Paris
1956 · Lithograph
composition (irreg.): 21 1/8 × 15 1/4" (53.7 × 38.7 cm); sheet: 25 7/8 × 19 11/16" (65.7 × 50 cm)
Museum of Modern Art
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Loren MacIver
American, 1909
PaintingSurrealism
Representation
None documented
23
Institutional Exhibitions
7
Works in Collection
16
Assets Indexed
3
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
90%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Movements
- • Surrealism
Related Artists
No edges recorded
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
America Seen: Between The Wars
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1961
No image
Painting and Sculpture from the James Thrall Soby Collection
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1961
No image
Art Lending Service Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1960
No image
XXVth Anniversary Exhibition: Paintings from the Museum Collection
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1954–1955
No image
Polio Poster Competition
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1949
About
Why this artist matters now
Loren MacIver was an American painter whose delicate, jewel-toned compositions drew from everyday urban and domestic subjects magnified to monumental scale. Working primarily in oil on canvas, she created intimate abstractions rooted in observed detail, a sidewalk crack, a puddle, a storefront, transformed into intricate, rhythmic fields of color and texture. Her work emerged in the postwar period as a distinctly lyrical alternative to both gestural abstraction and rigid geometric formalism. MacIver's paintings balance precision with spontaneity, rendering the overlooked and marginal as subjects of sustained aesthetic contemplation.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 25d ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
Surrealism
Medium
Painting
Related Artists
12 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (7)
Record
Images
Related artists
Adjacent in the graph
Martin Schongauer
Shared movement
Jérémie Marié
Shared movement
Joan Brossa
Shared movement
Hugo Gellert
Shared movement
Ernest J. Bellocq
Shared movement
Knud Merrild
Shared movement
Lisa Yuskavage
Also painting
Robert Ryman
Also painting
Adolph Gottlieb
Also painting
Jasper Johns
Also painting
Neo Rauch
Also painting
Richard Artschwager
Also painting
Record
Movements and affiliations
Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
In collection
Art Institute of Chicago
Record