Visiting the world of Meret Oppenheim is a little like confronting Object, her famed fur teacup—the viewer is tempted to imagine what’s underneath. It’s just an ordinary teacup, isn’t it—but is it?  Such layers and layers of surprises await. The current retrospective at MOMA has unearthed through nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, assemblages, reliefs, jewelry designs, works on paper, and collages to reflect a marvelously fluid mind.

Not surprisingly, when you arrive on the site, you are greeted with “A Message to Our Community.”  The foundation is “creating paths that lead to a more inclusive and diverse museum and workplace.”  Nearly a year ago, it launched a Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion Initiative.  It’s a high order and we can only hope that they can live up to the founding belief that “art can embrace the spirit and transform human behavior.” One example on the website of genius at work is a brief artist’s video profile of Simone Leigh.

Miro’s immersion into the prevailing Parisian scene was perfectly timed.  Andre Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto was written in the fall of 1924, and “The Birth of the World” produced in 1925.  Predating by decades the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock, the background is a grey morass of pouring, brushing, flinging gestures to signal the explosive nature of creation, acting as the stage on which his floating shapes take their place.  Acquired by MOMA as a gift from the artist in 1972, it justifies its place of honor in this show.

It's an old story, one that should have been relegated to the dustbins of history long ago, but the environment in which artists like Berthe Morisot, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo and Lee Krasner to name but a few grew up was rigidly defined.  Women were hardly solitary stars but marked by the liaisons, constellations if you will—familial, marital and otherwise—that allowed for their creative endeavors to flourish.  

It’s easy to see Goldin as the heir apparent to Diane Arbus.  Both precocious, both raised by Jewish parents preoccupied with their own successes or obsessions, as young women they were, more often than not, left to their own devices.  Free to seek outlets to a world beyond the narrow scope of their upbringing, they chose a descent into a netherworld.  Whether through an insatiable curiosity in Arbus’ case or an obsessive dependency in Goldin’s, it was a dangerous journey.  

Occupying the entire fourth floor galleries, the exhibit allows the spectator to experience many enthralling works in the round, returning to re-examine, question, and wonder at the prolific, unstoppable genius of the man.   A handy takeaway pamphlet with sketches and accompanying descriptions eliminates the need for wall notes.  This reinvention of gallery space to accommodate approximately 140 sculptures is the handiwork of curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, with the assistance of Virginie Perdrisot, Curator of Sculptures and Ceramics at the Musee National Picasso in Paris. 

If art for art’s sake is your main reason for visiting the Museum of Modern Art’s latest cross-current crazy quilt, Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980, then this exhibit may not be for you.   But if art as persuasion, as process, as anti-authoritarian political protest whets your curiosity, then go.  It’s an in-your-face look backwards—when the Prague spring revolts were in full bloom and uprisings from Cuba to Argentina were creating seismic changes in public sensibility. 

The Paris of Toulouse Lautrec: Prints and Posters, the first Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 30 years dedicated solely to Lautrec, features over 100 examples of work created during the apex of his career.  It is a giddy but never glum celebration of the most colorful and notorious characters that inhabited his world and his genius at depicting them.  It’s primarily the dancers and aristocratic doyens, the prostitutes, publishers and pleasure-seekers of the night that captured his heart, and subsequently, his brush.  

“Designing Modern Women 1890-1990,” The Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit from their third floor design department, begs the question of what came first—the chicken or the egg.  Is modern woman an independent spirit, totally responsible for her own evolution?  Or is she a willing, sometimes unwitting product of the collective consciousness?  Defining not only who she is but what drives her is a question that has inspired and intrigued designers the world over, and MOMA has gathered some of the most talented interpreters over the last century who took on the challenge.  

It’s a disarming pictorial display, and one which was part of Magritte’s first major exhibit at the Galerie le Centaure in Brussels in 1927.  Executed with a finesse and economy of means that set the artist apart from surrealist compatriots of the fantastic and bizarre—like Max Ernst and Salvadore Dali—it became a precursor for many of his most disturbing images to come.  Masterful depiction aside, the exhibit was not a success and depressed by the outcome, Magritte moved to Paris for the next three years.