The Upper East Side neighborhood in New York City, homeland for global art, contemporary and not. Madison Avenue, shopping street. At the intersection with the 75th, a new colossus of contemporary art appears: the Met Breuer.
The iconic building, designed by the leading name of Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer, hosted for fifty years the famous Whitney Museum, and now welcomes the Met. An extremely modern design for the architecture, with an inverted ziggurat shape, featuring an impressive and majestic use of concrete. Rationality and functionality – basis of the Bauhaus philosophy – are made explicit by the Hungarian architect, who generated great astonishment, by inviting the observers to take a step back in order to admire the elegant, moderate proportions.
At the beginning, the construction, restored by the studio Beyer Blinder Belle Architects&Planners, will host two exclusive exhibitions. Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible gathers almost 200 masterpieces of international masters of art from Renaissance to present, as Tiziano, Rauschenberg and Cézanne. Connected by the incompleteness, completely deliberate according to some people, unintentional for others, the works will be displayed until September 4.
Radically different is the second exhibition, dedicated to the Indian Modernist Nasreen Mohamedi and available until June 5, where an incredibly evocative frame becomes the scene for a large part of his production. Other exhibitions will follow one another in the Manhattan location: a retrospective dedicated to Kerry James Marshall, the photos taken in New York by Diane Arbus and the architectural ones portraying Breuer’s public buildings.
Within the multitude of New York museums, particularly concentrated in the exclusive American island, the Met Breuer follows the trail of the timeless Metropolitan Museum of Art and it will become a global artistic reference point.