Twenty years ago, the last expansion and renovation of the Museum of Modern Art brought significant changes so the place could essentially stay the same, fulfilling its original commitment to clarify and celebrate the richest of late 19th and 20th Century art.
Now, owing to an expansion and renovation that again almost doubles the museum’s space, that can be said no longer. The new MoMA is so different a place from any time in the museum’s 75-year history that its original commitment has been pushed to a middle ground, from which it will continue to recede while the institution pursues related interests.
This is not conjecture. The new building and how it is used send a message that had been sounded with increasing frequency since the last expansion. It was underlined for a generation by what the museum sold and bought. And it was restated in the space that served as the museum’s temporary quarters in Long Island City. The glamorous new structure in midtown Manhattan gives it different form, but the message is the same: The Museum of Modern Art wants to be known for serving more actively contemporary art than the work that gave its identity.
In a state-supported museum system, MoMA might have become for the 20th Century what the Musee d’Orsay in Paris is for the 19th — a museum consecrated to only that segment of art history it has treated through the finest works held in the greatest depth. But, clearly, that was not thought to be enough in the United States.
Here the most money and prospective gifts are now in the area of contemporary art, and the same has been presumed of audience interest. The supposed relevance of contemporary art is an especially significant consideration if you charge the highest admission fee of any major art museum in the world ($20 at MoMA). So you must not only emphasize the intent to acquire contemporary art but also the ability to show it in an edifice big enough to accommodate more of it so many more people will come see it — even if it’s not what you are.
(“Modern” and “contemporary” may be used as synonyms in everyday speech, but they do not mean the same things in art.
Taking a historical approach, MoMA’s first director, Alfred Barr, was among the first scholars to chart the parameters and characteristics of modern art. He diagrammed the sources, influences and crosscurrents of work created from 1850 to 1925. That is part of the intellectual foundation of the museum.
Others extended the time span, eventually through the 1960s, after which it was said the methods and values of the modern movement no longer influenced artistic creation. The classification “contemporary” picks up there.)
Contemporary from the start
The new MoMA makes us aware of its new commitment from the start, in a lobby extending the entire block from 53rd to 54th Street. No matter the side entered, visitors are put in a more contemporary frame of mind by a huge piece from the 1960s or 1970s.
Only later, against a view of the beautifully enlarged sculpture garden, does one confront works by modern masters before mounting a staircase to the single largest space in the museum, a six-story atrium that, like the lobby, is about dazzlement, congregation, orientation, and passage rather than contemplation or study.
Five large works are shown in the atrium. The Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Brice Marden date from 1963 to 1993. The Claude Monet is from 1920. It’s the kind of piece for which a half century of viewers came to MoMA.
But now it looks out of place. Where its large scale originally was emphasized in relation to easel paintings shown in galleries around it, here, detached from everything in its period and left to float in a contemporary immensity of plaster, stone and glass, with even windows giving views from floors high above, the scale relationship is reversed and a picture that should feel outsize is, in fact, dwarfed. (Something worse happens with Henri Matisse’s “Dance I,” which in order to be seen through a window in the atrium is installed behind a staircase; when in the gallery, one has to stand on the stairs to view it straight on.)
The 1984 MoMA also had large, “public” works in the lobby and at each entrance to galleries. One memorable siting was of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of St. John the Baptist, which makes a “behold” gesture with one hand. This was at the threshold of the first room of the painting and sculpture collection. The gallery held paintings by Paul Cezanne, who worshipped Rodin. But history proved the supplicant more important than the idol, so the sculpture of St. John was placed to presage the greater artistic coming.
Chronological relationship
That kind of relationship — witty but also meaningful — is now absent, as pieces are out on every landing, to greet viewers at escalators, elevators and staircases. (Never mind that people using one conveyance will miss the art at others.) Often the works have a chronological relationship to what will be seen in the galleries. But then certain departments — prints and illustrated books, architecture and design — again lead with contemporary works (sometimes few, sometimes many) before taking viewers back to the beginning of their modern collections.
On each floor, then, the museum repeats in microcosm its overall arrangement, which presents contemporary galleries on the second level, before the great modern collection beginning on five and concluding on four. As at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, to make chronological sense, you now have to start near the top and work down.
The roughly chronological display of painting and sculpture — Edgar Degas (1882) to Andrew Wyeth (1948) in Part I, Roberto Matta Echaurren (1942) to Richard Diebenkorn (1979) in Part II — happily restores the sense lost in the museum’s brief period of thematic arrangement.
Much is made of how these galleries have more than one entrance and exit, which allow viewers glimpses of as many as seven other rooms at one time. It is meant to suggest that the current reading of modern art is less linear than earlier ones at the museum. But this is an issue rather like the new windows in many galleries that give views outside. It’s decidedly secondary to what works are shown and how they are treated.
Always there will be disagreements about selection and installation. The examples most telling for me came at the last renovation. None since has shown as many cross-relationships and linkages between artists as clearly and visually, despite breaks in chronology. The galleries then were fairly small, the better to serve modern easel paintings that essentially are private in the way they address viewers; all but two galleries were carpeted to emphasize that intimacy.
Now the spaces are large, often divided by a central, movable wall, and evoke more contemporary spaces, not least through their blond wood floors. The greater openness allows each work more room, which is welcome. Despite wall vitrines and free-standing cases, however, the arrangements have a touch of streamlined regularity, which perhaps again has something to do with a contemporary consideration: crowd flow.
A serious imbalance
Artists omitted from the inaugural installation are most apparent in the painting and sculpture galleries. But whoever is not there now (for a start: Ensor, Modigliani, Gonzalez and Balthus) may well be some time later. The imbalance shown in the photography galleries that once more tip toward the contemporary is much more serious.
What is said about the history of the medium when Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Weston each is represented by a single work, Walker Evans by two and Cindy Sherman 25? This imbalance happens repeatedly, either through amount of space occupied or number of pictures. MoMA defined modern photography. What’s presented now is not an extended definition but special pleading.
`Difficult’ pieces
And why not, some might ask. Barr approved of Alexander Archipenko, whose sculptures in a key early show outnumbered those of any other artist. Such things happen. But Barr valued “difficulty” in a work of art, and he was known to deliberate mightily over even the most “difficult” pieces before they came into the collection. Now the climate is different.
The contemporary galleries at MoMA run from Gordon Matta-Clark (1974) to Peter Doig (2004), and how many works provide in form, handling, feeling or idea experiences that come close to the rigorous demand of the museum’s modern pieces? DIA Beacon, the year-old museum in upstate New York, has many, but it’s more restrictive than MoMA wants to be. Honestly, though, shouldn’t the Modern still be building its collection that way?
MoMA has some of the best of a number of contemporary artists, from Giovanni Anselmo to Elizabeth Murray and Martin Puryear to Kiki Smith, as well as several in a generally admirable installation of drawings. However, when you have vast spaces to fill — including a permanent video gallery — there’s a priority to fill them, even with pieces as empty as those on view by Damien Hirst, Elizabeth Peyton and Matthew Barney. Like Nature, a museum abhors a vacuum; paradoxically, the vacuous are helping fill it.
For four generations MoMA revealed profundity in all kinds of modern art. Will its still-to-open education center do the same with the contemporary? It had better. Else, the three restaurants, two bookstores, two theaters and enormous special exhibition space in this plain-showy building will readily become what the Modern now seems bent on embracing — entertainment.
