Museum broadens its size as well as its definition of modern art
NEW YORK -- Barnett Newman's "Broken Obelisk" is a glorious balancing act: a pyramid of rusting steel rising to a point and meeting another point that widens into a column with a ragged top. At nearly 25 feet tall, it's a compellingly vertical piece. And it is now in an ideal setting, dead center in the vast atrium of the expanded Museum of Modern Art.
The new MoMA, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi and opening Saturday, is spectacular. It's a reminder that the museum already owned the world's greatest collection of 20th-century art, when, three years ago, the works were sent to Queens to sit out the construction.
Back home on West 53d Street, the initial installation includes icons -- Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," an entire gallery of Pollocks -- but also splendid surprises. The new museum wasn't the only thing being built: The collections were, too. The MoMA has acquired hundreds of works since the exodus. The words "New Acquisition" appear on label after label. While museums that ignored the 20th century lament that it's too late now to catch up -- the art isn't available and its cost would be prohibitive -- the MoMA has received from its supporters a windfall that would make up an entire 20th-century department in any other institution. And these new additions match the quality of the existing holdings -- which is staggering. Very few things are less than the finest of their kind.
Art and architecture do not battle here. Unlike Frank Gehry's Bilbao or Richard Meier's Getty, Taniguchi's MoMA is a celestial shell of air, light, and whiteness. It defers to the collections. His aim, Taniguchi says, was to create a building that would "disappear" -- hardly the goal at the Getty or Bilbao. But at those museums the architecture is the star, and the works on view are certainly not uniformly top quality. The MoMA's are.
The expansion to 630,000 square feet, almost double the museum's former size, means the galleries can now accommodate huge works that the museum couldn't show in the past without moving everything else around. Among the works on the sixth floor, which will be for changing exhibitions, are James Rosenquist's 86-foot-long painting "F-111" and Ellsworth Kelly's 65-foot-long aluminum "Sculpture for a Large Wall," both looking at home in the airplane-hangar-size space.
The new MoMA also broadens its once-linear definition of modern art, in which Paris was the epicenter early in the 20th century and New York took over after World War II. Among the new works in the fold is Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica's 1960 "Neoconcrete Relief," a muted work in an irregular, angular shape. It was given by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a great collector of the cooler, abstract varieties of Latin American art. The Oiticica helps to balance the heat of the MoMA's paintings by Diego Rivera and his ilk, painters of passion and politics. It's also an indication of the art world's current interest in Latin American work and the recognition that high level art wasn't -- and isn't -- confined to a few all-powerful cities.
The old MoMA told the story of modern art in a straight chronological line. The uncertainty of our times perhaps contributed to the new installation, which zigzags. Stand in most galleries and you have a choice where to go next: Multiple doors mean there's no prescribed route. And while there are references to be made back and forth, each room is satisfying in itself.
With the new building, the MoMA has its first designated space for contemporary art. It's the width of a city block, with 22-foot ceilings and none of the usual support columns that keep viewers dodging to get a good look at what's on the wall.
The contemporary galleries are on the second floor, just up from the greatly expanded ground floor lobby, which is anchored by a few big-presence pieces that won't be swallowed by the space: Rodin's heroic "Balzac," for one.
The first stop on the tour, one that you'd have to try to avoid, is the atrium. Atriums are the bane of most curators, who see them as wasted space. Taniguchi's isn't. It houses the Newman, which needs an ocean of room around it, and on the opposite wall is Monet's c. 1920 "Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond." At 42 feet wide it is as emphatically horizontal as the Newman is vertical. The contrast encourages the formalist reading of art that the MoMA has always championed.
The atrium also organizes the space. You can see it from the other floors, thanks to interior windows -- including an extremely vertical one that seems to continue the interrupted upward journey of "Broken Obelisk." Massive though the building is, it doesn't overwhelm you with instant museum fatigue. It's enticing to explore.
If you're working your way up from the second floor to the fifth, you begin with art from right now and wind up at the end of the 19th century -- a reverse chronology. You can, of course, elect to start at the top and work your way down, but that goes against most people's instincts. The danger in doing the galleries in ascending order is that by the time you get to the fifth floor, some of the Cezannes, Kandinskys, and Dalis look almost quaintly dated, and their small scale is startling after the expansiveness of the Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, and color-field paintings on the floor below.
The fifth floor Picassos and Matisses are a different story. Picasso's stout terra cotta colored figures from early in the century, such as his "Boy With a Horse," and Matisse's luscious "The Red Studio" can go head to head with anything on the lower floors -- and triumph.
The Contemporary Galleries feature a who's who cast: Rachel Whiteread, Jeff Koons, Lorna Simpson, the regulars on the international circuit, all represented by signature pieces. Highlights here include Josiah McElheny's "Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely." McElheny has installed clear blown-glass bottles in a mirrored box set into the wall: They're repeated without end; the effect is magical. At the other extreme from this crystalline clarity is Gordon Matta-Clark's "Bingo," made of sections of the facade of an abandoned red shingled house. He's rearranged them so they make no sense as domestic architecture: Windows and doors are cut off so they can't function. Matta-Clark transforms the angularity of the existing ruin into that staple of 20th-century art, the grid.
While the installation doesn't force comparisons, they pop up anyway, some delightfully unexpected. In the Contemporary Galleries, for instance, is Andreas Gursky's giant 1999 color photograph "Rhine II," as insistently horizontal and calm a view of water as the big Monet in the atrium.
The second floor is also home to the MoMA's first gallery (as opposed to a theater) dedicated to film, video, and sound works, media that require tailor-made, high-tech spaces. Projected onto a wall just outside the media gallery is Hollis Frampton's 1969 "Lemon," a huge, lumbering shape that barely moves. Inside, the initial installation includes vintage work by Warhol along with newer pieces, including Eve Sussman's "89 Seconds at Alcazar." This opulently extended moment of Velazquez's "Las Meninas" features models in period dress slowly assuming the poses of the protagonists in a canvas that many -- Picasso included -- consider the greatest painting in history.
If you're going to exhibit new media, you need new materials. The walls in the Media Gallery are treated with "Screen Goo," which a curator calls "the world's most expensive paint." Metallic elements in it produce such vibrant images that actual screens, which are visual disruptions, are unnecessary. "Screen Goo" seems destined to become essential to the growing number of collectors buying new media works.
"Clutter" is not a word often associated with the MoMA, in either its old or new incarnations. The closest the new MoMA comes to it is in the third floor galleries designated for architecture and design. They're packed, like a department store display. Here the museum's values are admirably clear: They demand clean, sleek, functional objects, plastic and stainless rather than porcelain and silver. Any object is eligible for inclusion if it meets the MoMA's standards: There's an airport flight information display system, for instance, yet another new acquisition. An injection of wit saves the galleries from being preachy. Consider Ingo Maurer's "Porca Miseria Chandelier," which is made of smashed ceramic dishes and metal cutlery, an ensemble that looks as if several place settings had crashed to the floor and bounced back to serve another purpose.
Wit figures into the other galleries as well. Consider the space with an immense Donald Judd aluminum piece made of stacked boxes in vivid hues. It slashes through the huge space on a diagonal; it hogs attention, to the extent that you might not notice the work on the wall behind it -- Ellsworth Kelly's "White Relief Over White," a pair of curves as gentle as the petals in his line drawings. Kelly's new piece, like Taniguchi's new building, seems to want to disappear -- almost.
