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Modern art is more popular than ever, but you won't find much of it in Boston right now

For people who like art, Boston is one of the most lavishly endowed cities in America. Indeed, of the museums with the six biggest collections in America, two are in our area.

On the other hand, if you happen to be a Bostonian who likes modern art, these are dismayingly lean times. Look for modern art - by which I mean art made in the 20th century up until about 1970 (after which people usually start referring to "contemporary art") - at the Museum of Fine Arts right now, and you will come away with a few handfuls of work scattered willy-nilly. If you go to the Harvard Art Museum, you will get a desultory selection taking up barely more than a room.

The situation seems strange when you consider that modern art, after a long period of mutual suspicion between it and the public, has become, over the past two or three decades, the most popular art in the world, with crowds thrilling to the many unprecedented breakthroughs - in both form and content - effected by early 20th-century artists associated with movements like Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism.

The globe's most visited museum is London's Tate Modern. New York's Museum of Modern Art is not far behind. Prize works by artists such as Picasso, Pollock, Klimt, and de Kooning - all of them modern - have shattered one record after another at auction over the past few years. And judging by new biographies, the lives and works of such modern artists as Matisse, Braque, de Kooning, and Picasso are of intense, and increasing, interest to the public.

So why is modern art so thin on the ground in Boston?

There is one obvious answer: The MFA and the Harvard Art Museum are both undergoing large-scale renovations. The space they have to display their holdings is acutely limited.

The situation won't change at Harvard until 2013, when the university's Quincy Street museum complex reopens, and then only marginally, because every other area of the collection will be competing for its slice of only a modest increase in space. When the MFA's ambitious expansion is finished in 2010, modern art from America, of which the MFA has strong holdings, will get a big boost in the new Art of the Americas Wing, along with every other period of American art. But meanwhile only a single space, the Rabb Gallery, will be dedicated to European modernism (and Europe from 1900 to 1940 was without question the center of modernist endeavor). That display, which is set to open this spring, will hold just 35-40 works by, among others, Beckmann, Gauguin, Giacometti, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Matisse, Miró, and Picasso.

My question, then, is this: Do the renovations explain everything? Or could it be that there is a deeper malaise - a problem of commitment?

Remember, I am not arguing that Boston is starved of all art made after 1900. After all, when it comes to contemporary art, we are not doing too badly. We have a museum dedicated to it, the Institute of Contemporary Art, whose effect on the whole art scene is already being felt. And within striking distance we have such places as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Rose Art Museum, the MFA, the Peabody Essex Museum, MIT's List Visual Arts Center, and even the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which are making notable efforts to keep abreast of goings on in contemporary art.

But the dearth of Western art made between the death of Cezanne and 1970 is remarkable for a city so rich in art from other periods and cultures.

Of course, criticizing either the MFA or the Harvard Art Museum right now for failing to display particular parts of their collections feels a little like kicking a man when he's down. And yet, by the same token, now is a good time to raise questions about both museums' commitment to modern art. Both are at pivotal moments in their history, intricately involved in reshaping not only their buildings but the nature of their relationships with the public.

Surely it's strange, for instance, that the MFA has no dedicated curator of modern art, and no plans to appoint one?

It does have George Shackelford, a highly respected curator (he was responsible for "Gauguin Tahiti" in 2004) who specializes in 19th-century European art and is in charge of the art of Europe, including the decorative arts and European modern art nominally up to 1950.

According to Shackelford, the MFA's collection of modern European art has "great, great strengths, but no depth."

"Bostonians didn't really go for modern art in the period between the wars," he says. "They still went for Impressionism. Taste was really, really conservative. It's a miracle we got the Gauguin [painting, "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"]. [MFA director] Perry Rathbone in the 1950s did a great job of redressing the situation. But by then it was too late."

The last point is debatable. It's true that many of the greatest collections of early modern art were formed between the wars, when prize works were eminently affordable. But for prestigious, generously endowed institutions like the MFA, it is also a matter of priorities, and of will.

Australia's National Gallery in Canberra did not open until 1981, when prices for modern art were really beginning to skyrocket. And yet it has assembled a surprisingly good collection of modern art, almost all of which is on permanent display. This, in a country that has virtually no tradition of private philanthropy, and in an institution that could never hope to compete with the fund-raising abilities of the MFA.

When London's Tate Modern opened to the public in 2000, everyone acknowledged that its permanent collection was patchy, at best. But its curators begged and borrowed work, they took an innovative (if not always satisfactory) approach to their displays, and they signaled their ambitions widely. People started noticing - they could hardly fail to - and pretty soon more works entered the permanent collection, either by way of gift or publicly funded acquisition.

If a museum, in other words, takes the art of a given period seriously, it can signal its ambitions by putting what it does have prominently on display, conveying a sense of commitment and purpose that hopefully will get the ball rolling.

Modernism at MFA

The MFA has a strong collection of early modern American art. But does the MFA take European modern art seriously? There are good reasons to wonder.

Yes, it is a "universal museum," committed to art from all over the world, from every period. But why should modern art from Europe be just about the only part of the collection that is almost nowhere to be seen during this period of upheaval? Almost every other curatorial department has at least some token representation.

What's more, not since "Monet in the 20th Century," an obvious crowd-puller back in 1998, has the museum mounted a serious, scholarly show dedicated to a major figure of modernism (unless you count the American artist Edward Hopper - who, like Monet, is a surefire popular hit and only notionally a modernist).

One can only wonder at some of the MFA's decisions. It owns, for instance, two paintings by Matisse - an artist as important for the great postwar period of American art as any. The one it chooses to display, "Carmelina," is a remarkable painting, which absolutely deserves to be on display. But it was painted in 1903, before Matisse made his astonishing breakthroughs in color.

The other, "Vase of Flowers," is a painting from Matisse's so-called Nice period (1916-30), always popular but for many years a critically neglected period that has been reevaluated over the last two decades by scholars who now see this time as essential to Matisse's oeuvre. It is a modest but lovely painting, full of light and color - a work that harks back to Manet and forward to such artists as Milton Avery, Fairfield Porter, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elizabeth Peyton.

But Shackelford, echoing earlier judgments of the Nice period, says it is not his favorite Matisse, and so the public is starved of the opportunity to see even a single color-oriented work by the 20th century's preeminent master of color.

Boston's (and the MFA's) reputed conservatism is the reason usually invoked to explain away the dearth of opportunities to see modern art here. But my suspicion is that the problem may also reflect a long draining away in the academy of confidence in modernism.

For if it's true to say that modern art is the most popular art in the world right now, it is also true that, in academic circles, it is the most relentlessly critiqued. Modernism, in recent years, has been caricatured by those who see in it a dangerous combination of starry idealism and arrogant exclusivity. The progression of movements that form the backbone of the modernist endeavor - Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, and so on - is now regarded as constituting a sinister "Grand Narrative" that is implicated in the 20th century's other failed utopias, from communism to fascism.

In truth, many criticisms of modernism are perfectly legitimate. But the ideological distaste in the academy for modernism may help some institutions feel OK about neglecting it.

Harvard on hold

The story over at Harvard is nothing if not complicated. Thomas Lentz, director of the Harvard Art Museum, admits "it's pretty tough" for locals to see modern art right now.

The museum has long recognized that it has what Lentz describes as "huge gaps" in its modern and contemporary collection. But, like the MFA, its holdings of modern art are nothing to sniff at. Indeed, they have just been beefed up, thanks to a gift by Emily Rauh Pulitzer of 31 works by artists such as Vuillard, Picasso, Giacometti, Brancusi, and Lichtenstein.

"Modern art is very much on our minds," says Lentz. "In fact, we talk so much around here about modern and contemporary art that people think we're trying to turn ourselves into a contemporary museum. We're not."

Even in the best-case scenario, however, it will be a long time before Harvard can offer either the public or its students a display that does anything like justice to its holdings.

One plan after another has been proposed to improve the situation for modern and contemporary art, only to be scotched or postponed. (Pity Lentz, who, having taken on the job in 2004, is working with his third university president, not to mention ongoing tensions between town and gown and a constantly shifting political, institutional, and financial landscape.)

A 1999 plan to build a pair of new art museums designed by Renzo Piano on the Charles River was strangled when Harvard's Cambridge neighbors protested. An alternative plan, trumpeted in 2006, to build new museum, storage, and administrative facilities in Allston has meanwhile been put on hold while the museum focuses on renovating its badly outdated Quincy Street premises (home to the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums).

The display space in the renovated Quincy Street museum complex will increase by a third, but only a small fraction of that is likely to be devoted to modern art, according to Lentz. At any rate, it won't open again until 2013, by which time tens of thousands of students and other itinerant members of Boston's population (not to mention tourists) will have missed out on the full Harvard Art Museum experience.

Allston is, eventually, where Lentz sees the modern and contemporary collections finding a home. But he can't say when work there will begin, let alone end, and he adds that the current global financial crisis is only adding to the uncertainty.

In the meantime, the stopgap display in Harvard's Sackler Museum has just one room devoted to modern art, about half of which is given over to postwar American art. There are no more than a dozen works that could be described as classical modernism (among them paintings and sculpture by Mondrian, Matisse, Picasso, Beckmann, and Braque).

Lentz doesn't expect to change the display more than once between now and 2013. On the other hand, he says he is keen to collaborate with such institutions as the ICA and the List (here again, though, it seems the emphasis is on contemporary art rather than modern art).

Lentz seems determined to resist the idea that Boston is inherently conservative. Which is good, because frankly, in 2008, it's time to move on. This is a town filled, after all, with students, young people who are hungry to see art by some of history's most ambitious and paradigm-shifting creative minds. They, like everyone else, know that many of the most audacious of these artists were hard at work in the first half of the 20th century, and they can't understand why it's so difficult, in a place like Boston, to see more of the things they left behind.