Valentine's Day Sculpture Melts Hearts in Time Square

The 10-foot-tall, 7,000-pound Ice Heart was installed Friday in Times Square - the heart of New York City - just in time for Valentine's Day weekend. [Credit: Moorhead & Moorhead]

NEW YORK — Visitors to Times Square are loving the 10-foot-tall, 7,000-pound heart-shaped sculpture installed in the center of the chaotic intersection of 46th and Broadway. The Ice Heart is constructed from masonry scaled blocks of ice which are calibrated to absorb and magnify the lights of Times Square, the illuminated heart of New York City.

Selected  from among four finalists by the Art Review Committee of the Times Square Alliance, Ice Heart was designed by architect brothers Robert and Granger Moorhead. It was installed Friday, just in time for Valentine's Day weekend. The architects say that Ice Heart is a celebration of the "temporary nature" of the work, since it will slowly transform as it melts away and eventually disappears completely.

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Valentine's Day Sculpture Melts Hearts in Time Square

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art Opens in Charlotte

The exterior of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, featuring Sol LeWitt's "Wall Drawing #995". The museum officially opened January 2, 2010. [Credit: Bechtler.org]

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A large excited crowd gathered in front of Charlotte's newest modern art museum on Saturday as new Mayor Anthony Foxx performed his first ribbon cutting ceremony. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opened its doors for the first time, inviting visitors to view selections from its 1,400 piece collection. Only a handful of the artworks have ever been publicly exhibited in the United States.

The impressive modern art collection was amassed by the late Hans and Bessie Bechtler, a Swiss couple who made their fortune in air-filtration technology. Some of the works are accompanied by books, photographs and letters illustrating the artists' personal connections to the Bechtler family. Mid 20th-century artists including Miró, Giacometti, Picasso, Calder, Hepworth, Nicholson, Warhol, Tinguely, Ernst, Le Corbusier, Chillida and many others are represented.

The Bechtler Museum is only the second structure in the United States to be designed by internationally renowned Swiss architect Mario Botta; he also designed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Bechtler Museum of Modern Art Opens in Charlotte

The Pope Receives a Creative Audience at the Sistine Chapel

VATICAN CITY — The magnificent Renaissance frescoes of the great Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and Botticelli provided the backdrop for a pontifical address to art world heavyweights on Saturday. Pope Benedict received roughly 250 creatives, including painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, poets and film directors, at the Sistine Chapel (not your typical conference room/banquet hall), where he spoke to the crowd about bridging the gap between the art world and religion.

Though the Vatican invited roughly 500 artistic leaders of varying religious, political and stylistic allegiances, only about half accepted the invitation. Opera star Andrea Bocelli, film director F. Murray Abraham and architect Zaha Hadid (whose acclaimed MAXXI museum of contemporary art opened in Rome last weekend) were among those in the audience.

The Pope began his address by explaining, "At this gathering I wish to express and renew the Church’s friendship with the world of art." He said that in the present time of social and economic hardship, when all hope seems to be lost, it is beauty which can restore the human spirit.

"[...]the experience of beauty does not remove us from reality, on the contrary, it leads to a direct encounter with the daily reality of our lives, liberating it from darkness, transfiguring it, making it radiant and beautiful," Pope Benedict said. "Beauty, whether that of the natural universe or that expressed in art, precisely because it opens up and broadens the horizons of human awareness, pointing us beyond ourselves, bringing us face to face with the abyss of Infinity, can become a path towards the transcendent, towards the ultimate Mystery, towards God."

Pope Benedict ended by appealing to his audience, whom he called "the custodians of beauty," asking them to use their talent "to speak to the heart of humanity, to touch individual and collective sensibilities, to call forth dreams and hopes, to broaden the horizons of knowledge and of human engagement." He told them to be grateful for their gifts, and said, "Through your art, you yourselves are to be heralds and witnesses of hope for humanity!"

The Vatican is expected to have its own pavilion at the next Venice Biennale art exhibition in 2011, perhaps a sign that the establishment is finally willing to embrace the world of modern art.

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Read More - Full Text of the Pope’s Address

[Photo: Pope Benedict XVI greets more than 250 leading figures from the world of arts in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday. Courtesy Osservatore Romano/Associated Press]

The Pope Receives a Creative Audience at the Sistine Chapel

MoMA Designs a Bauhaus Retrospective

NEW YORK, NY — From architecture, industrial design, textiles and furniture, to graphics, painting and sculpture, the 20th century art movement known as the Bauhaus continues to influence our modern world (all one has to do browse the latest IKEA catalog for examples). In its first major exhibition dedicated to the Bauhaus since 1938, the Museum of Modern Art is celebrating the extraordinary artists, architects and designers of the avant-garde school.

The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 and existed in three German cities: Weimar (1919-1925), Dessau (1925-1932) and Berlin (1932-1933), under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The school was closed by the Nazi regime in 1933.

The Bauhaus aesthetic declared that there should be no distinction between form and function; art should meet the needs of society. The works are characterized by sleek simplicity, often incorporating industrial materials like wood and tubular steel, shaped by clean edges and geometric lines. The design isn't comfy, cozy per se, but it can certainly add sophisticated style to a room.

On Sunday, Workshops for Modernity: Bauhaus 1919-1933 opened at the MoMA; a retrospective exhibit featuring over 400 works by famed artists including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer and Josef Albers.

“The content of the exhibit is as much student work as masters’ work…it is a portrait of a school," said Barry Bergdoll, co-curator and The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA. "[The Bauhaus school] believed that if you combined modern design and practicality and utility, the public would be converted,” Bergdoll said.

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Workshops for Modernity: Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Nov. 8, 2009 - Jan. 5, 2010)

Museum of Modern Art | Website

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Read More - How the Bauhaus School Is Still Influencing Modern Design | New York Magazine

[Photos: Top Left - Marcel Breuer. Nesting Tables (B9), 1924-26. | Top Right - Christian Dell. Wine pitcher, 1922. | Bottom - Vasily Kandinsky. Designs for wall-paintings for the Juryfreie Kunstschau (detail), 1922.]

MoMA Designs a Bauhaus Retrospective