'One November Yankee'

When Diana, the woman with whom I go to theater, called me and asked if I was interested in seeing a new play called One November Yankee by Joshua Ravetch at 59E59 Theaters, I had misgivings.  I’ve long been displeased with many of the plays I’ve seen at 59E59—the theater’s selection criteria seem lax to me—so I was leery to start with.  Then, everything about the play seemed to say “No!” to me. 

I used to have a sort of sixth sense about proposed productions about which I read in the casting notices in Back Stage and Show Business when I was trying to get work as an actor.  I could tell from the little descriptions in the notice if a play was a potential success or a pretty sure loser.  I never actually kept score, but when the productions came around and there were reviews, I was more often right than wrong.

These days, I don’t read casting notices anymore.  But I do read the little blurbs in rep company brochures, on promotional post cards, or hand bills distributed around the theater district.  I still get a sense of what’s worth seeing and what’s not—according to my own taste, of course.  So when Diana proposed One November Yankee, is got that frisson that it was a probably miss.

There were, however, clear signs that told me One November Yankee was a bad bet.  First, it’s a play directed by its author—which I’ve admitted on this blog at least once I think is a bad idea and smacks of vanity production.  Then, the leads were played by two former TV stars (in fact, the entire cast)—and promoted as such in all the publicity.  And not just TV stars, but actors whose most prominent appearances—the ones the publicity spotlighted—were 28 and 35 years ago. 

In addition, the play seemed like a gimmick like an Alan Ayckbourn play: the two actors play three pairs of brothers and sisters.  This, of course, sets up gimmick casting, too: the TV stars are playing the three sets of siblings.  I found out later that there were more iffy indicators, but these were enough to hint that the emphasis in this production was on elements of the play’s presentation and not on any inherent drama.  That did not bode well for a good evening at the theater.

As I’ve explained before, I don’t usually look at reviews of something I’m going to see—except for the New York Times because it comes to my apartment—until after I’ve written up my own impressions of the show.  But since I knew so little about this play, I told Diana that I’d check it out a little before we decided.  I skimmed some reviews of previous productions of the play—now I wish I’d read them more thoroughly—and one stated that “the star of this production and the epicenter of these stories” is the main piece of scenery in the set.  That surely suggests a problem. 

But Diana had wanted to check the play out.  After all, we’d started this exercise of seeing theater together after I’d taught a class at a nearby community college that she’d proposed, an intro to theater course.  Diana, who was a speech teacher, not theater, called me after the course—I had subbed for her one semester when she was accepted in a program in the city that conflicted with the evening class—and asked me to be her Beatrice through the alleyways of New York theater.  I was supposed to guide her to the less obvious and established theaters and plays she wouldn’t know about on her own.  So I’m always a little reluctant to say no to something in which she’s expressed interest.  So I didn’t press my reservations about One November Yankee.

The plot of One November Yankee, as I suggested earlier, centers on three pairs of siblings (all played in New York by Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers) in different circumstances linked by an ill-fated airplane flight.  The unifying element, aside from Hamlin and Powers, is a crashed yellow Piper Cub (the set designer is Dana Moran Williams).  The play’s title refers to the tail number of the plane: 241-NY. 

(For those who don’t already know, the phonetic alphabet—used by NATO forces for spelling words or other letter designations over voice communications so as to avoid confusion from letters whose names sound alike—uses the words “November” for the letter N and “Yankee” for Y.  Aviators use the same system.  A 1999 play and 2013 movie, Charlie Victor Romeo, was based on verbatim transcripts from actual aviation accidents.  The title is phonetic alphabet for CVR, which stands for “cockpit voice recorder.”)  

In Delaware and New York City, One November Yankee was performed as an 80-minute one-act with no intermission.  The performance is divided into four scenes.  This is a reduction from earlier productions which were two-hour, two-act versions; each act comprised two scenes.

In scene 1 we meet Maggie and Ralph as he puts the final touches on his conceptual-art installation, Crumpled Plane, in preparation for the opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where his sister is a curator.  Now that Maggie sees the crashed plane, she’s not so sure how good an idea it was to get the museum board to give her brother a solo show.  Ralph explains to his sister that the artwork was inspired by an actual crash in which another brother and sister were lost and have never been found.  Sibling squabbling follows. 

(Readers may note that my last post, on 1 January, was “The ‘New’ MoMA, 2019,” a report on the museum’s reopening after extensive remodeling.  The coincidence was not planned.).

Then we travel back five years to some woods in New Hampshire where a plane has just crashed.  Margo and Henry, a pair of brother-and-sister “Jewish intellectuals” (he’s a writer; she’s a librarian and failed lawyer), were on their way to Florida for their father’s remarriage, but due to a series of mistakes, their plane has run out of gas and crashed.  Harry has badly broken his leg.  (If you guessed that this is the crash which inspired Ralph’s Crumpled Plane in scene 1, you get a gold star.)  Sibling squabbling follows. 

As scene 3 opens, we leap back to the same woods five years after the crash—a few days before Crumpled Plane’s MoMA opening is scheduled to take place.  Two hikers, Mia and Ronnie, have trekked into the woods and come across the crash site.  The pair find the remains of Harry and enough identification to discover who the pilot and passenger were.  Also, portentously, a copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (hint, hint!).  (So . . . a plane wreck is found mostly in one piece by a couple of civilian hikers five years later, and the occupants’ stuff is all right there along with the passenger’s body, but it had never been seen in all that time by dedicated searchers.  Did I mention that it’s bright yellow?)  Sibling squabbling follows. 

Finally we are back at MoMA as the exhibit opening is ending.  Ralph and Maggie learn that the plane has been found and they reflect on the evening’s events.  Sibling squabbling follows.

Williams’s set, which consists mostly of the canary-yellow plane, nose down and tail up—with the registration number 241-NY showing—dominating the small playing area in 59E59’s third-floor Theater B.  A few wooden boxes, which stand in for seats in the museum scenes, and, I guess, tree stumps or rocks in the forest scenes, are placed nearby.  It’s crowded and cramped at 59E59—but that’s okay since there’s no real action that needs any space.  The characters (except Harry, of course) pace a lot.  Ravetch is too busy telling us what everyone’s thinking to show us anything.

At MoMA in scenes 1 and 4, a projection on the small screen up high at stage right reads “Museum of Modern Art”; when the scene shifts from the museum to the crash site, some fallen leaves are strewn around and the projections change to trees.

Kate Bergh’s costumes are stereotypically correct for each character in the three stories; Ralph is dressed in what a stage designer might think an artist wears to work: all in black with a scarf around his neck indoors—he even gets some red paint on his shirt to add authenticity to his artiness.  Ronnie and Mia, the hikers, look like they stepped out of a Lands’ End catalogue.  Scott Cocchiaro’s lighting and Lucas Campbell’s soundscape contribute to the production competently.

Campbell does bring a measure of fun at pre-set while we’re waiting for the show to start.  There’s a video playing on the projection screen (no credit for the slides and videos is listed) with varied images of flying, planes, airships, and space craft.  An eclectic selection of recorded songs related to flying and planes is playing: Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Come Fly with Me,” Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from Mary Poppins, among others. 

One song that particularly tickled me is “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” the theme song from the 1965 movie farce of the same name.  Accompanying the song is a silent-movie video sequence that I’m sure was from the opening moments of the film; if it was, I wonder if the producers had to pay for that. 

On the other hand, when I saw the play that followed this . . . well, amuse-bouche, I had to wonder why it was part of the production at all—since the play isn’t really about flying or even planes, despite the dominating set piece.  The crashed plane, Ravetch has Ralph-the-artist explain, is a symbol of civilization in ruin.  (Would any artist actually state his work’s point so bluntly, even to his sister?  I don’t buy it!)  We get this, because the playwright has Ralph say it a number of times—just to be sure we get the point.  (So, as reported below, Ravetch says he wanted to write a play about flying.  Well, he still hasn’t.) 

Ravetch, an Angeleno who turned 60 last November, says several things inspired One November Yankee.  Ravetch is a pilot himself and he’d wanted to write a play about flying.  The playwright also attended many modern-art shows in Los Angeles, and he went to one that featured a box of Kleenex on a pedestal in a white room.  He thought it was ridiculous, especially when he learned that the janitor kept throwing away the tissues. 

Somewhere in there, he came up with the idea of putting a crashed plane on stage.  Ravetch wanted the audience to think that they were going to see a play about the crash, but then it turns out that the plane’s really an art sculpture based on a “real” crash.  (The accident is “real” in the play—that is, diegetically—but apparently not in life.  Clear?) 

The play needed characters, but the playwright didn’t want a romantic couple, so he devised the idea of a pair of squabbling siblings. 

Ravetch also sees the plane as an allegory for America.  “It really all became about the journey of these people and the journey of America,” Ravetch said.  “How advanced we are in one way and how we’re crumbling in another.” 

One November Yankee débuted on 17 and 18 November 2009 at the Pasadena Playhouse in a workshop production, part of the theater’s HotHouse Reading Series.  The reading—and all other stagings so far—was directed by Ravetch and featured Loretta Swit (Maj. Margaret Houlihan of TV’s M*A*S*H, 1972-83) and Robert Forster (films Medium Cool, 1969, and Jackie Brown, 1997, Academy Award nomination; TV series Twin Peaks, 2017), who died last October. 

The play’s world première was from 16 November 2012 to 5 January 2013 at the NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood, directed again by the playwright with Swit and Harry Hamlin (L.A. Law, 1986-1991).  This was followed by the East Coast première, 23 October to 10 November 2019, at the Delaware Theatre Company, Wilmington, again under the direction of the playwright.  Hamlin starred opposite Stefanie Powers (Hart to Hart, 1979-1984). 

(This constitutes another hint that something was amiss, had I known it in advance: it took One November Yankee—a two-actor, one-set script—10 years to reach New York City.)

The DTC production transferred to New York’s Off-Broadway, starting previews in Theater B at 59E59 Theaters on Manhattan’s midtown East Side on 29 November 2019.  The production opened officially on 8 December and Diana and I saw the 7:15 p.m. show on Thursday, 26 December.  The production closed on 29 December. 

The film rights to One November Yankee have been optioned by Pam Williams Productions as a feature film for Ravetch to adapt and direct and is currently in development.  Ravetch’s script has not been published. 

There are numerous thoughts raised in One November Yankee and one or the other of the siblings states them at one time or another during the play.  None are profound or even especially intriguing—I’ve already forgotten most of them—and none are developed or explored during the 80-minute performance. 

The play’s structure, in the way the three stories dovetail, and some of the dialogue suggest that Ravetch is also saying that everything is connected, that there are no coincidences.  (One reviewer even referenced “the butterfly effect.”)  Ravetch has written certain words and catchphrases into the dialogue that recur in each story so that we get the idea that, though the characters are unrelated, their lives are somehow connected.  (One such bit is the line “Jews don’t fly planes!”— which, despite the fact that it’s probably untrue, is the only thought in the play that’s about flying.) 

The fact that Ralph has used an actual incident as inspiration for his artwork seems meant to give it relevance, and the actual wreckage being found at the time of the art’s début appears to be intended to add significance somehow.  As far as I’m concerned, they don’t; they’re just more gimmicks Ravetch has devised to stand in for actual content—but maybe that’s just me. 

None of this, as I suggested above, has anything to do with flying.  (Oh, Ravetch incident-drops at every opportunity so that aviation is spoken of—but only in passing.  Someone brings up 9/11, the “Miracle on the Hudson,” John F. Kennedy Jr.’s ill-fated 1999 flight to Martha’s Vineyard, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared in 2014, the Concorde, and the Wright brothers.)  And none of these ideas, if that’s what they are, are deep or engaging enough, even had they been developed, to be worthy of sustaining a drama, even one as slight as One November Yankee.  (I can’t imagine what the L.A. show was like at two hours and two acts.) 

I don’t know any of Ravetch’s other work (his stage credits—he also writes for films and television—include two celebrity monodramas, Wishful Drinking, co-created and directed in 2006 for Carrie Fisher, and Step in Time: A Musical Memoir, written and directed in 2011 for Dick Van Dyke, and 2017’s Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind of Musical with Robert Forster and Tyne Daly, which won an Ovation Award, L.A.’s local theater award), but his writing in One November Yankee isn’t really dialogue, but a series of pronouncements in which the characters mouth the thoughts of the playwright so he can tell us what they and he are thinking. 

An example from the first scene is Ralph’s explanation for his sister of his art work: “This exhibit embodies the breadth of the twentieth century from the Wright Brothers to a post 9/11 world—and it depicts the immense chaos of that world and a once-great society, America, that is quite literally crashing in a heap of debris as we speak.”  Pretentious claptrap.  The lines are oral captions—like self-important wall panels in a museum gallery—not speech. 

In the words of Alexis Soloski of the New York Times, Ravetch “encourages a style of acting that’s arch and presentational rather than recognizably human.”  Soloski doesn’t say so, but this applies both to Ravetch as author and as director.

Hamlin and Powers stood up well enough to this burden.  Both actors began in the theater—Powers was a Broadway dancer—and have returned to it occasionally (Hamlin most recently on Broadway in Summer and Smoke in 1996 and Chicago in 2007; Powers in The King and I in 2004 and Looped in 2013), so they didn’t embarrass themselves, but neither did they lift the leaden text off the ground (speaking of flying)—which was certainly partly director Ravetch’s fault.  (As several reviewers noted, they both look damn good for, respectively, 68 and 77.  I’m 73 and I could play either actor’s father!) 

There’s a small critical track record for the earlier productions of One November Yankee in Los Angeles and Wilmington, but the coverage here in New York City was relatively meagre—maybe a dozen or so outlets.  I’ve selected eight to summarize here. 

Noting that the wrecked plane we see upon entering the theater is a “defiantly unsubtle” indicator that “[g]ravity . . . has had its revenge,” the Times’ Soloski, in the only print review I saw, went on to warn, “But if this two-hander . . . can’t achieve liftoff, blame bad jokes and broad acting, not physics.”  Remarking on how good the actors look, Soloski quipped that “wondering what has happened in their careers that has led them to a play this feeble is probably the best in-flight entertainment ‘One November Yankee’ can provide.”  

Labeling the plot implausible and the characters inauthentic (“I’ve yet to meet a working artist who talks like this or a curator who knows less about modern art,” she said of Ralph and Maggie), the reviewer felt that the playwright “sacrifices character and emotional realism for quips, few of them funny.”  Of the stars, Soloski declared, “The actors—with their big gestures and patchy psychology—don’t redeem the play or even improve it.  But because glamour has its own implacable logic, they make it nearly watchable.”  In the end, she reported, “For better or for worse, ‘One November Yankee’ . . . is too synthetic to be a true disaster.  That’s the cynical lesson on offer here: You can’t crash if you never get off the ground.” 

(Incidentally, like many of her critical colleagues, Soloski criticized Hamlin and Powers in scene 2 for adopting “unpardonable Jewish accents.”  Other reviewers used different modifiers, but I didn’t identify their speech patterns as an attempted Jewish accent—I am, so I think I would recognize one.  In fact, I never figured out what that accent was—I thought it might be something New-Yorkish, but that wasn’t it, either.  In the end, I settled for a made-up speech pattern that doesn’t actually exist anywhere—Lower Slobovia or someplace, maybe. 

(Why they needed any kind of accent, you’ll have to ask Ravetch; most of us have only the regional accent from where we grew up—mine’s a general Mid-Atlantic speech pattern.  I had a roommate in college who was Jewish and he sounded a little like Lucas Black, late of NCIS: New Orleans—because he was from Birmingham, Alabama; my parents knew a Jewish man from Melbourne, Australia, and he talked a bit like Crocodile Dundee.) 

“Veteran actors of screen, stage, and television Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers do their best to bring Joshua Ravetch’s ‘One November Yankee’ to the stage,” reported David Roberts on Theatre Reviews Limited.  “Despite their heroic efforts, Rav[e]tch’s script lacks the sophistication and strength to match the formidable skills of the cast.”  The plot, Roberts found, does “little to fulfill the promise of ‘exploring human connection brought on by tragedy in the aftermath of a plane crash that ripples across the lives of our characters’ [from the play’s promo blurb].  Nor are these stories ‘intricately interwoven.’” 

The TRL reviewer asserted that “the connections [among the characters] are there; however, they are more obvious than intricate” and he concluded that “the three stories fail to make a convincing argument for their telling.  There is no substance to them and no redemptive resolution or catharsis.” 

Determining that the plane is the “remarkably and stunningly apparent” “star” of One November Yankee, Marilyn Lester asserted on Theater Pizzazz that the play “is, at its best, a mediation [the writer may have meant ‘meditation’] on what classical Greeks referred to as storge—familial love, a powerful, supportive love that’s just as prone to disintegrate into chaos when family goals don’t align.”  Lester reported that the “conflicts [between the siblings] are explored with varying degrees of success” and continued that playwright Ravetch “is an articulate writer, but also a glib one, a facility that largely enfeebles the three stories.” 

The characters “speak to each other as if they’d just stepped out of a Noël Coward play,” the TP reviewer felt.  “Such archness may be occasionally amusing, but it certainly undercuts the valid points the playwright is striving to make.”  The playwright’s “relentless reliance on expletives,” a tactic Lester was not alone in pointing out (a couple of reviewers compared Ravetch to David Mamet), “which aid and abet his compulsion to be funny, plus his single-minded focus on the bickering between the siblings, detract from the possible depths the play could have achieved.”  In the end, Lester felt that the author “is ultimately One November Yankee’s undoing” because Ravetch is “a cleverness junkie with an addiction to flippant repartee.”  In the end, the review-writer determined that “Ravetch is fortunate that the acting prowess of Hamlin and Powers elevated the work to the heights it did achieve.” 

On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy proclaimed, “There’s real star power on the stage of 59E59 Theaters” and One November Yankee “is the one to see.”  The BWW reviewer affirmed, “The show’s intriguing premise is complemented by the outstanding acting skills of Hamlin and Powers.”  She also found, “It is interesting how these stories are woven together, revealing the personalities of the characters while it makes statements about the uniqueness of brother and sister bonds.” 

Kennedy felt that Hamlin and Powers are “an ideal pair to star in One November Yankee.  Each of them seamlessly assumes three very different roles during the course of the show.”  The reviewer added, “While they are convincing in all of their parts, Powers is particularly good when she portrays art curator, Maggie and Hamlin is compelling as the character, Ronnie [the hiker-dentist who identifies Harry’s remains].”  Kennedy praised the design team and concluded, “One November Yankee is an opportunity to see two beloved actors on one stage in a memorable show.  Get your tickets.  It is sure to sell out.”  (Note that the limited-run production at 59E59 has closed.) 

Victor Gluck of TheaterScene.net reported, “It is [Hamlin’s and Powers’s] star power which keeps this old-fashioned, rather sit-com-ish, interconnected triple bill as lively and as entertaining as it is despite clichéd writing and passé jokes.”  The actors “manage to be convincing in weak material.”  Gluck thought that Ravetch “has staged the scenes in rather static fashion,” but felt that Hamlin and Powers “are so accomplished at repartee that they keep the play moving despite the fact that they don’t move much in each scene.” 

New York Stage Review posted two notices. In the one, Melissa Rose Bernardo announced, “The most interesting character in the show, however, isn’t one of those six squabbling sibs.  It’s the broken-down taxicab-yellow Piper Cub plane.”  She added, “Unfortunately, none of the flesh-and-blood characters are as compelling as Crumpled Plane.”  Nonetheless, Bernardo affirmed, “The actors fare relatively well, though Hamlin overdoes both Ralph’s drunkenness and Harry’s accent; Powers, so glam on TV’s Hart to Hart, actually looks most comfortable as the crunchy-granola gray-haired Mia.” 

In the second NYSR notice, David Finkle observed that Ravetch “extends [his look at brotherly-sisterly love] but doesn’t deepen it.”  Finkle found, “Because he’s chosen the relatively quick sketch form, he keeps his writing, uh, sketchy.”  The NYSR writer explained, “As writer and director, he is able to maintain an amusing level of insights—with Hamlin and Powers maximizing his intentions—but it does seem as if he’s presenting a series of situations that might benefit from further delving.”  The reviewer finished up by suggesting: 

It could be said that just as Ralph sees a metaphor in “Crumpled Plane,” Ravetch discerns in the links between the characters from sketch to sketch a metaphor for our universal link to each other—a one-big-universal-family linkage that must not only be faced and endured but also honored.  He’s writing in the tradition of the old saw that goes, “Blood is thicker than water.”  As the history of humankind has forever demonstrated, there is a good deal of truth to the adage.

(I don’t frequently comment on a review in my play reports, but this calls out for some response.  Besides the fact that Finkle is presenting a clutch of clichés for his interpretation of Ravetch’s play—and rather commonplace ones at that—he’s far over-reading the play’s intentions, I think.  One November Yankee isn’t even as deep as Finkle seems to think it is.  Aside from the self-defined symbolism of the plane wreck, there are no metaphors here.  It’s all right on the text’s surface.  There’s no deeper meaning in Ravetch’s script.  It’s just as superficial as it seems.  Sorry, David.)

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, review-writer Samuel L. Leiter actually called the plane mock-up “perhaps the most memorable scenic unit I’ve ever seen on that modest, little stage.”  Really?  Poor Samuel must have seen some very dull sets at 59E59.  That plane isn’t all that remarkable that I expect to remember it very long myself. 

The play, Leiter felt, “escapes being a total wreck itself by virtue of its appealing stars,” a sentiment readers by now will recognize.  He pointed out bad jokes, like that Harry and Margo’s “reaction to the accident is ‘This doesn’t happen to people like us!’ by which he means, ‘Jewish intellectuals.’  ‘It’s the kind of thing you read about in the New York Times and it’s always rich Republican Goyem [sic].’  And that, if it somehow makes you laugh, is about the apex of the play’s humor.”  And he noted that “the seriousness of their situation [Harry does end up dying] taking second place to leaden attempts at humor based on fraternal squabbling.”

“Perhaps there’s a message somewhere in here about the vagaries of fate and coincidence and the inter-connectedness of experience,” mused Leiter.  “However, the overall superficiality of the writing and characterizations, the implausibility of the action, and the too-frequently banal dialogue defeat any attempt to take the play seriously.”  He summed up his assessment of One November Yankee by emphasizing, “When the image of a crashed plane upstages even actors like Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers, you may be forgiven for taking out flight insurance before you get on board.”

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.”