NTT DOCOMO’s Emoji Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has acquired the original set of 176 emoji (1999) designed by Shigetaka Kurita for the Japanese mobile phone company NTT DOCOMO. Described by Paul Galloway, a specialist in MoMA’s architecture and design department, as “12-by-12-pixel humble masterpieces of design”, the images are the basis for the almost 1,800 emoji in use today. The characters join other digital design objects in MoMA’s collection, including the @ symbol, which was purchased in 2010, and video games such as Pac-Man (1980) and Tetris (1984). An installation tracing the evolution of the emoji will go on show at the museum this month.
Sculptures by Cy Twombly Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Cy Twombly Foundation has donated five bronze sculptures by the artist, created between 1980 and 2011, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Shortly before his death, Twombly selected the works for an exhibition there in 2011. The sculptures were shown alongside his monumental, ten-painting series Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), which the museum acquired in 1989. Next spring, the bronzes will be reunited with the Homer-inspired epic when it returns from an exhibition in Paris.
Works on paper by Helen Saunders Courtauld Gallery, London
The Samuel Courtauld Trust has acquired 20 works on paper by the English painter Helen Saunders, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and pioneer of the Vorticist movement. The part-gift, part-purchase from Saunders’s descendant Brigid Peppin and her husband includes works in ink, watercolour and gouache spanning the artist’s career. Because much of her art has been lost, the acquisition represents the largest group of Saunders’s works in a museum collection.