Reimagining modern art at the MFA
The MFA has reimagined its presentation of modern art through five new spaces dedicated to this dynamic period. They consider modernism across geographies, introduce visitors to new narratives, and recontextualize collection favorites.
Through highlights from the Museum’s collection, new acquisitions, and rarely seen loans from private holdings, visitors can discover a range of approaches to understanding modernism. Thematic connections, historical movements, and pairings of artists demonstrate the innovative and wide-ranging ways that modernism redefined the aims and expressions of art in the 20th century.
Located on the first floor near the Lower Hemicycle and the second floor of the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, these transformed galleries are generously funded by the Wyss Foundation. Visitors can find even more 20th-century art on Level 3 of the Art of the Americas Wing.
Color and Spirituality in Modern Art
In the early 1900s, artists working in Europe and the Americas continued the break with depictions of the visible world begun at the end of the previous century. Instead of creating lifelike images using carefully blended colors, modeling, and perspective, they used non-naturalistic color and flattened, simplified, or distorted forms to express emotional or spiritual states. Featuring paintings by Paul Gauguin, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Henri Matisse, among others, this gallery explores the ways in which artists used color to express their feelings with directness and authenticity. Works by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Agnes Pelton demonstrate how artists’ interest in representing an invisible, higher reality rather than the material world led them toward abstraction.
Rosamund Zander and Hansjörg Wyss Gallery (Gallery 146)
Beyond Reality: Surrealism in the 20th Century
Surrealism was an interdisciplinary movement that upended reality by turning to dreams, chance, and the unconscious for artistic inspiration. Begun in Paris in the wake of World War I, it quickly spread around the world, and artists, writers, and thinkers adapted its ideas to their specific contexts. As the paintings and sculpture on view in this gallery demonstrate, Surrealist artists never adopted a single visual style. Instead, they shared an interest in making visible repressed or otherwise hidden meanings and desires, and revealing the unexpected in the everyday. Works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Remedios Varo suggest a mysterious world filled with symbolic objects and unexpected juxtapositions. Paintings by Jorge Camacho, Arshile Gorky, Matta, and Joan Miró encode imagery within abstraction. Full of surprises, and sometimes confusing or even disturbing, these works invite visitors to look anew at the world around them.
Rosamund Zander and Hansjörg Wyss Gallery (Gallery 145)
Taking a Line for a Walk: Alexander Calder and Paul Klee
With distinctive styles all their own, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) and Paul Klee (1879–1940) each abstracted forms from nature and everyday life. Inspired by Klee’s 1925 description of artistic creation’s starting point as “an active line on a walk,” this gallery looks at how both artists explored the principle in their different mediums, and with varying degrees of distance from their natural references. Klee produced colorful, highly personal, and often abstracted landscapes that attempted to represent his individual, theoretical understanding of the natural world. Calder encountered Klee’s work and ideas in the late 1920s—an experience that shaped his experiments with abstraction. His kinetic sculptures suggest living organisms or environments through evocative shapes and recognizable titles.
Gallery 154
An Imagined Dialogue: Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko
This gallery takes inspiration from an unrealized 1969 commission for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, which would have paired new paintings by Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and sculpture by Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966). Both artists’ explorations of the human condition resonated in a world that had recently witnessed tragedies like the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Japan. Rothko declined the commission, but it may still have inspired him: the gray, brown, and black palette of his final works, including the 1969 painting on paper in this gallery, resonates with that of Giacometti portraits such as Head of Diego (1961). This imagined dialogue between Rothko’s mediative canvases and Giacometti’s alienated figures underscores the power of their work and its search for meaning in the aftermath of World War II.
Gallery 152
During the 20th century, developments in culture, politics, and technology catalyzed revolutionary approaches to art making. Artists expanded traditional models—or dispensed with them entirely—while experimenting with new techniques, forms, and materials. This gallery explores the choices made by sculptors working in the United States and Europe that challenged the boundaries of expression. It bridges displays of the Museum’s European art with new installations of the contemporary collection, and presents work by artists including Jean Arp, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, and Pablo Picasso. Visitors are invited to explore the trajectory of three-dimensional art, from Auguste Rodin at the end of the 19th century to Simone Leigh in the present.
Rosamund Zander and Hansjörg Wyss Gallery (Gallery 258)
