Modern Art

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.

Last year, the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' epochal voyage, almost everyone was celebrating Latin American culture - everyone, that is, except the Museum of Modern Art. The museum seems to prefer the last word whenever possible. As with its contribution to the 150th anniversary of photography, which closed out that observance (and in 1990, not '89), its major survey of Latin American art comes at the tail end of the Columbian parade. This may be calculated, for the last word is often construed to be definitive.

Over the last four years, the Museum of Modern Art, the preeminent repository of modern art in the world, spent a staggering amount of money - $425 million in construction and renovation costs alone - to create a new home for its collections in midtown Manhattan. The new MoMA is 60 percent larger than the facility it replaces, although the area devoted to exhibitions grew by only 47 percent. The total bill for the project, including property acquisition, establishing an interim museum in Queens, and building an endowment, is an even more mind-boggling $858 million.

Sidney Goodman, 77, one of the most acclaimed, influential, and respected artists Philadelphia has produced since the end of World War II, died Thursday, April 11. He suffered for the better part of a year from Parkinson's disease. A Philadelphia native, Mr. Goodman graduated from Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts, in 1958. By the early 1960s, his boldly imaginative style of figurative painting had brought him national attention. When he was 27, Time magazine described him as "one of the most respected and sought-after of the new figure painters.

AMONG the paintings in the recent "Karmic Abstraction" show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery was a large piece by Ryan McGinness. An art-world star - the New York Times says so - his work hangs in respected institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and Spain's MUSAC. He's kind of a big deal. McGinness had other works in the show, but let's focus on one: "Untitled (Black Hole, Black 72.1). " On a black background, neon squiggles race in and out of each other as if created by some cosmic Spirograph.

For Albert Barnes, the French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a magnificent obsession on a scale that defies both reason and understanding. Between 1912, when he acquired his first nine Renoirs, and 1942, when he bought his last two, the founder of the Barnes Foundation gathered under his roof 178 Renoir oils of various sizes and subjects (as well as a pastel drawing, a lithograph, and a sculpture). Perhaps the best explanation of this amazing prodigality comes from the collector himself, as quoted on page 33 of the foundation's new comprehensive catalog of its Renoirs: "I have never experienced from Renoir's work the ennui or disgust with the platitudinous emptiness and general damn rot that I have found in the work of practically every other man represented in my collection from Delacroix to Picasso.

Find me an art gallery with an exhibit of Haitian paintings, and I am nearly giddy with pleasure. The colors, the inventiveness, the exuberance, the poignancy - all of it delights me anew with each exposure. It was a trip to Haiti more than a dozen years ago that ignited my passion for Haitian art, which (now, as then) has an international reputation. Early last year, however, a trip to the Dominican Republic made me feel like a jilting lover. Over time, rationality has prevailed.

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.

George F. Will's Feb. 26 Op-ed Page column, "Warhol represented an era of non-art," noted that a Warhol painting of 200 one-dollar bills recently sold for $385,000. For that kind of money, Mr. Warhol could have at least painted $1,000 bills. This example is typical of the high prices that modern-art patrons pay pseudo artists for silly works. Never in any field of human endeavor was so much paid by so many for so little. Mr. Will accurately depicts the essence of modern art - nihilism and novelty.

Samuel J. Korman, 87, developer, community leader and philanthropist, died Tuesday of a stroke at his home on Rittenhouse Square. Mr. Korman succeeded his father, Hyman Korman, as director of Korman Corp. and Hyman Korman Inc., the building and development firm founded in 1919. The company continues to operate as a family-owned partnership. Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Korman graduated from Frankford High School and several years ago was given the school's highest honor, its Pioneer Achievement Award.