Modern Art

For most of this century, painting has been dominated and defined by the accomplishments of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, so much so that it's difficult to think of one without thinking of the other. Each has been enormously influential, even to this day, and each has been touted by devoted partisans as the greatest artist of modern times. As painters and as individuals, they were polar opposites. Picasso was a mercurial bohemian whose tempestuous art corresponds closely to his public persona.

There's a marvelous moment in the Joan Miro retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when we can watch the great Spanish painter cross a boundary from the concrete world of the senses into the more ethereal world of the imagination, a world he would inhabit until his death in 1983. It happens in the span of three paintings that Miro completed between the summer of 1921 and the winter of 1924. The transition is thrilling to behold not only because Miro makes it look effortless but because he pulls us along.

Collage looks easy, doesn't it? Just collect bits of colored paper and printed detritus, arrange them on a sturdy ground, apply paste, and quicker than you can say "recycling" you have art. Well, not always. Banal collages, like junk sculpture, are quite easy to make, as many artists continue to demonstrate. Yet when you encounter a master of collage, you realize how wide is the gap between the mundane and the masterly, and how infrequently the sublime is achieved. Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has named Matthew Affron, a scholar and curator at the University of Virginia, to the museum's prestigious post of curator of modern art, museum officials announced Friday. Affron succeeds Michael Taylor, who was named head of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in 2011. Timothy Rub, director of the Art Museum, also announced that Dirk H. Breiding, an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been named associate curator of arms and armor in Philadelphia.

It promises to be a perfect marriage of art and theater. In the first-floor auditorium at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, members of a local theater company will be performing a comedy that pokes fun at modern art. Upstairs, people will be looking at an exhibition of works by American abstract expressionist Franz Kline. All of this will come together tomorrow when 16 actors from the Hedgerow Theater in Delaware County perform Museum, a one-act play set in an art gallery on the last day of a modern-art exhibit.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, internationally renowned for its splendid collection of early modern art, became significantly stronger in that department today. The museum was to announce that it has acquired, through gift and purchase, a collection of nearly 2,000 photographs by many of the most important 20th-century figures in the field, such as Man Ray, Andr? Kert?sz and Henri Cartier-Bresson. More than 120 photographers are represented, at least 90 of them new to the museum.

Sure, it seems that more and more of us are checking our e-mail from work while we're supposed to be on vacation. But has work become so ubiquitous that it follows us right into bed? A home office operated from under the covers with a computer screen rising at the occupant's feet may be one of the more unsettling visions of the future in "Workspheres," a new exhibition on the changing nature of the workplace at the Museum of Modern Art. While that conceptual model might cause some to recoil, designers in recent years have been creating actual office furnishings to accommodate our extended workstyles, and some of them are in the show, too. For those who spend a fair amount of time transfixed in front of a screen, there are chairs designed to promote body support as well as circulation - not to mention new-think on organizing tools, and furnishings that offer greater flexibility and personality in setting up shop almost anywhere.

Remember "Better things for better living through chemistry?" It has been a long while since the DuPont Co. used that slogan, though that doesn't mean that chemists and other involved in the burgeoning field of materials science have been idle. Quite the contrary. Though technologies involving the digital and the virtual have gotten more media attention, substances you can see and touch without electronic help have also been changing in radical and unexpected ways. That's the subject of "Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design," on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 27. The museum could have called it "Neat Stuff," and described its appeal a bit more precisely.

Yeadon's Public Library and New York's Museum of Modern Art share something these days: Both hold the photography of a Yeadon native son, Charles Martin. This month, Martin, 48, who grew up on Elder Avenue, sold a photo from his black-and-white series "The Glass Constructions" to the museum. Now, 11 other photographs from that series, of objects photographed through glass, are on display at the library. Having the photos on exhibit in his hometown and in the permanent collection of one of the world's most important museums has given Martin what he calls "a simultaneous pleasure.

Robert Motherwell, 76, one of the founders of the movement that made American art an international force after World War II, died Tuesday after suffering a stroke at his summer home in Provincetown, Mass. His death leaves 87-year-old Willem de Kooning as the sole survivor of the New York School, which developed the movement known as abstract expressionism. The flowering of modern art, which Motherwell once described as "an art of alienation and a rebellion against . . . any form of art that might be called morally uplifting," waned in the 1950s, but Motherwell kept it alive through his painting, which never abandoned the heroic stance epitomized by his most famous theme, Elegy to the Spanish Republic.