator of MOCA, came up with the division to provide a better understanding for Korean visitors.
“These objects are used by Americans everyday and we can peek into their lives through the artworks,” Park said.
The first section, “American Icon and Everyday Life,” views the capitalist consumer culture through artworks overwhelming with products and logos of American products.
Warhol’s “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” and “Brillo Box” captures a side of consumerism with repetitive images, while Lichtenstein reproduces Henri Matisse’s “Goldfish and Sculpture” in his own way.