CULTURAL TREASURES, THE 1920S AND '30S REVISITED (c) By Polly Guerin

The culture capital of the world invites you to experience a wealth of museum treasures revisiting icons of modernism, The Mystery of the Ordinary and more than meets the eye in the best of New York, and Only in New York my friends. Here’s the scoop!!

THE FUTURIST NORMAN BEL GEDDES In a first collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, at Austin, the Museum of the City of New York presents “Norman Bel Geddes: I Have Seen the Future," which will be on view from October 16 to February 10, 2014. It is the first major exploration of this remarkable visionary’s work. Bel Geddes played a significant role in the 1920’s and ‘30s shaping of modern America. He is best known to New Yorkers for the Futurama exhibition at the 1939-40 World’s Fairs and much of what Americans take as commonplace, such as interstate highways, a visit to a multi-media Broadway show, dinner in a sky-high restaurant were innovations by Geddes. The exhibit brings together 200 never-before-seen drawings, models, photographs and films of theater sets and costumes, housing projects, appliances, airplanes and automobiles. For the schedule of events www.mcny.org Image: Norman Bel Geddes, Motor Car No. 9 (without tail fin) ca. 1933. Courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Bel Geddes Foundation/Harry Ransom Center.

MAGRITTE, The Mystery of the Ordinary Explores the Artist’s breakthrough surrealist years with pivotal works from the 1920’s and 1930’s. On view at The Museum of Modern Art the exhibit showcases an intensely innovative period in which Rene Magritte aligned with the Surrealist movement, and his uncanny depictions of ordinary objects constituted an important new direction in Surrealist art. The exhibition offers fresh insight into the beginnings of Magritte’s extraordinary career as a modern painter and Surrealist artist. Like the artist and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. PICTURED HERE: The Human Condition (1933) brings together two of Magritte’s favorite themes: the window painting” and the “painting within a painting.” For further details www.moma.org MoMA, 11 W. 53rd St.

ART IN THE SPANISH AMERICAN HOME (1492-1898) This is the first major exhibition to explore the private lives, power struggles, and domestic collecting practices of the Spanish Colonial elite, some of the wealthiest people of their time. The Brooklyn Museum brings together some 160 paintings, sculptures, prints, textiles and decorative art objects that demonstrate how the new moneyed classes secured their social status through the spectacular private display of luxury goods, from all over the world. The exhibition invites visitors into an elite Spanish colonial home, beginning with public reception rooms hung with family portraits and filled with luxurious objects and ending with more private rooms where the family received only the most trusted confidants. Through January 12, 2014. www.brooklynmuseum.org

Ta Ta darlings!! A Norman Bel Geddes is my choice this week. Fan mail welcome at pollytalk@verizon.net. Visit Polly’s Blogs at www.pollytalk.com and in the left hand column click on the link to Blogs on fashion, remarkable men and women.