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-19e-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§ion=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.”
Colombian artist Fernando Botero died on Friday, 15 September 2023, in a hospital in Monaco. He was 91 and the cause was reported as complications of pneumonia.
ReplyDeleteColombian artist Fernando Botero died on Friday, 15 September 2023, in a hospital in Monaco. He was 91 and the cause was reported as complications of pneumonia.
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