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Modern Art in Technicolor: Art, Film, and American Identity

Jackson Pollock, No. 2, 1950. Mixed media on canvas. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Mr. and Mrs. Reginald R. Isaacs and Family and Purchase through the Contemporary Art Fund, 1965.554.
© Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Film

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street , Cambridge, MA

Focusing on postwar American art and film, this series examines the formation of national identity. Each screening pairs a work from the museums’ modern and contemporary art collection with a film that speaks to its concerns. As in any dialogue, the conversation goes both ways: as the chosen artworks reveal hidden complexities in apparently simple films, the selected films use narrative to tease out and make apparent the aesthetic and social ambitions of art. The series is programmed by Harmon Siegel, a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture program at Harvard.

Today’s film:
John Huston
Moby Dick, 1956 (116 min.; color)

Following the screening, view Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 (in Gallery 1200, on Level 1).

The screening will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Free admission

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.