The Museum of Contemporary Art came of age the other night-which is a contradiction in terms, as its local guardian angel delightfully pointed out. ”Our museum is dedicated to being on the cutting edge,” said Joseph Shapiro, sinking a knife into the 21st birthday cake for the Ontario Street temple of the avant garde. ”So it can never be `mature`, no matter how old it gets.”
Shapiro and 300 fellow supporters celebrated with a black-tie dinner-dance in museum galleries that were stripped of their usual abstract contents for the occasion. Promptly at 12:30 that afternoon, packing crates full of the Museum of Contemporary Art`s most recent offering, a traveling exhibit of Gerhard Richter`s paintings, were dispatched to Washington`s Hirshhorn Gallery. On the loading dock they passed the caterer`s tables, reported Maia Mullin, cochair of the event.
So patrons wouldn`t be completely thrown off their cultural bearings, dinner plates were garnished with a flowery reminder of the museum`s beyond-the-bourgeois esthetic. Mullin and her committee circulated through the crowd noting that the nasturtiums atop party-goers` salads were edible.
”The new is always difficult,” noted Helyn Goldenberg, a past board president, explaining the museum`s basic premise. ”That`s why we`ve taken the education of the public`s taste as our chief mission.”
Lewis Manilow, another past president, recalled that Chicago`s collective pallet needed considerable updating two decades ago when the museum was conceived.
”There were only a very few dealers and collectors in town,” Manilow said. ”My wife and I bought our first serious work, a Paul Klee, from the Frumkin Gallery for $200, a price tag, which shows how Chicagoans were still intimidated by modern stuff.”
Nor were those fears confined to the plastic arts, added Tom Henry, a voice coach with 28 years of service at Clemente High School. As a dozen of his students played Caribbean-beat cocktail-hour music, Henry explained how he came to his post as conductor of Clemente`s steel-drum band.
”One day in the `60s, a bunch of steel barrels were droped off at the school, and the other music teachers scrammed quick. So I said: `What the heck; I`ll give it a shot,` ” Henry recalled, while his students beat out a calypso tune. The young people`s blue jeans and warmup jackets provided nice visual relief from a sea of tuxes and peak-a-boo bodices.
Architect Helmut Jahn observed that the museum`s founders deserved credit for their artistic prescience as well as their bankrolls. ”They were far ahead of the crowd,” said Jahn, who has made considerable post-modern additions to Chicago`s skyline. ”To collect Picasso now you don`t need courage, only money.”
With a hint of pride, Shapiro, the museum`s founding father, recalled how he found his esthetic tastes: By riding the streetcar, like a teenage cultural Columbus, from his family`s West Side home to the Art Institute.
”My parents were dear people, but as Russian immigrants they didn`t know modern art from borscht,” the 80-year-old Shapiro said. ”Actually, borscht is what they knew something about.”
