'Matisse: The Red Studio' (MoMA, 1 May-10 September 2022)

 

In May, my friend Diana and I decided to pay a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to see an interesting Matisse show.  It was based on his 1911 painting The Red Studio (L’Atelier rouge), a painting of his actual workspace in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb southwest of Paris. 

In The Red Studio are several other paintings hanging on the walls—paintings of paintings—and several other works of art.  (Does that make it meta-painting?)

MoMA has gathered all the paintings-in-the-painting together, along with the other pieces, and is exhibiting them as a show called Matisse: The Red Studio (1 May-10 September 2022). 

Since I liked the Matisse artworks I’d seen anyway, it sounded like a fun show.  So, Diana and I met at MoMA on Wednesday, 31 September.  I’m sorry to report that I found it a disappointing show.  

Henri Matisse (1869-1954), a French painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, lived and worked in Issy-les-Moulineaux from 1909 to 1917.  He painted The Red Studio, “known as a foundational work of modern art and a landmark in the centuries-long tradition of studio painting” in the words of MoMA, in the fall of 1911. 

In the six-foot-tall-by-seven-foot-wide painting are seven of Matisse’s other paintings, including innovative works like Le Luxe II (1907-08) to less well-known works, such as Corsica, The Old Mill (1898).  The exhibit, which includes The Red Studio, will bring together this work with the surviving six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic by Matisse depicted on its canvas. 

The seventh painting, Large Nude (Grand nu à la Colle, 1911) was destroyed after the artist’s death at his request because he considered it unfinished.  It was a portrait of the artist’s daughter, Marguerite Matisse–later Duthuit, 1894-1982—when she was about 17.  Apparently, at the turn of the 20th century, a young woman posing nude for her father wasn’t considered disconcerting.

(Marguerite posed for many of her father’s paintings; in fact, she was his most frequent model.  Large Nude, however, exists today only in black-and-white photographs and the image in The Red Studio and the watercolor copy [now in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow] Matisse sent to Sergei Shchukin, 1854-1936, the patron who commissioned it.

(One further comment on Large Nude: the name of Matisse’s daughter Marguerite is also the French word for daisy, the flower.  Daisy images are featured in many of the paintings of Marguerite, such as the background of Large Nude—visible in The Red Studio—and on the dress she wears in The Painter’s Family, 1911, also commissioned by Shchukin.)

The Red Studio and the artworks depicted in it were assembled in one of the Robert B. Menschel Galleries on the third floor for their first reunion, according to the museum’s publicity materials, since they were together in Matisse’s studio at the time The Red Studio was made. 

(I find a discrepancy here that I haven’t been able to resolve.  In another of the Menschel Galleries, a wall panel noted that the art from the Issy-les-Moulineaux studio traveled to London with Matisse when he showed them, along with The Red Studio [when it was still called Red Panel or Panneau rouge], at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition there in 1912.  Perhaps, since the works came from and returned to the studio without being scattered to the four winds, they weren’t seen as being “reunited” until Matisse: The Red Studio.  Of course, that’s just my guess based on a parsing of the museum’s hype.)

In another gallery of the show, paintings and drawings related to The Red Studio attempted to illustrate the history of the painting, including its rejection by the wealthy Russian textile merchant Shchukin; its international travels; and its eventual acquisition by MoMA in 1949.  “We’re reconstructing every move that led to the creation of that painting,” said Dorthe Aagesen, one of the organizers of Matisse: The Red Studio.

In what the New York Times called “a marvel of detective work,” the exhibit was organized by Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, and Aagesen, Chief Curator and Senior Researcher at SMK (Statens Museum for Kunst), the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen; with the collaboration of Georges Matisse (the artist’s great-grandson) and Anne Théry, curators of the Archives Henri Matisse in Issy-les-Moulineaux (in the house that once contained the workshop of the artist).

Following its presentation at MoMA, Matisse: The Red Studio will travel to SMK for display from 13 October 2022 through 26 February 2023.

Now, let me address a couple of personal disappointments that may give readers a clue about where I’m coming from when I say I was disappointed in this show.  First, I said earlier that I liked the Matisse art that I’d seen before, so I looked forward to seeing Matisse: The Red Studio. 

I’m from Washington, D.C., see—as many ROTters might have guessed.  When I was young and lived there and then later, after I settled in New York City and returned often to visit my parents until their deaths, I often went to one or another of the District area’s art museums, of which, I imagine most of you know, there are dozens.

Among my favorite galleries—one of quite a few, actually—was the Matisse cut-outs, which I visited nearly every time I went to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, which was often.  They were in one of the tower rooms above the main galleries and I loved just to look at them.  They were like wonderful children’s art, except not.

I don’t remember seeing a solo exhibit of Matisse’s paintings anywhere until last month, though.  I saw many of his canvases individually among other art, of course, and I especially remember paintings like Icarus (1947; MoMA) and Dance I (1909; MoMA), and sculptures such as Reclining Nude II (1927; Metropolitan Museum of Art), a small bronze.  Apparently, I was spoiled and didn’t know it.

Second, I said I thought the MoMA show would be fun.  I figured the reuniting of the art in The Red Studio was really just a curator’s excuse for mounting a Matisse exhibit in the same way I thought that Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night at MoMA in 2008-09 was a (silly) excuse to put together a Van Gogh show (reported as part of “Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008),” 12 October 2016).  The curatorial rationale was just a blind, I figured.

Well, it wasn’t so much.  First of all, the supporting art, the pieces that were promoted as informative background and illustrations of the techniques and concepts the experts posit are what Matisse was up to in The Red Studio, was way too inside-baseball for my interest. 

Do I really need to know that Matisse invented the Venetian red he used for the walls of his studio in the painting?  Or that he was working on making the outer painting (that is, the studio itself) as well as the paintings-in-the-painting flatter than a 2-D canvas is anyway?  Really?  Does that help me appreciate the art more?  I don’t think so!

Where I could even understand the explanatory material—that is, the wall panels—it was pretty much TMI.  It seemed like so much padding—to fill out the galleries beyond the six paintings, three sculptures, and one hand-painted dish.  That wouldn’t make a museum show—it’s a display window.

I’ve admitted before that my enjoyment of art isn’t tied to the artists’ techniques or their observance of some principles of art.  I’m not an artist and I never took an art class.  (My companion Diana, who is an amateur painter and has been a serious art student, gets into that stuff.)  I go with my gut.  If looking at a piece of art excites me, or makes me smile, or moves me, that’s all I’m looking for.

Second of all, I was saddened to find that even the main art, the pieces that are in The Red Studio, were mostly uninteresting to me.  I couldn’t get into them much.  A few pieces, if I may fall back on how my mother and I used to judge art we liked, were worth coming back for on a Midnight Shopping Trip (Le Luxe II and maybe Bathers, 1907; oh, and Decorative Figure, 1908, a two-foot-tall bronze).

Matisse and his family—daughter, Marguerite (born to his model before he married his wife in 1898); wife, Amélie (Parayre) Matisse (1872-1958); sons, Jean (1899-1976) and Pierre (1900-89)—moved to Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1909, to a house surrounded by a garden.  On an adjoining property, he built a workshop (since demolished), custom-designed for making his art.  (The Matisses lived there until 1917, when he went to live in southern France.)

Aside from The Red Studio, the artist made another painting of his workroom: The Pink Studio, also from 1911.  This work, seen in illustrations in the MoMA exhibit, is at the Pushkin Museum.  My only point in bringing it up here is to show that the Issy-les-Moulineaux studio isn’t actually red. 

Following on his Fauvist period (1900-05), Matisse continued to paint in bold colors that weren’t necessarily part of his subjects’ natures.  He chose the colors, such as the Venetian red of The Red Studio and the soft, vibrant pink of The Pink Studio, for artistic and emotive reasons, not representational ones.

(Fauvism is a style of painting in the first decade of the 20th century, of which Matisse was a founding proponent, that emphasized strong, vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes that didn’t correspond to the way things appeared in real life.  When the Fauvists’ paintings were exhibited in 1905, a critic derisively described the works—with their expressive and non-naturalistic palette—as the product of fauves, French for ‘wild beasts.’)

In an earlier version of the studio painting, Matisse depicted it as a blue-grey interior with a pink floor and yellow furniture.  He overpainted it in the Venetian red, except the artworks in the studio.  The walls of the artist’s workroom were actually white.

Quite by accident, Diana and I viewed Matisse: The Red Studio starting with the supporting exhibit.  The entrance to the Menschel Galleries is between the two rooms and we went right into the gallery displaying paintings and drawings closely related to The Red Studio intended to illuminate the picture’s history. 

In an introductory panel outside the exhibit, the curators informed us that Matisse was “a highly controversial figure” at the time he painted The Red Studio and that poet, playwright, and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) named the artist “as among the ‘most disparaged’ artists of the time.”  This was news to me! 

Of the painting itself, the panel stated it had been greeted with “inscrutability and rejection.”  Though today The Red Studio is considered “one of the most renowned and influential landmarks of modern art,” the curators described it as “one of the most complex experiments of his career, a monochrome-but-not, flat-yet-deep composition that served as a proving ground for [Matisse’s] radical rethinking of modern painting.” 

These were clues to the negative rep under which Temkin and Aagesen asserted Matisse suffered.  But what had he actually done to warrant such opprobrium?  Matisse: The Red Studio’s second gallery (which Diana and I entered first), was an effort to explain these statements.  As I reported earlier, I found the attempt overfilled with details that went mostly over my head. 

Among the materials in this display, alongside paintings that illustrated aspects of innovative painting techniques Matisse used in The Red Studio, were artifacts and documents, such as archival photographs and letters.  There was also a section, on video in a separate room off the gallery, on the science of conservation and new findings on the process of creating the painting.

Another section of this gallery was devoted to the construction of the building, the inside of which The Red Studio depicts.  Altogether, this part of the exhibit was described as recounting the “biography” of the painting. 

I did learn, though, that Sergei Shchukin, the Russian collector who’d commissioned The Red Studio, had rejected the finished painting.  Having acquired a new house, the 18th-century Trubetskoy Palace in Moscow, Shchukin requested a series of works from Matisse to decorate it.  He bought The Pink Studio, among many other Matisse canvases, including Dance II (1909-10) and Music (1910), but not the painting in question here.

In a letter responding to the artist who, having sent his patron the requested water-color copy of The Red Studio, described the new painting, Shchukin said he preferred Matisse’s paintings with people in them.  This was almost certainly a flimsy excuse for not buying the commissioned work, since Shchukin had bought a number of Matisse paintings without figures, notably The Pink Studio.

Shchukin had a vast collection of modern art.  Among the works in his palace home were 38 by Henri Matisse.  (He fled Russia during the revolution in 1917 and his art collection was nationalized by the Bolshevik government.  The art was split between the Hermitage in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, and the Pushkin Museum.)

The Red Studio remained unsold for the next 16 years.  During that time, the painting was shown in several exhibits; it was met with bafflement or indifference.  It was finally bought in 1927 by David Tennant, the founder of London’s exclusive Gargoyle Club, a members-only club that catered to artists, writers, celebrities, and aristocrats.  The painting hung in the club’s ballroom until it was purchased in 1945 by Georges Keller, director of the Bignou Gallery in New York.  

Once ensconced in New York, the painting received much better appreciation.  American critics took to it avidly, and American artists absorbed its influence.  In 1949, The Red Studio was acquired for MoMA’s collection.

I repeat what I said earlier about this part—half of the Matisse exhibit, or more if you count the individual items displayed: I found it too esoteric and too detailed to be relevant to my reason for coming to this show.  It seemed like filler to me—what in the army we used to call “eye-wash,” stuff we added to a briefing to make it seem weightier than it really was and make it look flashier.

(By the way, I don’t contend that art conservation isn’t both important and interesting.  I posted “Conserving Modern Art” on Rick On Theater on 11 December 2018 [with a passing mention of the subject in “Morris Louis,” 15 February 2010].)

We then crossed back over to the other gallery where The Red Studio was hanging with the six remaining paintings Matisse depicted in the work and the four additional pieces of his art that appear in the canvas.

Of interest here, were—aside from just seeing the artworks live that the artist had painted in his studio painting (that meta-art thing)—was the 1898 Corsica, The Old Mill, the oldest piece shown in The Red Studio.  It’s a charming—New York Times art writer Roberta Smith called it “luscious”—little (15³/₁₆" × 18⅛") Impressionistic painting made in Ajaccio shortly after he and Amélie were married, with tiny brushstrokes that blend together like the dots in Pointillism. 

Unlike his later Fauvist paintings, the colors, though not individually Naturalistic, combine to evoke a sense of reality, but taken from the perception of the artist at the moment of viewing, rather than an objective or empirical appraisal.

Other pieces I enjoyed were Le Luxe II, with nude female figures much like those in Dance I, which I already acknowledged I like, and the sculpture Decorative Figure, a somewhat muscular-looking nude woman half-perched on a square pedestal with her legs crossed. 

Matisse apparently didn’t paint many male figures, but one of the paintings from The Red Studio is a teenage fisherman in Young Sailor II (1906), sitting in quarter profile in a peach-colored room, dressed in bright green pants and a blue pullover and cap.  He has very strangely shaped eyes—almost Asian—with a green cast not to the iris, but the cornea.  He also has a green line over his upper lip, like a peculiarly colored pencil mustache.  I’d say Young Sailor was a clear example of the artist’s Fauvist period, right smack in the middle of which it falls.

The Red Studio itself, hanging in the very center of the main wall opposite the entrance, is pretty much as odd as the various descriptions and analyses I cited earlier suggest.  First, the canvas is virtually all red except for the art within the painting and a few other objects.  Not only the walls and the floor are red, but the several pieces of furniture are the same color as well.  The artist was clearly spotlighting his work by obscuring everything else in monochrome red.

The curious technique Matisse used to draw those furniture pieces is striking if for no other reason than the painstaking care it must have taken to paint them.  The artist didn’t paint the canvas red all over and then take some other color and sketch in the outlines of the chairs, tables, stools, chest of drawers, and grandfather clock (with no hands).  No, he painted an undercoat, yellow in this case, and then painted the Venetian red ever so carefully so that he left the thinnest of lines of the yellow to create an outline, not thicker than a pencil line, of all those other objects, looking like red ghosts of furniture. 

Only one piece of furniture in the room is more fully realized: a yellow rattan chaise.  It’s on the right-hand side of the painting, directly across from the painting-in-painting rendering of Large Nude, hanging on the studio’s left wall.  Marguerite, Matisse’s daughter and model, is reclining in that same chaise.  For this and a couple of other reasons, the New York Times art reviewer Blake Gopnik thinks “Matisse meant his daughter’s naked image to be the true focus of “The Red Studio,” or at least its hidden theme.”

Then there’s the perspective.  There isn’t any.  Just left of center in the canvas is a corner, but the two walls and the floor together are as flat as a crêpe.  It’s almost like a child’s drawing.  (Okay, there’s a tiny indication of perspective—on the left-hand wall.  It’s mostly provided by the frame of Large Nude whose right edge Matisse suggests is farther away than the left by making it shorter.  But that’s pretty much all.)

As far as I’m concerned, its chief interest was in matching up the real paintings with the artist’s rendering of them in The Red Studio.

According to MoMA, Matisse rarely depicted himself in his art.  I’ve seen reproductions of one or two self-portraits, so evidently, he did it occasionally.  Instead of painting his own picture, as, say, Van Gogh did so often, Matisse turned to a common subject among artists: the studio painting. 

In this exhibit alone, there’s evidence of a number of paintings either of his workplace (The Pink Studio; Studio Under the Eaves, 1903) or of sections of it (Still Life with Geraniums, 1910).  He was inviting viewers into the place where he created.  Curator Temkin asserts that, for Matisse, this glimpse at his work and his workspace is the same as a self-portrait. 

On a table down front in the studio is a small box of blue pencils or crayons.  Since the artist isn’t present in the atelier, he’s represented by the art on view—the results of his creativity—and the pencils—his means of creating.  No other evidence of the work that happens in this space is visible: no easels, canvases in progress, brushes, paints, palettes.  The art, it seems, happens by magic.  Even time doesn’t pass here, since the clock has no hands.

The exhibit doesn’t specifically answer the question of why Matisse was so vilified in the Paris art world of the early 1900s.  The issue of the disparagement and ignoring of The Red Studio is a little clearer, however. 

First, the decision to paint it all over in red, nearly making it a monochromatic canvas, was radical for Matisse’s day.  It eventually led to Mark Rothko (1903-70), who was directly influenced by The Red Studio when it was first shown at MoMA in 1949, and the Color Field painters such as Clifford Still (1904-80), Robert Motherwell (1915-91), and Barnett Newman (1905-70).

Matisse wasn’t an Abstract artist, like those other fellows, but he may well have opened the door to Abstract Expressionism, a style of art that developed in the immediate aftermath of World War II and continues to be a mainstay of American and European painting and sculpture.

Having started out as an Impressionist (Corsica, The Old Mill), the critical establishments as well as the public resisted when the artist turned to Fauvism—hence the “wild beast” epithet—and then moved on to absorb influences from Cubism (Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973, was a great friend—and rival—after Gertrude Stein introduced them at one of her salons) and Primitivism, ultimately developing the “Henri Matisse style.”

His influence on modern art wasn’t recognized or appreciated until later in his career, so in his early years, say until the ’30s, the critical and buying establishments rejected his work and even fellow artists, confused at what he was doing, didn’t embrace him.  He was defying all the rules and changing everything, and I think they just resented that.

But, of course, the Impressionists had done the same thing some 40 years earlier, and then the Post-Impressionists followed.  Matisse was just in the vanguard of the next wave,

Even Matisse himself wasn’t sure where he was headed.  Of The Red Studio, the artist was reported to have said, “I like it, but I don’t quite understand it.”

Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, disclosed that Matisse’s “experiments on canvas broke so radically with norms, and triggered so much derision, that he was tormented by anxieties, undone by insomnia, near paralyzed by doubt.”  (Among Smee’s books is Side by Side: Picasso v Matisse [Duffy and Snellgrove, 2002].  He was a finalist for another criticism Pulitzer in 2009.)

Overall, today’s art critics are far more positive about Henri Matisse and his work than their early-20th-century counterparts were.  MoMA’s Matisse: The Red Studio garnered a lot of very positive attention in the press.

Lance Esplund called The Red Studio “monumental yet intimate—somewhere between picture and picture window” in the Wall Street Journal.  He expanded:

Opaque yet airy, flat yet malleable, Matisse's saturated red plane . . . reads as floor, walls, objects and open space; as solid, fluid, atmosphere and void.  The red expanse also, most perplexingly, feels alive, breathing.  The painting strikes first not as a room filled with stuff but, like a cymbal crash, as a vibrating emotional chord, an overflow of feeling.

Of the MoMA show, Esplund characterized it as “equally enlightening and engaging,” but he went on about the painting: “Matisse’s red conundrum is among the most audacious and pivotal of early Modern pictures.  In this exhibition . . . ‘The Red Studio’ feels no less radical today.”

Despite its overarching tension between taut flatness and deep space, “The Red Studio” stops short of pure abstraction.  But even after more than a century of abstract painting, Matisse’s heaving, buckling, elastic red room inspires discord, awe.  Matisse (1869-1954) is improvising here on the nature of representational painting space, in which we understand that a room has navigable height, width and depth.  But it’s a gateway to modernist abstraction’s multidimensionality and pliable flat plane.  As Matisse warps space, dissolves corners, collapses a table into the floor and challenges differentiations among objects, materials and locations, he challenges our notion of what a painting can be.

Commenting on the effect of the underpainting as it shows through the red over-coat, the Journalist asserted:

Throughout the canvas, ghostly outlines of underpainted ocher, blue, pink, orange, violet and green peek through the red plane.  Bleeding forward, they read as veins of pure light or preliminary contour drawing.  It’s as if the composition were in flux; as if Matisse—free-associating, ruminating, reconsidering—were still scratching the surface.

Esplund’s conclusion is his interpretation of the painting as a whole, an interesting exegesis:

In “The Red Studio”—more cauldron than interior—Matisse meditates on the nature of art and creation.  Here, within the frontal red field, his reimagined and resurrected paintings and sculptures, interrelating, blossom and glow.  The artworks provide the only real places of focus, rest, location.  Matisse is inviting us backstage, into his most sacred space, immersing us in the depths of his own imagination and inspiration.  He’s also holding our faces up to art’s furnace.  By dissolving space, Matisse dissolves time (there is no doorway, no place to stand, no hands on the grandfather clock). There is only Matisse’s art—only the now.  Through this radiant picture window, Matisse—and, by extension, MoMA—offers us a rare portal into the immediacy of the creative act.

In the Washington Post, Sebastian Smee labeled Matisse: The Red Studio “dream-inducing” while he characterized the painting as “overwhelming: It’s the optical-sensuous equivalent of a five-alarm fire.”  The artist, he affirmed,

had come to understand what today (thanks largely to him) seems obvious: that color intensity is a function of size; that a square foot of red (to put it another way) is redder than a square inch of the same red.  Compare this with the immediately preceding avant-garde movements, Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, which broke color into smaller and smaller units, and you can grasp the profundity of Matisse’s revolution.

The WaPo reviewer affirmed: “‘The Red Studio’ stops short of abstraction.  And just as its allover, uninflected red doesn’t entirely flatten out the space (perspective lines, painted in reserve, remain to suggest depth), the colored works arrayed around the studio break up the monochrome with exquisite harmonies.”

In conclusion, Smee quipped of the painting: “Just look at it.  It may have achieved eminence, but it will never look old.”

The New York Times’ art critic Roberta Smith described Matisse: The Red Studio as “a small but spectacular exhibition that dissects one of the artist’s greatest early paintings.”  Smith felt that the painting is

a statement of the artist’s values.  The things that matter most to Matisse—from paintings and sculptures to an open box of blue pastels—are depicted here in their true colors.  But most of the painting’s bulky items—two tables, two chairs, a chest of drawers and a grandfather clock whose face lacks hands, as if time stood still in the artist’s studio—appear almost as phantoms: They exist only as ocher outlines in the mass of red, brightened here and thereby little glimmers of pink and blue, felicitous leftovers from an earlier version of the painting.

Smith’s concluding assessment of MoMA’s Matisse show compared it to larger, more inclusive exhibits:

This season New York has had more than its share of large, exhausting exhibitions, among them MoMA’s Cézanne and Joseph Yoakum shows and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Surrealism survey.  Seeing them was a challenge from which I emerged feeling drained, retaining a blurred experience and wondering “Who is this for?”  Specialists who are at least 5-foot-10 and run marathons?  In contrast, “Matisse: The Red Studio” gives you many fewer artworks but allows deeper concentration.  You come away feeling restored, like you have been given a gift.

Blake Gopnik, also in the New York Times (which ran three rather large articles about this show, two of them reviews) dubbed Matisse: The Red Studio “a brilliantly focused exhibition.”  He advised, “Art lovers will want to catch the exhibition, or catch it again and again, before it closes” (which it will just today).

In his opening to the review, Gopnik presented elements of The Red Studio’s backstory as if it were “promotional copy for a true-crime drama.”  Then he explained that he’d come to MoMA three times to see this small show to suss out “a story that, for something like 100 years now, has lain camouflaged beneath the painting’s red surface.”

Gopnik spends the rest of his review raising questions that come to his mind while viewing (and re-viewing) The Red Studio and then speculating on the answers, sometimes with and sometimes without evidence.

The Financial Times’ Ariella Budick insisted that The Red Studio “hasn’t relinquished the ability to rattle and exhilarate.  Its radicalism endures.”  “MoMA has built an enchanting little show around that single masterpiece,” Budick added.

“The resulting mini-retrospective-within-a-show,” felt the FT reviewer, “traces Matisse’s growth and desires as they manifested in 1911.”

Karen Wilkin of The New Criterion labeled the MoMA Matisse exhibit “something wonderful” and “dazzling.”  The painting itself, she said, is “familiar and yet endlessly fresh.”  As viewers, Wilkin affirmed,

We savor the expanse of resonant, not quite Venetian red, check off the representations of works we know well, and puzzle over less familiar ones.  We note the complex interplay of drawing and planes of color, as well as the even more complex (and tedious to describe) relationship of like and unlike elements, and much else.  It’s always exciting to spend time with The Red Studio, but now the elegant, ample moma installation surrounds us with the actual paintings, sculptures, and the ceramic plate we know so well from their “portraits” in the picture, each presented individually but in close enough proximity that we can compare the real thing with its representation as we contemplate it for its individual merits.

“It’s an art historian’s dream come true,” she added.  The New Criterion writer thought that “the presence of the actual works catalogued in The Red Studio allows us to track Matisse’s path from 1898 to 1911, while the proximity of the real thing to the fictive image sharpens our perception of both.”  Wilkin felt that “seeing The Red Studio brought to life” was a “heady pleasure.” 

In the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl labeled Matisse: The Red Studio “a jewel box of a show” and asserted that the “eloquently mounted” show, “immerses a viewer in the marvels of an artistic revolution that resonates to this day.”

“Gorgeous?” asks Schjeldahl about the painting.  “Oh, yeah,” he answers himself.  “Aesthetic bliss saturates—radically, to a degree still apt to startle when you pause to reflect on it—the means, ends, and very soul of a style that was so far ahead of its time that its full influence took decades to kick in.”

The New Yorker reviewer described his experience viewing The Red Studio:

Contours tend to be summarily indicated by thin yellow lines.  Part of a pale-blue window obtrudes.  But nothing disrupts the composition’s essential harmony, the details striking the eye all at once, with a concerted bang.

On Vulture, the website that posts articles from New York magazine, Jerry Saltz wrote that “The Red Studio is among the most gorgeous lodestars in all of modernism.”  The exhibit, he declared, is “a ravishingly compact show.”  Then Saltz added, “You look around at this art-historical reunion and a long-gone world becomes young again.  It goes off inside you like a depth charge.”

“‘Matisse: The Red Studio’ does a lot in a little space,” reported the New York review-writer, “and reminds us that blockbusters can come in small packages.”  He continued:

In this concise show, we can ponder things longer, linger, make connections, see how one work might grow out of another without feeling overwhelmed, swamped by numbers, and exhausted at the end. . . .  We see how, in an incredibly condensed period of time, an artist can traverse universes and touch down in places unexpected.  We witness an artist not only inventing and reinventing himself but reinventing art history as he does so. In these little spaces, you can almost hear these mighty engines roar.

Saltz declared the painting “an origami of sundering simplicity, setting new geometric ordinances that insist the highly abstract world inside his painting is a real world, imagined or not.”  The studio is, therefore, “both illusionistic and tangible, rational and insane, almost like a cave painting.” 

The painting is “striking” and the exhibit is “enticing,” wrote Melissa Rodman on The Arts Fuse.  “Making the viewer draw visual connections among Matisse’s pieces is at the core of [Matisse:]The Red Studio,” added Rodman. 

“With light-handed, unobtrusive curatorial touches, the first room encourages the viewer to wander around the works of art, seemingly plucked from Matisse’s canvas and dropped into the present,” the Arts Fuse reviewer asserted.  “Together these works gain a certain depth, vivified because of their proximity to the titular painting.  Likewise, the painting comes alive in the presence of the standalone pieces it depicts.”

'Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start' (MoMA, 2021-22)

 

On 1 January 2020, I posted a report called “The ‘New’ MoMA, 2019.”  It was my account of the last visit I made to an art museum, on 19 December 2019, before the pandemic shut-down.  (New York City’s Museum of Modern Art had just reopened on 21 October after an extensive reconstruction of its West 53rd Street building.  This had been my first chance to see the new facility.) 

I hadn’t set foot in any sort of art show since then and, consequently, I hadn’t posted an art report of my own on Rick On Theater since that date.  (I have, though, republished articles on art by other authors.)  Then, on 31 December last year, the day of New Year’s Eve 2021, my usual theater partner, Diana, and I checked out Immersive Van Gogh, a virtual art experience, but not an actual exhibit of art, which was followed on 10 and 13 January by my report on the animated digital video show.

Now I have a true, in-person art exhibit, for the first time in almost 25 months, on which to report.  On Wednesday, 12 January, Diana and I went back to MoMA to catch Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start before it closed on Saturday, 15 January.  (Originally scheduled to close on 7 August 2021, it was extended in June.)

I’m going to try to reboot my art-appreciation eye and re-ink my pen (metaphorically speaking) and see what I can make of my first live art experience in over two years.  So, first I hope I can make something cogent out of this different kind of art immersion (to appropriate the terminology of IVG and its sister programs; there are a dozen, give or take).  Then I have to see if I can articulate that experience to try to communicate it to ROTters.

Wish me luck.  Whatever skills I ever had for this task feel rusty—not to say atrophied. 

Let’s do the prelims—the factual background of the exhibit—and see if that doesn’t limber up the ol’ joints.  (I’m going to take this slow, so bear with me . . . .)

Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start opened on 14 March 2021 in MoMA’s Edward Steichen Galleries on Floor 3.  (There were two pieces in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden outside the first floor; I’ll mention these later.)  The show included approximately 70 artworks supplemented by films, historical photographs, printed matter, letter facsimiles, and other archival materials from MoMA’s own collection, augmented by loans from the Alexander and Louisa Calder Foundation.

Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Zuna Maza and Makayla Bailey, Curatorial Fellows in that department, the exhibition delves deeply into the full breadth of Calder’s career and inventiveness.  Modern from the Start brings together early wire sculptures and carved wood figures, works on paper, jewelry, mobiles in motion (some by way of ancient motors), and monumental abstract sculptures called “stabiles.”  

(Mobile is a word invented by Dada and Surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp [French, 1887-1968] in 1931 to characterize Calder’s moving sculptures.  Stabile was coined by Dada artist Jean (Hans) Arp [German-French, 1886-1966] in 1932 to describe Calder’s non-motile sculptures.  Somehow, I find that neat. 

(Outside the field of invention itself, I don’t know how many folks have had even one word made up just for them—and here’s an artist who not only got two, but the coiners were world-class artists themselves!  That’s like a Nobel Prize in art.)

Diana and I met at the museum at 12:30 on Wednesday afternoon.  As usual, I got there before she did, but I was early, so we were right on time for out timed tickets.  The last time we were at MoMA, Diana was a member (she let her membership lapse over the shut-down) and we had attended a Member After Hours, so we used a different entrance than the main one.  I hadn’t seen the new Entry Lobby since the remodeling.

The main lobby just inside the 53rd Street entrance, next to the Museum Store, used to be basically a wide-open area with large, square hassock-like seats.  I expected to sit on one, facing the doors, and keep an eye out for Diana, as I had the tickets. 

But the redesigned lobby has no seating at all, just rope lines, checkpoints, and counters; the only seats near the entrance were off the left (as you enter) in the West Lobby.  (It’s the space that used to be the store, which is now on the floor below, beneath the West Lobby.)  I wouldn’t be able to see Diana as she went through the vaccination and ID check outside and she’d never see me even after she got inside unless she knew to look there.

So I took the one seat, a hard, unupholstered bench, that was right at the corner of the wall that separates the entrance from the seating area.  I soon lost all feeling in my tush.  (Eventually, I got up to stretch the muscles and took the few steps to my left to where the security guards stand to monitor visitors—and Diana showed up just outside at that moment.)

So, even at this late date, I discovered a consequence of MoMA’s redesign that’s disadvantageous.  I’ll add to that the signage—for where each exhibit is displayed—inadequate and confusing.  The listings of the contents of each gallery are almost all next to the elevators, so first you have to find one.

Then, the directories are light boards—and they change every few seconds.  That means if the exhibit you’re looking for has just been displayed before you find the directory, you have to wait while the sign goes through all its changes floor by floor before the exhibit you want comes up again.

(MoMA, like most art museums, used to have printed guides visitors could carry with them, but like all other printed matter, that courtesy has disappeared.  The brief brochure for each exhibit that was so useful was dispensed with a long time ago.  Everything has migrated over to the museums’ websites and smart-phone apps, it seems.)

Okay, enough bitchin’ and moanin’ for now.  Let’s get to the art and the display thereof.

I should acknowledge here that Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976) is one of my favorite artists.  (There’s a short bio of the artist in “Calder: Hypermobility at the Whitney,” posted on Rick On Theater on 21 August 2017; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/08/calder-hypermobility-at-whitney.html.)  I love his whimsy, his sense of humor, his ingenuity, his inventiveness.  His work makes me chuckle, wonder, imagine and dream, and delight.

One of my favorite Calder pieces, by far his largest mobile and the last major art work he created, the red-and-black Untitled (1976), hangs from the ceiling of the center court of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C. 

I used to visit NGA’s East Building hundreds of times when I went to Washington, and Calder’s Untitled and the Joan Miró (Spanish Surrealist, 1893-1983) tapestry Woman (1977) in the same vast, open atrium just beyond the museum’s entry were always my first pleasures, no matter what show I was there to see. 

Both pieces were removed for cleaning and maintenance, the Calder in 1988 and the Miró on 2003, and I missed them dearly.  (The mobile was returned to its proper place, but the tapestry was replaced.)

For many years, I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.  As much as anything else I accomplished there—mounds of research—I loved walking under Le Guichet (“The Box Office”), Calder’s monumental 1963 black stabile directly in front of the library’s entrance. 

When it, too, was removed during a make-over of the Lincoln Center Plaza, I actually missed it.  I suppose that’s partly because I often used to “open” the library and arrived a few minutes before its noon opening and sat looking at the sculpture or walking around it for the time I had to wait.  (There was also a Henry Moore [English sculptor, 1898-1986] sculpture, Reclining Figure [1963-5], in a pool a few yards north of the Calder.)

I even own a Calder lithograph that’s of the same iconography as the sculptor’s mobiles—the same color palette and the same blobby shapes.  It could, in fact, be seen as a study for a possible mobile (though I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was intended for).  The title, Magie Eolin (1972)—the nearest translation for which I can come up with is “magic of the wind”—might suggest that it was inspired by the wind-driven sculptures so beloved by both the artist himself and his fans.  

I have a faux-Calder mobile in my study, too.  My mother bought it as a gift for my father at one of the Washington museum shops, the NGA or one of the Smithsonians, and they passed it on to me sometime after I moved into my present apartment—which has an extra room for my study/guest room.  It’s not an actual Calder, but it was clearly modeled after his work (and could almost pass for one of Calder’s mobiles . . . if you don’t look too closely).

So you can judge why I was so ready to get to Modern from the Start before it closed.

Calder had a long and symbiotic association with MoMA.  It started when the institution was in its infancy and the sculptor was just beginning his career.  Each gave a boost in prominence and stature to the other. 

In the words of Artbook, a distributor of art books and museum exhibition catalogues, “Through MoMA, Calder came to be known as a pioneer of modern sculpture, and through Calder, MoMA came to understand itself as an American museum of modern art.”

Calder’s work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans, just months after MoMA opened to the public.  (The museum opened in November 1929 and led a peripatetic existence for 9½ years.  Painting and Sculpture ran 3 December 1930-20 January 1931.)

The museum’s unofficial “house artist,” Calder created a number of pieces commissioned by MoMA for special events during its earliest years.  In 1939, for example, when the Museum of Modern Art moved into its permanent home on West 53rd Street, the sculptor made Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a multicolored mobile that still hangs at the top of the lobby’s grand staircase for which it was made.  The staircase, with the mobile, is just outside the exit from the last gallery of Modern from the Start.

Also in 1939, for the celebratory dinner on 8 May MoMA hosted for its tenth anniversary, Calder was commissioned to make huge free-form silver candelabra.  Some of the candelabra, which when connected up looks like a model rollercoaster, were on view in Modern from the Start.

Calder also worked closely with the MoMA curator, in collaboration with artists Marcel Duchamp and Herbert Matter (Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer, 1907-84), on his major 1943 mid-career retrospective at MoMA, Alexander Calder, which introduced the artist, already known in Europe, to an American audience.  

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Calder’s sculptures were a mainstay of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where they have continued to reappear in the succeeding decades.  For Modern from the Start, for example, Man-Eater with Pennants, a giant standing mobile of several different painted metal components affixed to rods that move around a central post by means of air currents, commissioned by MoMA in 1945 for the Sculpture Garden, has been remounted there after an absence of 50 years.

In 1966, ten years before his death, Calder made a gift to MoMA of 19 artworks in order to fill out the institution’s holdings.  The donation included mobiles, stabiles, wood and wire sculptures, and jewelry dating from the 1920s to 1964, making the institution’s Calder holdings the largest and most complete collection by the artist in any museum at the time.  The works were put on display in Calder: 19 Gifts From The Artist (1 February-5 April 1967).

Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start used the connection between the artist and the museum as the lens through which to look at Calder’s career and his art.  It started in a large gallery devoted to the artist’s stabiles (plus one mobile, Snow Flurry, I, 1948) from the 1930s to the ’50s.  The rest of the exhibit proceeded mostly chronologically.  (I won’t, however.)

Cara Manes’s organization clearly revealed that Calder had what amounted to multiple careers.  “One of Calder’s objects is like the sea,” wrote philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (French, 1905-80), “always beginning over again, always new.”  In addition to his several forms of sculpture, he made lithographs, children’s books, jewelry, and theatrical set designs.

I wasn’t in the least disappointed with the exhibit.  The last Calder show I saw, the Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility in 2017, was devoted to the artist’s mobiles, his wonderful kinetic sculptures.  Modern from the Start covered the whole range of Calder’s creativity.

That’s a little like the menu item labeled a “mixed grill,” an assortment of several kinds of broiled or grilled meats and vegetables served together.  My dad wouldn’t ever order such a meal, which he complained included too much of things he didn’t like and not enough of things he did like.

Well, Modern from the Start didn’t suffer from that failing.  It was a wonderful sampler of Calder’s delightful, imaginative creations.  For instance, I hadn’t seen a display of his wire sculptures, whimsical and often satirical little portraits or caricatures made from bent wire—like, maybe, three-dimensional doodles—since I saw Focus: Alexander Calder (14 September 2007-14 April 2008) at MoMA.  Modern from the Start had a terrific selection of about half a dozen examples.

The wire sculptures, made mostly in Paris, were from the 1920s through the ’40s.  The playful figures, both human and animal (Sow, 1928; Cow, 1929), generic (The Hostess, 1928; Portrait of a Man, c. 1928) and famous (Josephine Baker (III), c. 1927; Marion Greenwood, 1928), are delightfully rendered. 

They’re almost childlike, except that they’re too sophisticated in execution, both in terms of ingenuity and visual sense, to be by a child.  Calder’s ubiquitous whimsy is still evident: in Cow, which is otherwise in steel wire, the sculptor gives us several tiny cow pies made from brass!

The Hostess, subtitled Dowager, is a great example.  The forward thrust of her body suggests what a snob she is; the lorgnette, extended almost at arm’s length, is a sort of illustration of looking down her nose; offering the limpest of handshakes shows her sense of her superiority.  All this is communicated by the merest suggestion of corporeality—just like a satirical cartoonist, except Calder used steel wire instead of ink lines.

The wire sculptures were shown with some of Calder’s wood carvings because both artforms were his earliest efforts.  The Horse and Cow were both carved in 1928, the same time Calder was making his wire pieces. 

Cow (not to be confused with the wire sculpture of the same title) is particularly interesting because it looks as if the animal is emerging from the block of wood, possibly a found piece.  The head is sweetly naturalistic, but as the body recedes toward the wood block, it becomes more impressionistic and ambiguous, until it melds into the wood.  It reminded me vaguely of Michelangelo’s explanation of sculpting that his subject lives in the stone and all he has to do is get rid of everything else and the statue emerges.

Except, of course, nothing Michelangelo ever carved was as cute as Calder’s wooden cow.  (I feel I should add at this point that if Vincent van Gogh [Franco-Dutch painter, 1853-90], on whom I blogged on 10 and 13 January, is my all-time favorite painter, Michelangelo [Italian sculptor and painter, 1475-1564] is my all-time favorite sculptor.  My remark was not a put-down, just a differentiation.)

In the section displaying the mobiles, among the many engaging pieces, is one of special significance to this exhibit.  I’m going to give the mobiles short shrift because I covered the topic so extensively in my 2017 Hypermobility report, but I will say some words on 1934’s A Universe, one of Calder’s first motorized mobiles. 

First of all, how could I ignore a work of art that gripped Albert Einstein (1879-1955), according to the museum, so that he “reportedly stood transfixed in front of its slowly moving orbs for the entire forty-minute cycle.”  MoMA curators allege that the scientific genius uttered, “I wish I’d thought of that.”

Second is the aspect that made A Universe important to Modern from the Start: it was the first piece of Calder’s art to become part of MoMA’s collection, purchased the year he made it.

First shown in MoMA’s Cubism and Abstract Art (2 March-19 April 1936), A Universe is an abstract vision of the cosmos.  A small red sphere and a larger white one suggest planets and move along curved wire orbits at different speeds, completing a full cycle in forty minutes. 

Note, particularly, that it isn’t the universe.  Prompted, reportedly, by the discovery on 18 February 1930 of the (now demoted to dwarf) planet Pluto, the mechanized sculpture is an abstract representation of a conceptual collection of worlds. 

Calder’s mobiles date from 1931, a year after he paid a visit to the studio of his friend Piet Mondrian (Dutch Abstract painter, 1872-1944), which marked a turning point in Calder’s career: it fully opened the American sculptor’s eyes to Abstract art.  As Roberta Smith, the New York Times’ “co-chief art critic,” put it, Calder “suddenly got what modernism and abstraction were all about.”  It is to this epiphany that the MoMA exhibit’s subtitle alludes.

The mobiles, however, clearly show Calder’s background in mechanical engineering (see his bio in my Hypermobility post or some other site), both the mechanized ones and the wind-driven ones (though for different aspects of physics).  That’s one of the elements of his creativity that so fascinates me—the confluence of science and art.  You can see it in the work, and it isn’t even incongruous in practice—only in people’s minds is there a conflict.

Physics informed Calder’s art-making in that the scientific laws shaped the pieces and made them work. Different forces act upon the sculptures—gravity, air currents, vibration at the hanging point—setting them in motion.  Yet these forces aren’t evident in the experience of the artwork; that depends on the viewer’s perception of how the work’s many parts function together to achieve its full expression.

As obvious as this is in the mobiles, especially the wind-and-gravity-driven pieces, it’s also present, though less visibly, in the stabiles.  Though they don’t move, the stabiles are still in balance, even if only to the viewer’s eye. 

In the Brooklyn Rail, sculptor Brandt Junceau asserted that “the stabile is a special case of the mobile: same vocabulary, sans only wire, plus only stove bolts.  Both planar, with the same touch-and-go relationship to support and gravity, but the stabiles bristle with a menace that is often vanishing but never entirely disappears from the fully airborne works.”

Optics is also a physical science, and Calder’s stationary constructions work on the eye in not dissimilar ways that the mobiles move and turn: they draw your attention from one element to another by its size and shape. 

In the Wall Street Journal, art reviewer Lance Esplund, who’s the author of The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art (Basic Books, 2018), declared that the stabiles “feel alive” and remarked that they “appear to be in continual states of interplay and metamorphosis.”

The gallery displaying the stabiles contained both three large sculptures (Black Beast, 1940; Black Widow, 1959; Spiny, c. 1939)—not quite the monumental size of Lincoln Center’s Le Guichet and Flamingo (1973) in Chicago—and a pair of maquettes (Spiny, c. 1939; Black Beast, 1940).  (A maquette is a small model or study in three dimensions for a sculpture.  The two in Modern from the Start were, indeed, models of two of the full-sized stabiles on exhibit.)

Calder’s stabiles, monumentally scaled abstract works in steel and aluminum, quite the opposite of his delicate, kinetic mobiles, which they closely followed chronologically, were, like the moving sculptures, influenced by Calder’s momentous 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio.

Despite their often massive size—many of his later stabiles were created for outdoor public spaces or voluminous indoor atria—the great, soaring arches, the blocky triangles and trapezoids joined by thick metal plates and reinforced by ribs, all held together by large bolts come together to seem almost delicate and airy.

Earlier, I mentioned taking pleasure from walking under Le Guichet to get into the performing arts library.  Calder intended the stabiles to be accessed that way; he wanted people to walk through them, touch them, lean against them.  They invite interaction with people.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal’s Esplund asserted that the stabiles “demand that we not merely consider them as works of art, but that we interact with them.”

They also engage the viewer, like me when I sat in the Lincoln Center Plaza and spent some minutes watching Le Guichet while waiting for LPA to open.  As big as they are, they please the eye.  Consider Spiny, one of the full-sized stabiles in Modern from the Start.  With a fat crescent near the floor at one end and large triangular panels in the middle and the other end, the piece still looks like a graceful, elegant dance in progress.

The bulbous crescent down at the bottom of one side is opposed to a tall, thin upside-down-L-shaped spike high up at the other.  The crescent-shape anchors the sculpture, but the spike acts like an arrow pointing off to a distant destination.  Almost all Calder’s stabiles work like that.  It’s art and physics in tandem.

In the section where the silver candelabra was shown were also examples of Calder’s jewelry, something he made throughout his life.  Most of the pieces are items he made for friends as gifts, such as the curled brass J and S cufflinks he made in the 1930s or 1940s for James Thrall Soby (1906-79), a longtime trustee of MoMA and an early supporter of Calder’s work.  I found these objects little more than curiosities next to the wire pieces, the mobiles, and the stabiles.

I said at the beginning of this report that I’d say something about the Calder pieces on display in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, outside the north side of the museum’s first floor.  The reason I didn’t make any comments in the body of the report is that, though Diana and I came to MoMA with the full expectation of seeing the exhibit in the garden, when we arrived and asked for directions to Modern from the Start, the staffer who checked us in said that the main exhibit was on the third floor, but that the garden was closed that day.

The upshot was that we didn’t see the two pieces out there.  I don’t know the reason for the closure; it wasn’t on the website and there’s no indication that the garden is closed Wednesdays as a rule (there have been many events scheduled there on Wednesdays).  Here’s what we missed (not counting a glance out the windows from the lobby):

I’ve already mentioned the return to the Sculpture Garden of Man-Eater with Pennants, the 1945 standing mobile Calder created for the garden on commission.  It was on view there from 1945 to 1949, when it was removed, ostensibly because of reconstruction of the garden space.  Reportedly, however, the story is that the sculpture was considered a failure.

Among the complaints was the concern that the mobile, limned by the Wall Street Journal’s reviewer as “an unapologetically intimidating conflation of tree, anchor, flagship and farm machinery—like standing under an alighted helicopter,” didn’t move enough due to the weight of the steel-rod-and-sheet-iron structure and the absence of ball bearings.  The museum’s head of the Department of Architecture and Design had reservations about the ironwork, which he called “clumsy,” the “far from pleasing” colored forms, and faulty engineering.

Furthermore, fears about the public injuring themselves on the mobile began immediately, and, in the interest of public safety, a small fence was set around the mobile.  Of course, there were also supporters, but the sculpture was nonetheless removed. 

Man-Eater traveled to outdoor venues in London and Houston in the 1950s and then returned to MoMA. Its last showing at the museum was from 1969 to 1970, and then it was put away in storage, where it’s remained until reinstalled in the Sculpture Garden for Modern from the Start. 

When the exhibit closed on 15 January, Man-Eater was once again removed from display.

The other Calder sculpture on view in the Sculpture Garden for Modern from the Start was Sandy’s Butterfly from 1964, another standing mobile that’s been a favorite of the garden curators and visitors since MoMA acquired it in 1966.  The Journal’s Esplund described it as “a carnivalesque combination of windmill, flower and whirligig.”  Roberta Smith called it “sturdy [and] bright” in the Times.

Esplund’s entirely laudatory assessment of the show overall, which he dubbed a “compact retrospective,” was that it was “a spirited, synergistic environment from start to finish” that “will surprise even diehard Calder fans.”  The Journalist made separate comments about some of the component displays of the exhibit throughout his notice.

Of the opening gallery, where the stabiles were seen, Esplund declared it “absolutely stunning”—“[p]layful, muscular, fantastical and serene”—and pronounced it “among the most striking gatherings of Calder's art I have ever seen.”

The WSJ writer labeled the jewelry on display “endlessly inventive” and compared the wall-mounted “Constellations,” a name devised by Calder’s friends Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney (1900-86; curator of MoMA from 1935 to 1946) for the spidery sculptures from the World War II years (when there was a scarcity of metal) made from small pieces of carved wood linked by wires into a new, open form of sculpture, to “still-writhing animals, enormous bugs and trophy heads.” 

Esplund’s sum-up of Modern from the Start was, “This exhibition, a roaring toast to Calder, should become a permanent installation.  It’s a tribute to one of Modernism’s giants, and a living reminder of what made MoMA modern—from the start.”

On HypeArt, a website associated with the fashion site HypeBeast, Shawn Ghassemitari, the associate editor of HypeBeast, observed, “Few artists can take an existing medium and completely reinvent it.  Alexander Calder is one such artist, who took the idle grounds of sculpture and brought a kinetic dynamism that continues to spin the minds of millions to this day.”

“The amorphous shapes of his sculpture invite deep reflection,” explained Ghassemitari, “but just as you think you’ve grasped the idea of one, they continually change to varying degrees of light and shadow.” 

Fellow sculptor Junceau warned in the monthly Brooklyn Rail that Modern from the Start is “[n]ot a career retrospective, but it is a lot of stuff.”  He characterized Calder’s motorized mobiles as “tottering between an age-appropriate quaintness (they’re nearly 100 years old) and their original, nervy DIY impudence.”   Junceau added that “we know perfectly well every mobile, every stabile is alive.”

The pro tem review-writer asserted, “The exhibition may not answer some of its own questions, but . . . Clement Greenberg [very influential visual art critic, 1909-94; an editor at Partisan Review, art critic for The Nation, and associate editor of Commentary in the ’40s and ’50s] . . . acknowledged Calder’s multifarious talents and noted the light felicities of his work, but was that enough?” 

Junceau summed up Calder’s imprint with the assertion, “Calder is justly beloved for his unpretentiousness, but there is an aethereal condescension somewhere high in that egalitarian voice.”  (I confess that Junceau said many things in his article—I’m not sure it should be labeled a review—that I couldn’t unpack.  It wasn’t the words he used, but the ideas he was expressing that confounded me.)

In the Times, Roberta Smith reported, starting with the stabile exhibit, “The first gallery’s austerity is startling.  It . . . reminds us that while visual wit is rarely absent, Calder’s work has its dignified, somber side.”  She explicated:

Constructed of several planes of cutout sheet-metal, the sculptures emphasize his control of nuanced shapes, both rounded and straight-edged, and his ability to angle them together so that your interpretations change restlessly among animal, human and abstract as you move around them.

“The contrast between the first two galleries—the big black sculptures and the delicate wire pieces—form a Calder primer,” the Times art reviewer continued.  “The bent-wire pieces speak to his extreme sensitivity to line, including the linear shadows cast by the wire portraits, which provide alternate, moodier expressions.”

After the first two galleries, explained Smith, “The remainder of the exhibition is one large, loosely divided space that tracks Calder after 1930, examining the different ways he made modernism his own.”  She remarked of the mechanized mobiles that “[t]hey are some of the most lovable abstractions in modernist art history, partly because they are too casually handmade to be purely abstract.  They brim with personality, a condition of much of Calder’s art.”

(Smith made an additional comment that I found particularly droll, suggesting that the mobiles “bring out the previously unknown playfulness of Russian Constructivism.”  Constructivism, a largely austere art movement, was founded in 1915 and flourished in the Soviet Union, in support of the Bolshevik Revolution until Socialist Realism was established as the official artistic style by Stalin in 1934.)

Smith ended her notice with what seems to me a somewhat romantic notion, characterizing Modern from the Start as “a beauty of a show that . . . will make the world a better place.”  Let’s hope.

In the Upper East Side neighborhood paper Our Town, Val Castronovo explained that

the curators [of Modern from the Start] are less concerned with chronologies and timelines and more intent on letting viewers experience the works, taking their cue from the artist himself, who, in fact, wanted most of his sculptures to be lived with—touched and engaged with at home—not put on a pedestal in a museum, where touching is prohibited and viewers are cautioned to distance themselves from the art.

Castronovo concluded his comments on the MoMA show by advising, “With virus fears spiraling again, it seems like there’s no better time to enter Calder’s universe and be spirited away.”

For Reuters, the London-based international news service, Soren Larson reported that Modern from the Start “draws on the rich and varied holdings MOMA has by Calder” and that curator Manes asserted that “her aim was to show how varied and experimental the artist was.” 

Larson felt, “From large, sheet metal sculptures bolted together, to tiny hanging wire caricatures called ‘stabiles,’ the MOMA exhibition offers new insight into the resourceful and creative artist.”  (Note that Larson got his Calderian terms mixed up: the “large, sheet metal sculptures” are, of course, the stabiles, and the “wire caricatures” are . . . well, Calder’s wire sculptures.)

I can’t say how well I made out conveying this art experience to you all; you’d have to judge that.  What I can tell you is that I enjoyed the attempt.  After so long a lay-off, it was a pleasure to be writing about art again.  It turned out to have been a fortunate turn of events that the subject was Alexander Calder, not just because his work is so familiar to me by now, but because I like it so much.  It was actually fun to write this report.  Calder does that to me!

[This report is Rick On Theater’s 1,000th post.  I started the blog on 16 March 2009, just under 13 years ago.  I’m surprised ROT’s lasted that long.  I'm astonished I’ve lasted that long!]

The "New" MoMA, 2019

In an e-mail to some readers of Rick On Theater on Tuesday, 17 December, I remarked that I hadn’t yet been to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art since it reopened after an extensive remodeling, but that I probably would be going soon and that I’d report on the visit.  That “soon” came faster than I imagined when I wrote that message.

On Wednesday evening, 18 December, Diana, the woman with whom I often go to theater, called me at home to inform me that MoMA would be having a Member After Hours the next night.  She asked if I was interested in attending the event, which is a periodic offering of the museum (the next one is scheduled for Tuesday, 14 January 2020) at which MoMA members, which Diana is (I’m not), and their guests can visit the museum facilities—exhibits, restaurants, film showings, bookshop, and gift store—from 6:30 to 9 p.m., after the building is closed to the general public.

Now, Diana doesn’t understand the notion of arriving at a meeting on time.  The last time we went to a Member After Hours event at the Modern (for Joan Miró: Birth of the World on 8 May, reported on ROT in “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” 16 May 2019), I sat in the members’ reception area for a half hour or more waiting for her.  Since I was going to be her guest, I couldn’t just go on in to the museum without her—the way I can pick up my ticket to a show and take my seat if Diana cuts her arrival close at the theater. 

So, this time, we arranged for Diana to call me at home when she left her apartment (she lives uptown, north of Columbia University, and I live downtown in the Flatiron District) and then I’d leave for the museum.  I still got there before she did and we didn’t get into an exhibit until about 7 p.m.  That only left two hours to see anything.

MoMA, at 11 W. 53rd Street, was closed from 15 June to 21 October for major renovations to the tune of $450 million.  (This is the latest in a long line of remodels in the building’s 80-year existence.  The last was only 15 year ago, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi.)  The expansion and refurbishment was conducted by the architectural firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the international design and architecture firm.  DS+R are international architects, too, but they are substantially represented in major public sites in New York City.  They designed the High Line Park, the West Side’s elevated walkway three stories above 9th and 10th Avenues; the renovated public areas of Lincoln Center as well as several of its performance spaces and other buildings; and The Shed, a cultural center in Hudson Yards on the far west side of Manhattan’s midtown.

The museum reconfigured the gallery spaces, rehung or redisplayed the art that was on exhibit from its collection, and reconceived how modern and contemporary art, MoMA’s self-defined focus, is presented to visitors.  Upon reopening, the museum’s total floor area is 708,000 square feet, an increase of 47,000 square feet of display space.  The new space allows MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, and other overlooked artists. 

The New York Times named as examples Japanese experimental photographer Shigeru Onishi (1928–1994); Okwui Okpokwasili (b. 1972), an Igbo-Nigerian-American artist, performer, and choreographer; and Haitian-born French painter Hervé Télémaque (b. 1937).  (This aligns with my observation at the last Frieze and Art New York fairs, reported on ROT in “Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA,” 16 May 2019.)

The fin-de-19^e-siècle and early-20th-century artists are still on view as well, of course (as you’ll soon see). Pioneering member of the German avant-garde Paula Modersohn-Becker’s (1876-1907) Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in her Raised Left Hand (1907), for instance, is a recent addition to the collection of works by women.  

Since its opening in 1929 (in the Heckscher Building on 5th Avenue at 57th Street; the current building, on 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, was opened in 1939), the Museum of Modern Art has arranged its displays of art by genre: sculpture in certain galleries; painting and drawing in others; photography, design, or architecture in still others; and so on.  Films and performance art were shown in auditoriums designated for those purposes.  In the new MoMA, the forms will be mixed in loosely chronological arrangements—though there are still galleries devoted mostly to one medium or another. 

The purpose for this reconsideration of the way MoMA’s art is exhibited seems to be to effect a sort of visual conversation among not just different works of art, but different kinds of art so that they inform one another—and us art-consumers as well.  I’ll say more about this, but one very clear example of this strategy was in one of the galleries of Collection 1880s-1940s on the fifth floor.  Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973; Spanish) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is in the same room (Gallery 503, devoted to Picasso’s early-20th-century work) as Quarantania, I by Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010; American, b. France) and American People Series #20: Die (1967) by African-American painter Faith Ringgold (b. 1930; Harlem). 

Picasso’s painting depicts violent contortions of five Catalan prostitutes in Barcelona’s red-light district; Ringgold’s large painting (72" x 144") shows a race riot involving blood-spattered white and black people, their faces contorted in expressions similar to Picasso’s prostitutes as they cling to one another for safety.  Ringgold had come to MoMA many times as a young artist in the early 1960s to study Les Demoiselles. 

Bourgeois’s Quarantania, I seems like an abstraction of the Picasso, comprised of five anthropomorphic wooden totems, painted white and slotted onto upright rods.  Their arrangement echoes the five women of Les Demoiselles and if you stand at one side of the plinth on which the wood sculpture sits, you can see both the Bourgeois and the Picasso hanging on the wall at the other end of the gallery simultaneously.

I’ll get back to the art and the new display philosophy shortly, but let me first fill in the architectural changes at the historic building.  According to DS+R’s own statement of the “Project Goals”:

The goals for the project are threefold: to increase gallery space and allow the Museum to exhibit significantly more of its diverse collection in deeper and more interdisciplinary ways, to provide visitors with a more welcoming and comfortable experience, and to better connect the Museum to the urban fabric of midtown Manhattan.

ArchDaily, which bills itself as “the world’s most visited architecture website,” reports:

The expansion features two key additions, with the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio creating a double-height space for live and experimental programming, and the Paula and James Crown Platform offering experimental, creative pace to explore ideas, questions, and processes that arise from MoMA’s collection.

The project has not been without controversy, with considerable backlash generated from the decision to demolish the American Folk Art Museum [at 45 West 53rd Street, which MoMA purchased in 2011] in order to make way for the new expansion.  Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in January 2014, DS+R principal Liz Diller embraced the criticism, saying “we would be on the same side if we didn’t know all the details that we know.”

New galleries on the second, fourth, and fifth floors will offer a deeper experience of art through all mediums, with a general chronological spine uniting all three floors, and serving as a touchstone of continuity for visitors.  Adopting a stance that there is no single or complete history of modern art, the museum will rotate its collection within these galleries every six to nine months.

The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio will serve as a double-height space for live and experimental programming in the heart of the museum’s collection galleries, catering from performance, dance, music, moving image, sound works, and art forms not yet imagined.

Meanwhile, the Paula and James Crown Platform will explore ideas, questions, and processes from the museum’s collection.  Visitors can create art, join conversations, and participate in programs that connect people more deeply with art and each other.

(More detail about the MoMA redesign is provided by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s own site at https://dsrny.com/project/the-museum-of-modern-art?index=false&tags=cultural&section=projects&search=moma.)

From my brief observation on the 19th, what seems to be the museum’s rationale for this major reconception of the physical space and the use the curators will be putting it to is an opening-up—or perhaps an opening-out is a better coinage.  I didn’t get the chance for which I’d hoped to see the new physical plant in its entirety, but the feeling I got was one of greater expansiveness, greater openness.  The galleries are less confined—not just larger, but less closed in and closed off from the other nearby spaces.

Not only do the art images flow more freely from one gallery to the next because the openings from one to another are wider so that visitors pass more freely and less obviously from one space to the next, one collection to the next.  I didn’t feel so much that I was leaving one room and entering another, but moving from one part of a larger space into another, related part.  Further, the larger openings meant that I could see some of the works in the next gallery from the one I was in and those in the last gallery from the new one into which I’d just entered.  There was still a connection.

This sense of connectedness carried over to the floors as well as the galleries on each floor.  There seemed to be many spots along the corridors and passages where I could look down on the open spaces of the floor below—this didn’t seem to work as well looking up—so that the entire museum felt like it was one great gallery, enticing me to come see what there was in other parts of it.  Instead of little enclaves of one kind of art or one artist, it was all part of a world of art.

The way I saw the change in approach to exhibiting the art shared this concept.  Going back to the Picasso in Gallery 503, it might have been possible for him and Louise Bourgeois to have met, I suppose—though I doubt they ever did—but it’s extremely unlikely that Picasso and Faith Ringgold ever crossed paths outside of her study of Les Demoiselles at MoMA in the ’60s (she also studied Guernica, which had been on loan to the Modern from 1939 until it was returned to Madrid in 1981). 

The juxtaposition of works by these three artists, in conversation, as it were, with one another, is the model for which I believe the museum’s curators and educators and the designers at DS+R were aiming.  It sounds good and illuminating, but it remains to be seen whether the curators, working in teams from several disciplines, can actually carry the plan off successfully and in the long term and how well the public will take to it.  After all, the Modern’s been doing things art-wise for 90 years.

But the Picasso-Bourgeois-Ringgold apposition is a micro-model—repeated, though it is, in several other galleries.  The concept works also on the macro level.  By redefining what the museum means by “modern art,” visitors will see work by artists from cultures, populations, and parts of the world MoMA has overlooked till now.  Holland Cotter in the New York Times dubbed the concept “Modernism Plus.”

I’ve already mentioned Paula Modersohn-Becker, the female Expressionist from Germany who was an important member of the Modernist movement at the start of the 20th century.  Despite her significance, her work is little known outside Germany, where there is a museum of her work in Bremen, the world’s first museum devoted to a female artist.  Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand, the artist’s 1907 painting in the current exhibit (Gallery 504), was only acquired by the Modern in 2017 (though some etchings and prints have been in the MoMA collection since the ’40s and ’50s).

Betye Saar (b. 1926; Los Angeles) is an African-American artist best known today for her assemblages, though at the start of her career, she worked as a printmaker.  Part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, she is legendary among contemporary artists.  MoMA acquired a few of her assemblages in 2013, but last year the museum purchased 42 of her rare, early works on paper and from 21 October 2019 to 4 January 2020 (Paul J. Sachs Galleries, Floor 2, 2 South), for the opening of the fall season, is mounting Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window, an exhibit that explores the ties between Saar’s assemblage Black Girl’s Window (1969) and her prints, made during the 1960s.  It is the first show dedicated to the artist’s work as printmaker. 

In another season-opener, the Modern is featuring Pope.L (b. 1955; Newark; also known as William Pope.L), an African-American visual and performance artist known for his “interventionist” street art.  Pope.L won the 2017 Bucksbaum Award at the 2017 Whitney Biennial for “work [that] demonstrates a singular combination of talent and imagination.”  (In “Art as Intervention: A Guide to Today’s Radical Art Practices,” Julie Perin, a video artist and experimental filmmaker, defines interventionist art as art that “disrupts or interrupts normal flows of information, capital, and the smooth functioning of other totalizing systems.”)  The museum’s member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 runs in the Edward Steichen Galleries (Floor 3, 3 South) from 21 October 2019 through 1 February 2020.

Michael Armitage (b. 1984) is a Kenyan-born painter currently dividing his time between Nairobi and London.  Projects 110: Michael Armitage, yet another exhibition of an artist new to MoMA that’s part of the re-opening introduction of the “new” Museum of Modern Art, in association with the Studio Museum in Harlem, is on view on Floor 1, 1 North from 21 October 2019 to 20 January 2020.  This exhibit, Armitage’s New York solo début, is part of the multi-year partnership among the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1 that commenced in February. 

While the Studio Museum’s longtime home on W. 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue is closed for the construction of a new building, PS1 will present the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition and the Museum of Modern Art will host various other exhibits such as Projects 110.  With a firm belief that art is an agent of social change and a captivating figurative style,  Armitage emphasizes the global social problems that many choose to deny.  The artist’s African roots, his relative youth (he’s only 35), and his socio-political focus are all paradigmatic of MoMA’s new inclusivity for “modern art.”

Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift (21 October 2019-14 March 2020 in the Robert B. Menschel Galleries, Floor 3, 3 East) is another example in the current line-up.  A collection of abstract art from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay, Sur moderno is a donation from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.  Latin American art has long been part of the Modern’s collection.  Diego Rivera’s (1886–1957; Mexican) Cubist Landscape (1912), seen in Gallery 505 in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries, was acquired in 2001, but a large portion of MoMA’s Rivera holdings go back to 1935 and ’40.  Works by Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (1932-2023) have been in the collection from the 1960s and ’70s. 

Despite those artists’ distinctive personal styles and home-grown subject matter, they worked in a European or American convention.  Botero’s painting and sculpting style bears his name, “Boterismo,” but still, his most recognizable painting is Mona Lisa, Age Twelve (1959), based on perhaps the most famous piece of European art.  (I have ROT posts on both artists: “Rivera, Kahlo, and Detroit,” 12 and 15 April 2015, and “Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (2007),” 26 November 2017.  There’s also a  short piece on The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, Place at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art in “Short Takes: Some Art Shows,” 17 June 2018, and Botero—and his Mona Lisa—gets several mentions in “Gres Gallery,” 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.)

The artists in Sur moderno—Lygia Clark (1920-88; Brazilian), Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt; 1912-94; Venezuelan), Raúl Lozza (1911-2008; Argentinian), Hélio Oiticica (1937-80; Brazilian), Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005; Venezuelan), and Rhod Rothfuss (1920-69; Uruguayan-Argentinian), among others—are not only working in abstraction, but are steeped in the South American world from which they come.  In addition, Rivera was already famous when MoMA started buying his work and Botero was on the cusp at the time of the museum’s first couple of acquisitions—and this was generally so of other Latin American artists whose work MoMA purchased.  The Sur moderno artists are not well known here even though all of their careers are over.

(MoMA didn’t supply a definition of the phrase sur moderno, but on the analogy of Surrealism, which means ‘above’ or ‘beyond realism,’ I take the meaning of the exhibit’s title to mean ‘beyond the modern.’  In the mid-20th century, the period during which the artists in this collection flourished, abstraction was seen as the height of modernism in the arts.  As MoMA explained: “[S]tarting in the mid-1950s, the language of abstraction became synonymous with modernity in South America.”) 

It would probably have been more interesting, as well as providing a better view of the newness of the new MoMA if Diana and I had gone to one of the exhibits I just described.  Our time was short, however, and we actually couldn’t find a listing of all the current offerings at the museum; the small card for Members After Hours on 19 December listed only one show aside from the three parts of Collection, the display of selected works from the Modern’s permanent holdings divided chronologically (1880s-1940s on Floor 5, 1940s-1970s on Floor 4, and 1970s-Present on Floor 2).  

On the fly, we impulsively selected Collection 1880s-1940s, partly because it covers one of my favorite art periods—the others are Impressionism (1860s to 1880s) and mid-20th-century Modernism—so we dead-headed to the fifth-floor galleries,  We weren’t even halfway through the exhibit when the museum started closing.  Still, we did get an impression of some of what MoMA’s rethinking is about.

Next to adding new artists in categories neglected and overlooks in its previous nine decades and its reconceiving the way it displays its art with respect to what goes up with what (consider the Picasso-Bourgeois-Ringgold juxtapositioning), the museum is also rethinking how it displays its foundational art—that represented in Collection. 

Those works will be displayed on a more-or-less permanent basis, rather than stored and hauled out to be incorporated in specific theme shows.  But the curatorial teams will frequently reinstall the artworks so that they will be seen in new combinations.  Every six months, they’ll swap out one-third of these works for others from the MoMA holdings so that each gallery is not always exactly the same in terms of the art on its walls.  The “stars” of the collection, such as Picasso’s Demoiselles and The Starry Night (1889) by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90; Dutch), currently in Gallery 501, will always be on view.  (Water Lilies, 1914-26, by Claude Monet, 1840–1926; French, still has a gallery, 515, virtually to itself.)

Arranged in a loosely chronological order, each of the 23 galleries on the fifth floor—as do the galleries on the second and fourth floors—explores an individual topic.  A gallery may be devoted to an artist, such as Picasso in 503 (“Around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”) and “Constantin Brancusi” in 500; a specific medium or discipline, as in Gallery 502’s “Early Photography and Film”; a particular place in a moment in time (“19th-Century Innovators,” Gallery 501); or a shared creative idea (“New Expression in Germany and Austria,” Gallery 504). 

At the same time, the galleries display painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography, media, performance, film, and works on paper all together so as to highlight the creative affinities and frictions produced by the proximity.

After exiting the elevator on the fifth floor, we were confronted with a sort of preview of the rest of the display, a selection of paintings from major artists of the 1880s to the pre-World War II 1940s.  This kind of set up our expectations for the rest of the galleries in the floor—but not exactly a prediction.  Here were four or five famous artists’ work, pieces by the likes of Picasso and Juan Gris (1887-1927; Spanish, worked in France).

Among these was Still Life with Three Puppies (1888) by Frenchman Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a demonstration of the artist’s shift from naturalistic representations and colorations to “art [as] an abstraction” to be derived “from nature while dreaming before it.”  Three Puppies is a still life of fruit on a platter and in a small bowl in the foreground below a row of three cobalt-blue goblets with apples against their feet, which diagonally bisects the canvas.  Three puppies are drinking from a large pan above the line of goblets.

The incongruous scale and placement of these objects on a tabletop results in a disorienting composition.  The puppies’ bodies are outlined in bold blue, echoing the goblets, and the patterns on their coats reflects the botanical print of the tablecloth.

What the preview doesn’t reveal are the surprises I’ve already mentioned—the sometimes startling juxtapositions with artworks from other periods or disciplines, the mix of genres, and the appearances of less-familiar artists among the more established exemplars. 

The first gallery around the corner from the elevators is “Constantin Brancusi” (Gallery 500), a large open space with eight sculptures by the Romanian-born French artist (1876–1957).  The sculptor, who began in traditional crafts such as woodworking, worked in several media when he turned to avant-garde art after coming to Paris in 1904.  MoMA is displaying examples of many of these varied works, from the carved marble of 1930’s Fish, a sleek, gray 21" high x 71" long x 5½" thick polished piece of stone sitting on a pedestal of one marble and two limestone cylinders, to Bird in Space (1928), arguably Brancusi’s most iconic piece, a polished bronze crescent 54 inches tall standing gracefully on a stone plinth.  Also on view is the carved cherry-wood The Cock (1924), a triangular abstraction of a rooster’s comb. 

As much as I like Bird in Space, the sculpture for which I’d return on a “midnight shopping trip” (ROTters will know the meaning of that phrase) is Mlle Pogany (1913), a cast and polished 17¼"-tall bronze bust of Hungarian artist Margit Pogany (1919-86).  The abstract image is immediately reflective of the 1920s, representing its subject through highly stylized and simplified forms.  Her eyes are large and almond shaped, set in an oval face, and her short, straight  flapper-style hair is represented by a black patina that comes down over the nape of her neck. 

Aside from the art on display in Gallery 501, what pleased me about “Nineteenth-Century Innovators” was a comment in the introductory wall text:

The late nineteenth century was an era of rapid change: the emergence of a mass media, new and faster forms of transportation, noisy and bustling cities, and developments in industry, from the sewing machine to the telegraph.  Vision itself was likewise transformed, whether by new kinds of illumination—such as electric light—or by the increasingly widespread availability of photographic images.  Seeing the world differently, artists reacted to these changes; how one saw was as crucial as what was seen [the italics are my additions].

I’ve long maintained, without any support—that I’ve found—from art experts, sociologists, or cultural critics, that the advent of photography, especially by private individuals, was a significant influence on the evolution of Impressionism in art.  My contention: while the rest of Western arts were moving into Realism and Naturalism in the middle and late 19th century, the impact of such interests as sociology, anthropology, antiquarianism (especially on stage), photography and motion pictures, moved visual art away from natural and realistic representation, going in an opposite direction to Impressionism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and, ultimately, Abstraction. 

Why?  Here’s my rationale: the stage and literature strove to keep up with the impulses generated by the fields I mentioned to see (and reproduce) things as they really are (or were) in remote places, visual artists saw that they could never compete with photographs and cinema in duplicating reality.  So they went in the direction of expressing feelings (Impressionism), dreams (Surrealism), states of mind (Expressionism), and essences (Abstraction)—things photographs and moving pictures didn’t cover. 

So while the models for literature and drama in the second half of the 19th century were Émile Zola (1840-1902) and Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), painters went with Claude Monet, who named the genre with his 1872 painting Impression, soleil levant [Impression, Sunrise].  Ironically, perhaps, literature, drama, and even movies caught back up with painting in the mid-20th century or so—and visual art reinvented Realism as Photorealism and Hyperrealism in the last decade of that century.

“Nineteenth-Century Innovators” models the consequences of what I have posited (and validates my belief).  (Incidentally, Gallery 501 contains one of the earliest examples of a woman becoming prominent in the visual arts; Mary Cassatt. 1844-1926; American, worked in France, is represented by two prints—drypoint and aquatint: Under the Horse-Chestnut Tree, 1896–97, and By the Pond, c. 1898.)  Paul Cézanne (1839-1906; French) took up the challenge of finding a new way of “seeing differently” by looking at the alterations in the visual experience over time (something still photography can’t do and motion pictures can to an extent, but not yet in color in the late 19th century and the early 20th. 

Both Boy in a Red Vest (1888-90) and Château Noir (1903-04) are examples of subjects Cézanne rendered more than once, reexamining what he saw in each viewing and the variations he found.  He painted young Michelangelo di Rosa, a boy in his early teens it appears, in his crimson waistcoat four times in oils and twice in watercolors, all in different poses.  (The first owner of Boy in a Red Vest was Monet, who referred to it as the best picture he owned.) 

Cézanne painted Château Noir in Aix-en-Provence repeatedly from varied perspectives using thick paint in broad swatches of many colors.  (The Château of Vauvenargues, designed to evoke ancient ruins, was eventually owned by Pablo Picasso, who passed it on to his daughter.  The Spanish artist and his wife Jacqueline Roque are buried there.)

Neither painting is merely a portrait or a landscape.  Cézanne was more concerned with his impressions of his subjects (that’s where the name of the genre comes from): the palace rising from the dense green foliage, dominating the surroundings, depicted in short, broad brushstrokes.  The lighting of the scene seems crepuscular, making the painting feel ominous, even a little threatening.

Young di Rosa is seated quietly, almost contemplative, composed and even sweet.  Cézanne has mostly created the painting with a range of subdued colors, ranging from blue, brown and green, to whites and creams, but the highlight is the intensity of the red used in his vest, the only brightly-colored area in Boy in a Red Vest and the focus of the whole piece.  The portrait’s shadows, which were also prominent in Château Noir, somehow unify the painting despite the clash of the deep red vest with the muted hues of the rest of the canvas.

There are three Edvard Munch (1863–1944; Norwegian) pieces in this section, all woodblock prints: Angst, Man's Head in Woman’s Hair (Mannshode i Kvinnehår), and Moonlight I (Måneskinn I) (all 1896).  I don’t suppose it requires much commentary to limn the artistic focus of Munch, the famous creator of The Scream (four versions made between 1893 and 1910), but in brief, his art largely depicts what his subjects are feeling, a precursor of Expressionism (which is generally dated from the first decade of the 20th century).  Angst, a blood-red print, is a perfect example of the thrust of the Norwegian artist’s artistic vision.

As far as I’m concerned, the most striking work in Gallery 501 is van Gogh’s The Starry Night.  One of my all-time favorite paintings, I use it as the desktop wallpaper on my laptop.  (I used to use Escaping Criticism, 1874, by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1835-1910; Spanish.  It’s a trompe-l’oeil painting of a boy climbing out of the frame of the picture and on my old desktop, it looked like he was climbing out of the monitor.  But I digress—neither this artist nor his painting are part of the MoMA collection.)

“This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for The Starry Night, one of his best-known paintings.  If you know that the window out of which the painter was looking was in an insane asylum, you get an idea how van Gogh is depicting a different kind of vision than that of the rest of us.  The thick brush strokes, the swirling colors, the dark, ominous treetops in the night all help portray not so much what the Dutchman saw out the window, but how he felt about what he saw.  I can also attest to the fact that every time I look on The Starry Night, I am moved profoundly—both by the sheer beauty of van Gogh’s creation and by the emotional content of his work of art. 

(I discuss this painting at some length in “Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008),” posted on Rick On Theater on 12 October 2016, which includes my report on another MoMA show, Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2016/10/van-gogh-miro-at-moma-2008.html].)

The canvases by Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin in Gallery 501, in accordance with the new policy of the MoMA 2.0, are interspersed with art from beyond Western Europe and even beyond painting.  The MoMA curators have married the Post-Impressionists with little hand-thrown ceramic bowls and pitchers in twisted, pinched shapes by the Mississippi craftsman George Ohr (1857-1918), known as the “Mad Potter of Biloxi.”  (Timesman Cotter dubbed the pottery’s shapes “gnarly” and Andrew Russeth of ARTnews called them “physics-defying.”)  I confess, I failed to see the connection—aside from the contemporaneity of the potter’s work with that of the painters whose art is hanging on the adjacent walls.  Perhaps it’s the contrast that intrigued the curators: two-dimensional European art set against three-dimensional American craftwork.

Gallery 502 is devoted to “Early Photography and Film.”  I’m not particularly drawn to photography as art, though there have been exceptions, but I was somewhat fascinated with Lime Kiln Club Field Day, a three-minute clip of a black-and-white silent movie from 1914 (some references give the date as 1913).  The exhibit is footage from an unfinished feature showcasing the work of the black Vaudeville entertainer Bert Williams (1874-1922; Bahamian-American).  An all-black movie (with a white director) shot in New York City and New Jersey locations, it was made in the midst of the Jim Crow era.

This brings us to “Around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” once again.  Leaving aside Les Demoiselles, Bourgeois’s Quarantania, I, and Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die, look at the rest of the display in Gallery 503.  You get something of an idea of the vastness of Picasso’s reach—from the virtually impressionistic Boy Leading a Horse (1905-06) and Woman Plaiting Her Hair (1906) through his Cubist works, including the patinated bronze sculpture Woman’s Head (Fernande) (1909) and paintings like “Ma Jolie” (1911-12) to the almost Abstract Repose (1908) and Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery) (1907). 

By the time Diana and I got to Gallery 504 (“New Expressions in Germany and Austria”), we were running out of time and we started to rush through the art.  “New Expressions” is the exhibit in which the newly-acquired Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand is hanging.  It’s a self-portrait of the pregnant artist staring out at viewers with one hand, holding two stylized flowers, raised, while the other rests over her swollen belly.  Painted in the year of her death, the painting depicts the artist’s face as masklike; combined with the areas of thick paint on her brow and right eyelid, the literal carving of a flower into her cheek, and the vivid, expressionistic color palette, this makes Self-Portrait a stand-out in this gallery and in the collection.

Also in “New Expressions” are Egon Schiele’s (1890-1918; Austrian) Portrait of Gerti Schiele (1909), a painting of his younger sister made when the artist was still a teenager, and Gustav Klimt’s (1862-1918; Austrian) Hope, II (1907-08).  I’m not much of a fan of either artist, but the Klimt is interesting for its medium and the artist’s influences.  Because he was Viennese, Klimt lived at the crossroads of East and West and he drew on traditions of the Byzantine world as well as Russian icons, Japanese screens, and Persian carpets. 

In Hope, II, for instance, while the woman’s flesh is rounded and dimensional, the highly patterned dress of metallic gold is flat, like Russian Orthodox icons.  The woman is pregnant and there is a death’s head peeking out from behind her abdomen, which combines images of birth and death, as well as spirituality, symbolized by the three women at the subject’s feet who seem to be praying.

By now, the museum was indeed closing and we breezed through “Circa 1913” (Gallery 505), which contained Diego Rivera’s Cubist Landscape, an example of the young Mexican artist’s, later famous for his murals (and his devotion to communism and the Soviet Union), short-lived flirtation with Cubism as he was experimenting with various art styles, looking for one that fit him.  (In my opinion, Cubism did not.)  Like his other Cubist work, of which there is not much, Cubist Landscape reads as an academic study; there’s nothing of the artist in it, just the technician.  It’s pretty—very colorful—but it’s not Diego Rivera as he eventually became.

And then we had to leave the building.  It turned out that I couldn’t possibly get a real impression of the new Museum of Modern Art in the two hours the Members After Hours afforded me.  The New York Times’ Roberta Smith judged, “The Museum of Modern Art . . . is not what it used to be—and not yet what it may become.  While still very much in progress, the museum could be on its way to its second round of greatness . . . .”

Smith’s Times colleague-in-art criticism, Holland Cotter, asserted:

My guess is that in some hopefully ever-improving version, this 21st century MoMA will work, if only for self-preservative reasons.  Multicultural is now marketable.  To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility.

The Times art critic felt, “As we learn from every art fair every year, more art is not more.  What’s needed is agile planning and alert seeing, and these are evident in the museum’s modestly scaled opening attractions.”  Cotter continued:

On the evidence of what I see in the reopened museum, a bunch of very smart curators are putting their heads together to work from inside to begin to turn a big white ship in another direction.  We’re not talking Revolution.  With this museum we probably never will.  But in the reboot there are stimulating ideas and unexpected, history-altering talents around every corner.  As long as both keep showing up at MoMA, so will I.

In a New York Times Magazine report on the renovation, Deborah Solomon, an art critic and biographer, was of the opinion that

it is hard to applaud a host of new changes whose raison d’être is not entirely clear, except, perhaps, as fodder for the Instagram feeds of visitors.  A double-height Studio, a space that will feature live events, has been placed in the center of the permanent galleries.  Moreover, one-third of the art in those galleries will now be rotated every six months.  One abiding pleasure of museumgoing is the chance to see a painting you love in the same place, on the same wall, from one visit to the next. It’s as logical as wanting to visit your own grandmother from one year to the next, instead of a new grandmother.  The rotation plan can sound as lonely-making as one of de Chirico’s surreal plazas and will no doubt send countless travelers wandering the galleries in search of a favorite masterpiece, only to realize it’s not there.

On the other hand, a museum can no more ruin a masterpiece than it can create one, and it is admirable that MoMA remains dedicated to championing the new.  As [Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s founding director] well understood, it is easy to love the time-tested masterworks of the past and harder to believe in the artistic potential of our own clamorous, crazy-daisy moment.  One day many years from now, art lovers looking back at our era might well ask: What creative “ism” did we, right now, contribute to the planet?  The answer is a worthy one: Revisionism.

Michael Kimmelman, the Times architect critic, in yet another review—this time, of the building itself—called the current look of the easternmost block of W. 53rd Street, home of the Museum of Modern Art and “a canyon of glass and steel,” “the headquarters of Darth Vader’s hedge fund.”  He likened the museum’s westward expansion to our nation’s push to the Pacific, calling it “the museum’s Manifest Destiny argument.” 

The architecture critic characterized the “latest metamorphosis” as “smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless.”  He quipped, “You may feel like you’re entering an Apple store.  Everything is crisp and coolly engineered.”  Kimmelman further predicted, “The new layout will require lots of signs, staff in the halls to direct people, apps and maps.  We’ll see if visitors find it liberating or confusing.”  Quoting Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s current director, the Times critic wrote that the museum is “always going to be a work in progress.”  Kimmelman concluded: “Fair enough, I suppose.  A work in progress like the Modern’s architecture and the idea of modernism itself.”

In the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott cautioned that::

there’s a difference between complicating narratives and abandoning them.  MoMA seems to want to do the latter but can’t quite bring itself to do so.  The rough narrative in the galleries remains broadly chronological, with the stars of its collections still pretty much where you expect to find them.  The danger is that the museum will end up with a two-tier system, still dependent on the iconic pieces that visitors demand to see, supplemented by the occasional guests brought in temporarily to complicate things.  Even more worrisome is the stated goal of abandoning the didactic function.  No one wants a cultural organization that hectors, but they do want to learn.  It’s a question of tone.

The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl predicted:

MOMA’s revision of its master narrative should trigger no end of conversations about issues of the century past and how they preface, or fail to, our anxiety-prone times.  Not despite but because the focus is :only art,” it supplements serious thought about the world with registrations of what it’s like to live in it—the out-there of news squared up to the in-here of spirit.  After absorbing the general themes of the reinstallation, which will take time, we can get down to the quibbling that is the elixir of art talk in the big city.  Go with a gabby friend or two, to jump-start your share.

Paddy Johnson warned in the New York Observer, “For the vast majority of observers, the viewing experience will be vastly more complex than it was four months ago, but a fraction of its potential.”  In New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column, architect critic Justin Davidson acknowledged, “The result [of the renovations] might have been either a mess or a compromise; instead, it’s a work of confident and self-effacing elegance.  Whether it will make a great museum is another question, one that may take time to resolve.”

In a conversation between Davidson and New York/Vulture’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, the art writer asserted, “I’m thrilled to say that the Museum of Modern Art is now almost big enough.”  He continued, “I love that for the first time ever, you can get lost at MoMA.  As with the Met, we may begin to tell ourselves our stories rather than being subjected to the old bullying ‘Cézanne begat Picasso who begat Duchamp who begat everything post-1979’ line.” 

Davidson responded:

Well, what you call bullying, I call teaching.  I am deeply grateful to museums that have trained my eye and helped me understand how artists and movements relate to each other—all the begats, as you call them.  It’s one thing to get lost at the Metropolitan Museum, which covers many millennia and the entire globe.  That kind of disorientation is a wonderful experience, because it gives you a sense of the infinite varieties of art.  It’s also overlaid with generations of connoisseurship and culling.  But MoMA has a narrower purview, and now it seems less confident about how to navigate it.

The building maven added that “the joyful part of the experience is that it feels like a big-city museum, with all the excitement and disorientation that suggests.  You keep making discoveries.”  Then he demurred: “The frustrating part comes if you want to slow down, step out of the flow, and just have a few quiet moments with an artwork you love.  I found that virtually impossible.” 

In The Art Newspaper, Jillian Steinhauer lamented that “the renovation does not change the commercial, almost soulless, feeling of the place, especially with political conflicts brewing in the background,” then added, “But it has given us, at least so far, a much more interesting institution than the one to which we bade farewell in June.  For New Yorkers and droves of tourists, that is a win.”  Steinhauer, however, had some additional doubts:

Will [the] crowds know where to go when they arrive?  I am not sure.  The new floor plan flows well enough once you are upstairs, but standing in the vast lobby, there is little indication that the primary attractions lie west, in a space that didn’t exist before.  Off to the east, where the axis of the museum used to be, the old escalators and even the sculpture garden now feel like an afterthought.  The effect is imbalanced, so that the few remaining galleries on that side of the mega-building seem marginalised.

Steinhauer had a great deal to say about the new MoMA (and I can’t quote the whole review), but her overall analysis of the changes was:

In many ways, I suspect the new MoMA building will be a lot like the old MoMA building—which is part of the plan, of course: when your museum is a major tourist attraction, why mess with it too much?  To the curators’ and institution’s credit, however, when it comes to the work on the walls, they’ve changed things up enough to reinvigorate them.

“So how is the new MoMA?” asked Andrew Russeth of ARTnews.  His answer?  “Sumptuous, luxurious, and wisely conceived, I am happy to report.”  Russeth added, however, “Some of its longstanding architectural problems remain, and it is still quite corporate—too sleek for its own good—but it would have been foolish to expect that to change at this point.”  Then he predicted:

Those who visit the museum only occasionally will find their next visit to be pleasant and familiar.  For my part, I found myself getting not-unhappily lost in some of the permanent-collection galleries on the upper floors, but I suspect I will get acclimated soon enough.  It is all right angles and mostly sensibly proportioned spaces—a lovely place to visit, at least in these early preview days when very few people are there.

Along with high praise for both the reconceptualization and the art on display, Russeth had some misgivings and complaints—but they all seemed to be in the vein of, ‘Let’s wait and see if the museum addresses them.’  In the end, though, he offered:

MoMA looks great now, and there are some exciting signs of change.  But while walking through its sparkling new interior, I found myself imagining alternatives for the $450 million that created it: filling in some of its baleful atrium space with collection galleries, building little MoMAs elsewhere that could be run by local artists, raising salaries for staffers, buying a boatload of obscure, untested art, or just nixing that admission fee.

Maybe next time.

“If a museum could morph into an airport, it might look something like the newly expanded, refurbished and reimagined Museum of Modern Art.”  That’s what Howard Halle wrote in Time Out New York in his review of the new MoMA.  Listing a number of similarities, Halle added that “the place is something of a corporatized mess, but one that reflects museum-going’s final transformation from contemplative activity into immersive user experience.”  He backed off slightly:  “This isn’t a criticism so much as it is an acknowledgment that MoMA understands how things work nowadays, if only a bit too well.” 

“Then, of course, there is the art (and a lot of it),” proclaimed the man from TONY.  “More spectacle than substance, these, too, look like something you might see at JFK or LaGuardia, but they are of a piece with the sense that MoMA is throwing everything it’s got at the walls as it figures out where to go from here.”  Of the rethinking of the modern-art narrative, Halle asserted, “That sounds good in theory, but the results are mixed in practice.”  It works better with the more current work than longer-established art, said Halle:

MoMA’s attempts to enlarge the canon, however, can seem strained the further back into history they go.  It seems perfectly fine to reintroduce previously neglected figures into their time periods: Hanging the work of female Abstract Expressionists Lee Krasner and Hedda Sterne next to their sacred-cow contemporaries Jackson Pollock [Krasner’s husband] and Willem de Kooning is long overdue.  Less clear is the reason for including “responses” by Faith Ringgold and Louise Bourgeois to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon alongside the painting.  It seems like a stunt to deflect attention from Picasso’s reputation as a sexual predator by contextualizing his work with that of women—a gesture which only diminishes them. . . .  In contrast, the museum has been careful not to fuck with less controversial fan favorites like Matisse and Brancusi, who are given fairly sustainable amounts of space without a hint of revisionism.

In the Wall Street Journal, Art in Review editor Eric Gibson pretty thoroughly lambasted the Museum of Modern Art for its rethought display philosophy as well as its execution of the concept.  He concluded that “at the end of the day, the new, reincarnated Museum of Modern Art tells us more about the current cultural moment than will all the contemporary art it ever displays or acquires.”  (Gibson’s review of the opening is so full of appraisals, mostly negative, that I can’t even summarize it here.  Be warned: I’m just going to skim the surface.)

Gibson opened his notice by stating, “The good news about the expanded Museum of Modern Art is that the bad news isn’t as bad as we had been led to believe it would be.  Yet the good news isn’t as good as it ought to be . . . .”  Bemoaning the loss of MoMA as “the indispensable textbook” of modern art, the WSJ writer complained that “what the museum describes as a ‘general chronological spine’ has been supplemented—and to a great degree, overwhelmed—by a multitude of thematic mini-exhibitions.”  He disparaged the make-your-own-narrative approach as a cop-out because “the history of modern art is now so politically fraught that to attempt a definitive accounting is to court the Furies of one or more aggrieved interest groups.”

While Gibson lauded the general concept of greater inclusivity as “overdue and welcome,” he found “that overall concept is marred by instances of special pleading and political tub-thumping.”  He even found that some examples have “many upsides,” but declared, “What's been lost, though, is grandeur.”  “Modernism was one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century, indeed, of all time,” Gibson believes, and “the old MoMA communicated that.”