MOMA'S Moment
The parties are over. Now the work starts.
Almost a year has passed since the reopening of New York's Museum of Modern Art. The hurricane of commentary and criticism and chatter about money that accompanied the event (most of it favourable) has subsided. The pomp and fancy dress hauled out for the opening-night festivities have long since been sent back into storage, and buzz about billionaire board members and patrons has dropped from the news pages. The Modern—as gallery-goers who, like me, came of age in the 1950s and 1960s have always called it—has forgotten its whirl of fabulous debutante parties and returned to its old day job of entertaining and educating and proclaiming its famous story of what happened to art after it became modern, and before it ceased to be.
The basic story, as illustrated in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, has changed little since it was devised many years ago by Barr, the museum's founding director and formative intellectual force. The great narrative opens in the late 19th century, with the marvellously fresh paintings of Cézanne and van Gogh in which Barr saw evidence of a decisive break with the aristocratic, academic past of art, and the beginning of a radically new realism. But in contrast to the layout of the old galleries, which dictated a long, generally linear march from 1880 to about 1970, the new ones open up various lines of inquiry from the incandescent Impressionist moment toward modern art's futures. In one direction, for example, the visitor is led from Impressionism toward German Expressionism by Wilhelm Lehmbruck's superb Standing Youth (1913), in another direction is Picasso's very different vision of the youthful human figure in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and, beyond, landmark works in the hugely influential Cubist experiment of 1912.
Though any general discussion of the Modern's collections will tend to fasten onto emblematic works, making a walk through the galleries sound like heavy going indeed, the display in the Barr galleries is actually a happily rhythmic mix of great and less-great pieces, dead ends and culminations. There is nothing of the faintly monotonous sense one gets (for example) at the Frick Collection, where there always seem to be too many masterpieces. The Modern's more various array allows for lulls and crescendos, and at least two fortissimos. One is Cubism. The other, preceded by a generous homage to Surrealism, is the New York School in the early 1950s. Here again, the new Modern's display arrangements turn even its most famous works from showstoppers into hinges. The gallery containing Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950, for example, opens immediately onto a room wonderfully adorned by the works of other artists from the same chronological and intensely creative moment: a characteristic Rothko, Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Kline's Chief and others. Turning again, we see a room of Pollock's immediate predecessors, comrades, partners in passion: Gorky, Gottlieb, de Kooning, Krasner.
As everyone knows, the tale laid out by these galleries in both the old Modern and the new has to do, supremely, with easel painting and, to a somewhat more subdued degree, sculpture—their revival by artists (and enlightened patrons and intellectuals) in Europe in the decades on either side of 1900, their fortunes in Europe and America during the later 20th century, their status as inexhaustibly versatile instruments of discovery. In contrast, short shrift has been given to the anti-art pranksters of the modernist period—the Berlin/Zurich Dadas, Duchamp—and to political avant-gardists of any kind, apart from the early and acceptably formalist Malevich and the dandyish Surrealists. Barr and the wealthy, liberal New Yorkers who created the Modern's storyline were not deeply interested in, or perhaps simply could not understand, art that viewed modern art and its audience with contempt.
Strolling through the Barr galleries in 2005, decades after discovering art through the Minimalists and the post-Moderns of the 1970s, I found the old propositions advanced there about the modern movement more compelling than ever. That painting is art, for example, and that art in other mediums, however novel or timely, beautiful or fun or intellectually stimulating to write about, is commentary, or, at best, an attempt to do what painting does, though with clumsier, unnecessarily complicated means.
In the Modern's former incarnations, the painting and sculpture galleries encouraged and reinforced this admittedly snooty conclusion about the art of modern times. The mixed-media experimentation of the 1960s was largely ignored in favour of recognizably modernist painting and sculpture, or handed off to other departments to worry about. The representation of the 1960s in the Barr galleries, then, took the form of a stately, sober but optimistic coda to the 1950s. The last period of artistic modernism's hegemony (which ended in America and elsewhere circa 1970, by this account) was a time dominated by the terminal refinement of tendencies and conditions announced in the fifties, especially flatness and ontological simplicity in painting and sculpture, and New York Pop's dead-cool appropriation of stuff ordered in from American popular culture.
This closing moment in the drama of modern art, as presented now, is a decidedly more melancholy, resigned affair than I remember it being in the past. The last works we see in the Barr galleries include a black painting by Ad Reinhardt and a work by Agnes Martin, both almost entirely drained of the brushy commotion typical of modern New York painting before 1960; and muscular minimal sculptures by Eva Hesse, who (like modernism itself, one is prompted to remember) was dying young at the end of the 1960s. The curators further darken this sombre conclusion by placing beside the last exit out of the Barr galleries (and hence out of the Modern's story of modern art) a sad heap of props and souvenirs from a 1966 New York performance by Joseph Beuys, all to do with reconciliation, healing and the attainment of wisdom.
In artistic modernism's heyday, we are reminded by this piece, many influential thinkers believed in the transcendental power of art to heal the soul and right the listing world. The German composer and writer Richard Wagner gave this idea an influential formulation that resounded well into the 20th century. (Among the first books published by the Bolshevik government of Russia was not a tract by Lenin, but Wagner's Art and Revolution.) The wild anti-art avant-gardists of the early 20th century believed it, but so did the zealous Presbyterian preacher's son Alfred Barr, after his Calvinistic, staunchly moralistic fashion. In whatever way it was believed and preached, this doctrine of universal renovation and salvation without reference to God was part of the post-Christian culture from which modern painting and sculpture emerged, and in which Barr's imagination of the modern was shaped. It persisted into the time and work of Joseph Beuys, who gave this piety its final and most tender, disillusioned expression, before Beuys himself and modern art's pretensions to recreate the world were hounded offstage, in the 1970s, by radical artists, academics and critics everywhere.
Nobody reading this, I suspect, needs a lengthy lesson on the art world's principal quarrels since the 1970s. It is sufficient to note that, after 30 years of attempts by critics, historians and museum people to end the jockeying for modernism's fallen crown and declare some artist or some tendency to be the undisputed postmodern heir to the throne, the civil war continues, and the end is still not in sight. To complicate matters, we have so far not been able to forget or lay to rest the ghost of modernism. The discredited works of the great modernist painters and sculptors (or their embalmed works, preserved in art-history books and slide shows) continue to litter our imaginative attic and our museums, never allowing us to forget the all-or-nothing valiance of the modern movement so brilliantly dramatized by the Modern, or the movement's immensely suggestive encounters with doubt, the menace of spiritual purposelessness, the decline and disappearance of the sacred.
Nor is the problem only that Pollock and Warhol and Newman refuse to stay safely dead and say nothing. Though nobody in the anti-painting seventies could have predicted such a scandalous outcome, Gerhard Richter, the most complex and intellectually involving artist to emerge internationally since then, is an old-fashioned, apolitical easel painter, a trafficker in formal iconography and method with deep roots in the modernist project. Richter has shown himself to be a committed investigator of the existential disenchantment that obsessed the conflicted modernist imagination from the Expressionists to Beuys.
Depending on your position in this ongoing war of succession, the high-ceilinged contemporary gallery in the new Modern will seem to be (1) a surrender to the forces of confusion, (2) an unconvincing attempt to establish an august modernist genealogy for some contemporary artists popular among New York collectors, dealers and critics or (3) an acknowledgement that, while art made since 1970 must count for something, the Modern is darned if it knows what.
I am inclined to believe the contemporary gallery is all three, to some extent. But on a recent visit to the museum, I was particularly struck by the wager being laid on the table by the contemporary curators. The big bet, backed up by the remarkably big (and much discussed) contemporary gallery, says that the works by newer artists here can stand up well beside the recent works of artists who hail from the older, modernist order of things, and hence be seen as successors. In the camp of the greybeards: Richter (represented by a luminous urban landscape), Warhol, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns.
With these precedents in mind and in view, the curators want us to look at newer works and make formal connections. Indeed, such connections—insistently made by the younger artists—can be made out between, let's say, Richter's desolate cityscape and Julie Mehretu's rhapsodic 2003 invocation of Istanbul, or between Warhol's dumb-like-a-fox painting of a Rorschach blot (1984) and Jeff Koons's dumb-like-a-fox-looking stack of professional-grade vacuum cleaners, New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker (1981). But look again, and the links seem to vanish, leaving merely the trace of artistic parasitism. As a handout at the gallery entrance reminds us, Warhol made Koons possible. So be it: but where, in anything Koons has ever made, is the insolence, sucker punch or urbane hopelessness you have to admire, like him or not, in Warhol?
Setting up such informative juxtapositions in the contemporary gallery reinforces&—;unintentionally, I assume&—;the very last notion the Modern wants us to believe it believes: that the art which has the power to matter deeply to us went into sharp decline some 25 or 30 years ago, or survived in the practice of a few senior artists (Johns, Twombly, inter alia) who have since died or are now nearing the end of days. To be fair, and as far as I know, the museum has never stated these convictions about contemporary art in so many words, and has never stopped showing the art of the moment and become simply a museum of the modern. In this latest architectural makeover, the Modern has gone to extraordinary lengths to emphasize its commitment to art made after 1970, simply by making it the first thing you see upon leaving the soaring central atrium and entering the museum proper.
Yet one leaves this gallery with the distinct sense that the world would be no poorer if most of the more recent art on display had never been made. Too much of the work fails to hold our interest for very long, because it lacks necessity. We learn nothing new about the world of immediate, concrete experience, its meanings and menaces; such art remains art about art, hence without urgency to commend it. Though Andy Warhol's painting has always given me a certain sinking feeling—the vertigo that comes from standing too close to the edge of the abyss—his work was the revelation of an age, and of a critical passage in modern sensibility, from post-war austerity to tail-finned hedonism, that many of us who grew up in America during the early and middle Cold War years were caught in, wrenched and baffled by. Warhol's art is also evidence, if evidence is needed, that painting can do what only the most remarkable novel or poem can also do: narrate a truth of recent existence—something about the human condition we would rather not face, or would prefer to encounter only as a safely neutralized platitude (our age's declining curiosity, perhaps, or our impatience with the disciplines of difficulty)—with a penetrating, life-changing twist.
For a structure built to house an institution so conspicuous on New York's cultural skyline, the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi's $425-million (U.S.) Modern has been talked about, for the most part, in the midst of articles (like this one) that are mostly about something elseÃthe collections and displays, or the politics and intrigues, or the wow of all that money, or whatever. The judgments we find in the hurried notices I have read have tended to be positive, with polite praise for the 630,000-square-foot museum's lightness and spatial generosity, its monumental grace and clarity and—to use a word much overused by fans—its elegance.
In my experiences of the new Modern, I have found all these sentiments about the architecture to be well-founded. Other things about the building worth noting—I am not the first writer to spot them—include the refinement and high level of craftsmanship of the Modern's galleries and public areas. (I have seen nothing of the greatly expanded curatorial and administrative quarters.) Despite its complexity, which involved the construction of new buildings and the renovation of old ones on the Modern's very constrained campus, Taniguchi's museum has been realized with great simplicity and dignity in the dense urban fabric of midtown Manhattan.
But when I first visited it, one afternoon last December, I was blinded to most of the project's good points by what I took to be a huge overscaling of everything. As I discovered on second and subsequent visits, the new Modern is not, in fact, overscaled at all, though the reasons one might think so are interesting.
One reason has to do with the common-sense expectation that the inner precinct of a museum is, well, interior. I wish the curators better understood that at the new Modern, more than one thing about the architecture is not commonsensical at all.
After entering the Modern's enlarged but understated lobby, and ascending by a fine, unassertive staircase to the 5,000-square-foot atrium at the heart of Taniguchi's new building, the long-time Modern visitor gets the shock of seeing Monet's very popular Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond (c. 1920) disagreeably diminished by the vast wall it hangs on, and by its juxtaposition with Barnett Newman's glorious, monumental Broken Obelisk (1963Ã?9). Like the water lilies, two de Kooning canvases (1977 and 1982) seem much smaller and less resonant, but also more intimate, than they actually are.
The key to these disquieting sensations lies, I believe, in the discord between the right space and the choice of the wrong works to hang in it. Taniguchi has switched the core of the museum from a privileged inner sanctum into a space with the sense and scale of a piazza, bringing light and air down into a crowd of palatial urban buildings (which the Modern's tight bundle of old and new structures around the atrium, of course, is). This means the Newman sculpture, intended for an open-air setting, looks fine, while the Monet—a piece in the manner of an haut-bourgeois, fin de siècle dining-room decoration—seems exposed and uncomfortable. (A great deal more could be said about the atrium, which is one of New York's great new urban places.) Given enough trips to the new Modern, one could, I suppose, become accustomed to seeing the water lilies under these new, architecturally flipped conditions. I have decided not to become accustomed to it, and I look forward to the day the curators decide to move Monet's subtle picture to a more secluded place. [Ed: At press time MOMA stated that the Monet would be moved in August 2005 to the museum's fifth-floor painting and sculpture galleries.]
Another probable cause for the sensation of bigness that I felt at first was nothing more complicated than surprise at no longer seeing the Modern's holdings under domestic-scale circumstances. For the first time in its history, in fact, the galleries and transitional spaces in the Modern feel like those in any great public museum, instead of the corridors and rooms of a Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue apartment. Of course, the early collections, and the power, wealth and determination that created the museum, came from such apartments, and, to some extent, still do. Yet it was surely high time the museum broke with its architectural tradition of luxurious domesticity, got an architect as excellently mindful as Taniguchi—the designers of the several previous incarnations of the Modern, from Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone to Philip Johnson and Cesar Pelli, have been hacks or corporate tailors—and commissioned a building comparable in intellectual and aesthetic breadth to its collections.
Fall 2005
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