Miniature

Though smaller in size than the artists' usual works, the works in Modernism in Miniature gain their heft from their big-name creators.

[Modernism in Miniature](https://www.nortonsimon.org/exhibitions/2020-2029/modernism-in-miniature/), at the Norton Simon Museum, explores modern art through the lens of the tiny. Today, of course, we are accustomed to purchasing the very large in the form of the very small. 2” (1920-22), an ornate box crafted by Albert Schulze (an expert at the wood technique “intarsia”) with nothing inside, serving as a commentary on the desire to catalogue and possess. This is, perhaps, part of the joke: these works are no more accessible than their larger cousins. The exhibition was organized by Frances Lazare. Feininger the elder, an active member of the Bauhaus movement, also took to making toys, and the heads look like toy versions of totemic sculptures. That many miniatures are themselves works about artworks seems a kind of commentary on collectibility — namely, who has access to art — alongside the opportunity that miniaturization affords in improving the ability to own, transport, and display art for a broader range of viewers. The show features miniatures from Picasso himself: five bronze sculptures of women (all simply titled “Woman” and numbered) are lined up and set against a lithograph titled “Collection of Small Pictures.” Both the print and the sculptures read as sketches rather than final pieces. 1950), which contains reproductions of the works of German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, and Kurt Schwitters’s “Lust Murder Box No. — Much of modern art, like modern cinema, modern architecture, and modern warfare, plays out in large scale, taking up literal space in an effort to shift the conversation toward the modernist notion of progress and its celebration of human achievement. Other tiny museums in the show include Joseph Cornell’s “Hôtel du Nord (Little Dürer)” (c. But today, in whatever era of aesthetics we’ll eventually settle on calling this period, some of the most globally impactful media play out in miniature, on tiny screens that we carry with us and consume on the train, toilet, or couches in front of televisions.