LONG BEACH, CA.-The Long Beach Museum of Art presents Modernism and the Milton Wichner Collection through August 16, 2009. This exhibition and its related programming highlights the Museum’s important collection of European and American works of modern art including the 1979 gift to LBMA from Milton Wichner, a Los Angeles-based lawyer. On view as part of the Milton Wichner Collection are over two dozen paintings by such seminal modern European artists as Alexej Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Fischinger and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy. In order to provide a wide-ranging survey of modern art in both Europe and the United States during the mid-20th century, the exhibition will also include fifty additional works from LBMA’s collection from such well-known artists as Charles and Ray Eames, Helen Lundeberg, John McLaughlin, Karl Benjamin, Hans Burkhardt and others.

Although the artists represented in Modernism and the Milton Wichner Collection worked in a multitude of styles and materials, they are bound together by their conscious break from earlier artistic traditions, their interest in experimentation and their desire to create universal, abstract forms. In addition, many of the artists in the exhibition were influenced by twentieth century advances in science and technology, including discoveries in the study of molecules and atoms, space exploration, and the development of new materials such as aluminum.

Though primarily made up of paintings, the exhibition also includes sculpture, ceramics, drawing, furniture, prints, and glass.

Modernism and the Milton Wichner Collection also highlights the Long Beach Museum of Art’s current Ahmanson Foundation-funded effort to digitize and make web accessible the Museum’s entire collection of European and American modern art. That effort will be fully realized in the spring of 2009 with the launch of the Modernism Access Project. The first phase of making our collections webaccessible was completed earlier this year with the unveiling of the Ceramics Access Project, now available at www.lbma.org.