The works displayed on this floor roughly span the years 1880 to 1950. Within an overall chronological flow, galleries highlight individual stylistic movements, artists, and themes, including Cubism, the work of Henri Matisse, and Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, among other subjects. These galleries are frequently reinstalled in an effort to feature a wide range of artworks in various configurations, reflecting the view that there are countless ways to explore the history of modern art and the Museum’s rich collection.
Lichtenstein based many of his early paintings on imagery he found in comic books. The source for this work is Run for Love! published by DC Comics in 1962, the cover of which the artist significantly altered to arrive at the finished composition. In the original illustration, the drowning girl’s boyfriend appears in the background, clinging to a capsized boat. Lichtenstein cropped the image dramatically, showing the girl alone and encircled by a threatening wave. He changed the caption from “I don’t care if I have a cramp!” to “I don’t care!” and the boyfriend’s name from Mal to Brad. In addition to appropriating comic books’ melodramatic content, Lichtenstein manually simulated the Benday dots used in the mechanical reproduction of images.
Painted on the eve of America's entry into World War II, while Tamayo was living in New York, this pair of snarling dogs captures, in the words of fellow Mexican painter Juan Soriano, "that horror before a world that was turning to stone before our eyes." Set against an eerily vacant yellow backdrop bathed in a red glow, the dogs, with their fangs bared, strike an anxious note, while the pale-blue bones near their paws suggest death or carnage. The subject matter was likely inspired not only by contemporary events but by pre-Columbian terracotta burial sculptures. In Aztec and Maya mythology, dogs were considered guides to the underworld, and statues of them were often buried with members of the ruling class.
Kahlo collected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico retablos—small paintings on metal made to thank God or saints for curing illnesses and performing miracles—and adopted the medium as her own. In this fantastical family tree, Kahlo depicted herself as a fetus in utero and as a child inside her childhood home. While Kahlo celebrated Mexican culture by invoking its traditions in her art and wearing elaborate traditional attire, this painting is as much a tribute to her European and Jewish heritage. On the right is her German-born Jewish father and his parents, symbolized by the sea, and on the left her Mexican mother and her parents, symbolized by the land and a faintly rendered map of Mexico that appears above her grandparents’ heads. Kahlo was fluent in German and closely monitored the rise of Nazism in Europe. She made this painting shortly after Hitler passed the Nuremberg laws, forbidding interracial marriage. While the painting adopts the format of genealogical charts used by the Nazis to advocate racial purity, Kahlo uses it subversively to affirm her mixed origins.