It was to be expected, then, that the re-opening of the museum in May of this year would be seen to be an event of historic importance. After all, for the better part of four years MOMA has been more of an absence than a presence on the art scene, and it has been an absence keenly felt. Giving full priority to its long-awaited rebuilding and expansion program, the museum pretty much ceased to be what it had been for half a century—the central reference point for anyone seriously interested in the history of modern art. With its collections either dispatched to other venues or locked up in storage and its exhibition schedule drastically curtailed when not altogether suspended, MOMA gradually became something of a ghost of its former existence, continuing to haunt the life of art yet no longer an active participant in it. Expectations for its return were made all the higher, of course, by the promise of a “new” MOMA—a transformed museum boasting a glittering new building, with vastly expanded facilities both for the installation of the permanent collections that are MOMA’s greatest glory and for the temporary shows that have been so essential a part of its contribution to contemporary cultural life. And it is assuredly a new MOMA that we have now been given—a museum not only greatly enlarged physically but significantly altered in its general outlook and spirit.
Much that we cherished in the old MOMA remains as it was, and at times looks even better than one remembered. Certainly a great effort has been made, especially in the galleries devoted to the permanent collection of painting and sculpture, to concentrate (as the museum always has) on quality—to give us the best of the art that the modern era has bequeathed to us, and to confer upon our intercourse with this art that special feeling of intimacy and awe we gratefully recall from years in attendance at the old MOMA. Yet there is no avoiding the fact that a great many changes—some of them quite subtle, and some not subtle at all—have gone into the making of the new MOMA, and the most important of these is the revised perspective it now brings to modern art itself.
It is assuredly a new MOMA that we have now been given—a museum not only greatly enlarged physically but significantly altered in its general outlook and spirit.
For the new MOMA is, among many other things, a museum even more deeply entrenched than hitherto in the history of modern art and in modern art as history. It is also a museum now governed by a sharper and more narrowly defined view of that history than formerly obtained in the museum. It is a view that owes much to the critical thought of the last quarter-century. Its outlook may best be characterized, I think, as that of art-historical formalism, and it is in the nature of the strengths and the weaknesses of this outlook that it serves as a better guide to some kinds of art than to others, and that it is generally more useful in charting the art-historical past than in coming to grips with the present. For as a means of dealing with the present, this formalist outlook tends—one is tempted to say, inevitably—to lead to a false orthodoxy. And attempts to compensate for, or guard against, such orthodoxy tend, in turn, to lead to a virtual abandonment of any discernible standards.
The consequence of this for the new MOMA is made vividly clear in its inaugural installations. Whereas the task of tracing the history of modern art has been undertaken with an impressive sense of confidence, intelligence, and discrimination—even if the confidence may be said at times to border on overconfidence—the more challenging task of coming to terms with the art of the present has been badly botched. At least as far as painting and sculpture are concerned—and it is these that remain the principle interest of the new MOMA, as they were of old—the museum now reveals itself to be an institution that finds it increasingly difficult to get its bearings in a contemporary art scene that does not lend itself to the fixed ideas and tidy categories of the formalist outlook.
It must be acknowledged, in any discussion of this problem, that the division separating MOMA’s role as a custodian and codifier of history from its other role as an arbiter of contemporary taste has been the source of a built-in conflict in museum policy from the very beginning—as, indeed, it usually is for any cultural institution which undertakes to fix our understanding of the past at the same time that it seeks to discriminate among the claims of the present. It is not the problem itself that is new, but the extent to which history has now given it a new dimension and thereby rendered it all but unmanageable. For the passage of time, far from ameliorating this division and enabling the museum to reconcile the conflicting pressures it brings in its wake, has only succeeded in exacerbating these contradictory consequences. So deeply has this division penetrated to the core of the museum’s sense of its own identity that it has now gone a long way in determining not only the aesthetic character but even the physical structure of the new MOMA.
What is really new in the new MOMA is not so much the added space the museum has acquired—important as that may be—as the way it has utilized the space as a means of institutionalizing this categorical separation of the past from the present. As a result, the new MOMA is no longer a single museum with a unified purpose and outlook, but two (or more) museums which pursue vastly different objectives and uphold very different standards.
All of this is plainly legible in the design of the new MOMA. Here again, in the very disposition of the museum’s new space as well as in the way the space has been appointed, the policy already familiar to us in the old MOMA—the policy of making a sharp distinction between the parts of the museum in which we are intended to view modern art as history and those in which we are left to deal with contemporary art as an element of a new and uncodified cultural experience—has been elevated to the level of a structural principle. There may even be a certain symbolism in the way visitors to the museum are obliged to ascend—to the second, third, and fourth stories—in order to commune with the certified masterworks of modern art, whereas they must descend from these higher elevations to the lower levels of the building in order to study the “temporary” productions garnered from the current art scene. (In keeping with this symbolism, the movies of course are consigned to the lowest levels of the museum.) Even for contemporary works that have been nominated for permanent status and, on that provisional basis, accorded temporary lodging on the third floor—where, presumably, they may be properly tested for durability in the neighborhood of permanence—the same sharp distinction obtains between paintings and sculpture deemed to be permanently permanent, so to speak, and those judged for the moment to be only potentially permanent.
I do not mean to mock this policy. There are few alternative courses open to a museum that invests so large a portion of its space and resources in codifying a correct “reading” of the past at the same time that it persists in the vexing task of explaining the present. Still, while the alternatives may be few, if any, the comedy as well as the contradictions and pitfalls inherent in such a policy are worth noting, for they tell us something important about the way judgments in art come to be institutionalized. They alert us to the fact that history—in this case, the history of modern art—rests not on some immutable system of interpreting what artists have achieved but on particular acts of judgment made at particular times in particular circumstances.
Something else is also plainly legible in the design of the new MOMA. This is the important role played in the very conception of the building’s design by the change that has lately occurred in the size and in the character of the museum’s public. Indeed, the role played by this change is so important that it may very well be considered dominant. Which is to say that the new MOMA is a museum designed, as the old MOMA never was, to accommodate huge crowds of people—not all of whom, moreover, can be expected or in fact are expected to have an informed or even a very compelling interest in the art to be seen in the museum (though they may have—what is not the same thing—a compelling curiosity to see what it is). The new museum is designed, we may say, for a public nurtured on blockbuster exhibitions—exhibitions that are as much media events as they are art events, and that have the inevitable effect of arousing, by means of high-intensity publicity campaigns, the kind of interest which art in and of itself can probably never fully satisfy.
It will be recalled that MOMA was itself responsible for mounting what remains in many ways the most spectacular of the recent blockbuster exhibitions. This was the great Picasso retrospective, numbering around one thousand works by the artist, which occupied the old MOMA building in its entirety during the spring and summer months of 1980, and filled it with capacity crowds (seven thousand visitors a day). Although it was little noted at the time—probably because Picasso has a way of consuming all of our attention, and this was more of Picasso than anyone had ever before met with in one place at one time—this exhibition can now be seen to have been a watershed event in MOMA’s own history as a museum. It marked the end of the old MOMA and the beginning of the new. The galleries were emptied of every item in its collections that did not bear directly on this mammoth show. A new system of admission by advance reservation was devised, a new traffic pattern was designed for handling the crowds, and an augmented publicity department was created to insure that the crowds would keep coming. Whether by accident or intention, the Picasso retrospective proved to be a trial run for the operation of the new MOMA, and central to its success was the public that turned out for this exhibition—a public so eager not to miss out on what became the media event of the season, and of many a season, that it was willing to put up with almost any discomfort or distraction (and there were many!) in order to have been there. Those who said at the time that MOMA would never recover from this assault turned out, in some sense, to have been right. The new MOMA was born the day this exhibition opened its doors to the waiting throng.
It would have been quite correct, I think, to suggest that blockbuster exhibitions of this sort have converted the museums that embrace them into agencies of mass culture, for something less easily categorized—a cultural development that has not yet been defined or described—resulted from this planned introduction of huge new crowds into museums hitherto largely devoid of them. But if the blockbuster exhibition did not transform the museum into a branch of mass culture, it nonetheless brought us a fairly radical change in the museum-going public. It created, in effect, a new public which, while lacking both the knowledge and the sensibility to be found in the elite art public, must all the same be differentiated from the mass public that seeks its principal cultural gratifications in television and other commercial entertainments, professional sports events, and similar mass-market enterprises, and takes no interest whatever in the experience of high art.
Nor would it be correct to characterize this new public as middlebrow. The middle-brow public of yesteryear, with its perfect confidence in its own philistine taste and its indifference, if not outright hostility, to avant-garde culture, has pretty much ceased to exist—a casualty, perhaps, of the death of the avant-garde itself and the absorption of so many of its characteristic attitudes by the institutions (the academy, the mass media, et al.) which once served as a kind of support-system for middlebrow taste. In contrast to the old middlebrows, the new public I speak of is anything but confident of its taste. In a sense that I do not mean to be invidious but merely descriptive, this public may even be said to have no taste—none, anyway, where art is concerned—but to be possessed instead of a keen appetite for whatever modes of cultural experience are persuasively and conspicuously commended to its attention.
That exhibitions of high art now constitute one of these modes—and a very important one, too, to judge by the attendance figures—is, of course, a matter of considerable interest, and it would be nice to know what accounts for it. Is it to be explained—as I suspect—by the fact that art exhibitions do not necessarily require any sustained effort of cerebretion in order to be enjoyed at some level of pleasure or, for that matter, demand the kind of protracted intellectual attention in real time we are obliged to give to books or even plays of comparable seriousness if we are to derive any satisfaction from them at all? Is the explanation to be found, in other words, in the decline of literacy among the so-called “educated” classes? A dismaying thought. But however we attempt to explain this phenomenon, the phenomenon itself is an important new factor in the museum world, and the pressure it now exerts on that world is enormous.
Its influence certainly makes itself felt in the very look and atmosphere of the new MOMA. We are made to feel it straightaway in the enormous lobby area and in the computerized checkroom, and then most conspicuously in the so-called Garden Hall, the vast atrium-like, glass-enclosed space that now rises on the north side of the museum to its topmost story and has the effect of re-orienting the entire building away form the West Fifty-third Street entrance and toward the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden and the neighborhood of the West Fifty-fourth Street. This dazzling, light-filled space, with its elegant banks of escalators, its spacious halls, its busy display of structural detail (itself a visual experience of considerable interest), and its dramatic views, is now the museum’s main traffic artery. Interestingly, it is also the new MOMA’s principal architectural signature—its most expressive identifying image.
It is therefore of some significance that it is a space remarkably inhospitable to the exhibition of works of art. There are works of art displayed there, of course, and some very important ones, too—among them, Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910), Francis Picabia’s Dances at the Spring (1912), and Joan Miro’s Mural Painting (1950-51), on the second floor; and large-scale works by Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella on the third floor. Yet most of the art on display in the Garden Hall wages a losing battle against atrocious visual circumstance. Owing to the unremitting volume and intensity of the circumambient light, even sculptures as powerful as Gaston Lachaise’s Floating Figure (1927) and Alberto Giacometti’s Large Head (1960) are reduced to silhouettes; and because of the overwhelming scale of the space in the Garden Hall, the paintings—though no doubt selected on the basis of size (and the fact that size precluded their installation in the neighboring interior galleries)—tend to be sadly diminished. The result is not uniform,to be sure. With their bold forms and intense color, the Frankenthaler painting and the Stella construction manage to survive, if only barely, this diminishing effect. But Boccioni’s The City Rises, one of the classics of Futurist painting (though a heavily restored one), is simply wiped out by it, and there is not a single object on display in the Garden Hall that gains anything by being shown there.
The truth is, as a space in which to exhibit works of art—at least of the kind that have been placed there for the inauguration of the new MOMA—the Garden Hall is irredeemably makeshift, irrational, and unrewarding. But it is not, of course, the primary function of this space to serve as an exhibition area. Exhibiting works of art there is clearly a secondary consideration, if not indeed an afterthought. The real purpose of this space is to provide a place where crowds can gather and take their ease without having to be in any way concerned with the works of art they have ostensibly come to the museum to look at. For that purpose the Garden Hall is suitably commodious and very entertaining. It is sheer spectacle and gives the visitor a lot to look at when he doesn’t want to look at art.
In some respects—especially in the city-scape views it provides—the Garden Hall resembles the glassed-in hallways of the upper floors of the Pompidou Center in Paris, but it also calls to mind the great hall of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Both, of course, are pioneer examples of blockbuster-inspired museum design, and one has the impression that they have been carefully studied. If so, it must be said that some of the less appealing features of these buildings have not been avoided in the design of the new MOMA. On the contrary, they seem to have been emulated. The Garden Hall is an infinitely more elegant and refined space than any thing to be found at the Pompidou Center, but the very purpose which the Garden Hall serves guarantees that the irksome sense of bustle and commotion which can nowadays make a visit to the Pompidou Center such a ghastly experience—ghastly, that is, for anyone seriously interested in art—will be pervasive here as well. As for the great hall of the East Building of the National Gallery, it has proved from the outset to be a great space for crowds but an abysmal one in which to show works of art. The exhibitions which the National Gallery devoted to the works of Auguste Rodin and David Smith proved this unfortunate point beyond dispute, and it looks very much as if the Garden Hall—whatever its felicities as a design experience—is going to prove equally resistant to the museum’s basic artistic purposes.
It was Alfred Barr’s hope in 1936 to be able to engage the services of one of the great architects of the modern movement for this important commission. Since its opening in 1929, the museum had occupied temporary quarters in existing buildings—first in the Heckscher Building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and then, from 1932, in the townhouse at 11 West Fifty-third Street. During this period the museum had made the cause of modern architecture one of its principle concerns—its historic survey, “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” was organized in 1932, the year the Department of Architecture was established—and it was therefore to be expected that when the time came for MOMA to put up a building of its own, the commission would go to one of the figures it had already singled out as modern masters. Barr’s own choices were three: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and J.J.P. Oud, a Dutch architect associated with the avant-garde De Stijl group. Mies was clearly the director’s first choice. In a letter, written in July 1936, to Mrs. John D. (Abby Aldrich) Rockefeller, Jr., who had supplied the funds for purchasing the land on which the museum was to be built, Barr referred to Mies as “the man who is possibly the world’s finest architect.” And in another letter that month—this one to A. Conger Goodyear, the museum president—Barr left little doubt about what the selection of an architect would mean (as he saw it) for the museum itself. “The Museum, presumably, stands for the best,” he wrote, “not only in the art of our time but in architecture, too. I cannot but feel that if we took a second best, or, what is just as likely, a fifth best we would be betraying the standards of the Museum in general and in particular the standards which it has upheld in architecture.” To Mrs. Rockefeller, Barr stated the matter in even stronger terms: “To rest content with a mediocre building on such a site would be to betray the very purposes for which the Museum was founded as well as to make a laughing stock of the Museum’s five
Barr, as we know, lost this battle. The ideal museum that he envisioned in 1936—a museum that would embody in the very concept of its design the exalted standards which MOMA, under his directions, upheld in its architectural exhibition and publications program—was never built. The commission went instead to two Americans—Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone. Goodwin, though a MOMA trustee and a collector of modern painting and sculpture, was about as far from being a modernist as an architect could be in 1936. Russell Lynes, in Good Old Modern, described him as “an architect with the eclectic tastes of the Edwardian era and his roots … in the neo-classicism of the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts.” Stone was a young, undistinguished convert to modernism who happened to be in the employ of Wallace K. Harrison, the architect of Rockefeller Center. Barr had warned Mrs. Rockefeller that awarding the commission to Goodwin and Stone “will almost certainly result in a mediocre building,” but the trustees were adamant. Even the last-ditch effort made by Barr to keep up the appearance of architectural virtue by allowing Mies to design the facade of the Goodwin-Stone building—a curious idea in itself, but a prophetic one, as it turned out—came to nothing.
“Museum people have to watch out for architects. The better they are, the worse they are, in the sense that the more powerful their vision, the less are likely to consider the needs of paintings.”
There are several things to be observed about this fateful episode, and all of them have a bearing on the architectural character of the new MOMA. One is that the trustees’ decision to settle for a “safe” solution in 1936 led to a fundamental split in MOMA’s architectural policies—a split that, from the Thirties down to the present day, has separated the ideas put forward in the museum’s architectural exhibition and publications program from those put into practice in the museum’s own building program. It is a split, moreover, that is now likely to remain permanent. But another thing to be observed about this decision is that it did not result in the predicted disaster. It may even have been responsible for averting one. We cannot know, of course, exactly what sort of building Mies was given the opportunity to design in later years—the Brown Pavilion addition to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the National Gallery in West Berlin—have proved, as spaces in which to exhibit works of art for public viewing, to be among the very worst on the international museum
Glass-box architecture—as the Miesian mode has come to be called—is nowadays unduly maligned, in my opinion, for at its best it is surely one of the great artistic achievements of the modern age, and as the basis of skyscraper design it remains, more often than not, vastly superior to the gimcrack postmodernist architecture which has lately supplanted it. But this is not to say that the aesthetic attributes of the Miesian mode easily lend themselves to every architectural function, and we now know that as museum design it is all but guaranteed to be utterly dysfunctional. So it was undoubtedly a lucky stroke for the museum that Alfred Barr lost his battle to have Mies design the original MOMA building in the Thirties. I would go further and say that it was a lucky stroke for Barr himself—which is to say, for the kind of museum that he went on to create in the building he was finally given. Barr was the greatest museum director of his time, and much that we have reason to cherish in the new MOMA as well as in the old we owe to his vision and his judgment and to the courage and tenacity with which he pursued his goals. But it does no honor to his achievement to pretend that he was always equally wise in all matters of museum policy, and on the architectural question he was clearly wrong. I think I know why he was wrong, too, for the reason goes to the very heart of Alfred Barr’s conception of what kind of Museum he wanted MOMA to be in the earliest stages of its development.
This subject will be discussed in due course—for it is central to our understanding of what sort of museum MOMA has become in our time. For the moment, however, there is still a further and final observation to be made about that architectural decision in 1936 and its relation to the present. Barr lost out in his final plea to have Mies design the facade of the original MOMA building. With the new MOMA of 1984, alas, we have not been quite so lucky. For in the multi-storied, glass-enclosed Garden Hall which Cesar Pelli, the architect of the new MOMA, has now made its most conspicuous design feature, the museum has at long last achieved its (more or less) Miesian facade. And chances are that it is a far grander facade, though also one that is far more elabore in its dramatic display of structural detail, than any that MOMA would have gotten in the Thirties. But is this the right style for the museum even today? There is certainly reason to doubt it. The fact that the Garden Hall is in many respects a very beautiful space—and just the kind of modern, light-filled space that Barr had no doubt envisioned for the museum in its original building—does not alter its almost total uselessness for showing works of art to the public. Nor does the beauty of the Garden Hall alter the irony of its belatedness as architectural history: precisely the kind of belatedness, by the way, that would be likely to exclude it from any future MOMA survey of distinguished architectural design.
It must be said that the task which confronted Cesar Pelli in designing the new MOMA was decidedly more complicated and unwieldy than any in the recent history of museum building. The new MOMA was never intended to be an entirely new building, and of course it isn’t. Certain elements of the old Goodwin-Stone building as well as the addition of the garden wing designed by Philip Johnson in 1964 had somehow to be preserved and harmoniously integrated into the new museum, however much they might be modified in the resulting structure. At the same time, the museum’s elegant, open-air sculpture garden—probably the most beloved open space of its kind in New York City—had likewise to be preserved and protected from the potentially overpowering contrast of the new fifty-two-story Museum Tower, the luxury apartment house that now rises above the west wing of the museum as a sort of admonitory symbol of MOMA’s farewell to visionary urbanism. And dominating all these considerations were two others: the all but absolute authority given (and properly given) to the museum’s chief curator’s to control—and thus, in effect, to design—their own exhibition galleries; and the need to provide ample, non-viewing space for the museum’s huge new public. Such an assignment could not have been expected to yield a completely coherent architectural structure; still less was it likely to inspire a great architectural idea. It is no wonder, then, that the new MOMA is not exactly an architectural masterpiece. The real wonder is that, given the circumstances and conditions to be met, it is as fine as it is, and that what is now the museum’s primary function—to exhibit as extensively and as intelligently as possible the masterworks from its own permanent collections—is so beautifully served. One somehow doubts that a building which really was an architectural masterpiece would have served the museum nearly as well.
By and large, and despite some important flaws and failures to be noted, the execution of this formidable task has proved to be a triumph. At least this is the case for the installation of the European masters of painting and sculpture on the second floor of the museum, and for the departments devoted to drawings and to prints and illustrated books on the third floor. Far more problematical are the galleries largely but not exclusively devoted to American painting and sculpture on the third floor, and the new installation of the outdoor sculpture garden. As for the Department of Photography on the second floor and the Department of Architecture and Design on the fourth, these—like the Department of Film which now presides over two movie theaters in the lower levels of the building—tend more than ever to address us as virtually separate museums, independent entities with standards, agendas, and historical perspectives that differ in important respects from those of the Painting and Sculpture, the Drawings, and the Prints and Illustrated Books departments as well as from each other.
It is, in any case, of the permanent collection of painting and sculpture that I wish mainly to speak here. Mounted at the entrance to the second-floor galleries housing the European masters is a quotation from Alfred Barr—in whose memory, appropriately, these galleries are named—which alludes to “the conscientious, continuous, resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity,” and it is clearly in this spirit of uncompromising connoisseurship that William S. Rubin, the curator responsible for this department, has carried out his task. We enter the first gallery in this series directly from the Garden Hall, of course, and the shift in scale, in feeling, in the density of light that surrounds us, and in the kind of demand that is made on our faculties is abrupt and startling. We have left the anonymous, over-scale pretensions of late twentieth-century modernism for the most intimate, profoundly inward act of the late nineteenth century—Cezanne’s. It is like crossing to another civilization.
Now it is a more distant civilization, too. When the museum was founded in 1929, Cezanne had been dead for less than a quarter of a century. Monet had been dead for only three years, Degas for twelve. In 1984 an entire century separates us from Cezanne’s The Bather (1885-90), which hangs in the first gallery of the permanent collection—the same amount of time that separates the Cezanne from David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784). Clearly we are in another period, not only chronologically but culturally. Yet in commencing its survey of modern painting with Cezanne, along with certain other Post-Impressionist masters in the adjacent galleries, the new MOMA has remained faithful—and properly so, I think—to the historical outlook of the old. It was with an exhibition of Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and van Gogh that the museum opened its doors fifty-five years ago. This is not, to be sure, the only way to chart the history of modern painting, but the alternatives are to locate its origins even earlier—in the work of Corubet or Manet or the Impressionists—and not any later. And there is a strong case to be made for beginning such a survey with Cezanne and the major Post-Impressionists. It was directly from their work, after all, that the most radical art movements of our own century—Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and the abstract art that derived from them—drew their inspiration. It was never a practical proposition for MOMA to become a full-scale museum of nineteenth-century art, in any case. Even when it joined in the general rediscovery of Monet in the Fifties and early Sixties, it was the artist’s late work—which belongs to the twentieth-century in scale and spirit as well as chronologically—that was acquired for the permanent collection.
It is, then, as a prologue to the mainstream of twentieth-century modernism that these initial galleries devoted to Cezanne and his contemporaries have been planned. The art is magnificent, of course, and the galleries, with their discreet proportions, easy lighting, and unobtrusive decor—white walls and gray carpeting—are altogether agreeable. Except for one minor but irritating detail—the mistaken decision to put every picture into a uniform gold frame of innocuous design—we feel ourselves on solid ground. The ambiance is at once grave and pleasurable.
As we proceed on our course, moreover, we discover some important and delightful acquisitions which have lately been added to the collection—among them, Seurat’s The English Channel at Grandcamp (1885), Signac’s Portrait of Felix Feneon (1890), Matisse’s La Japonaise (Mme Matisse) (1905), and Bonnard’s Basket of Fruit Reflected in a Mirror (1946). But there are some real disappointments, too. Years ago it was Alfred Barr’s habit to hang Maurice Prendergast’s wonderful Acadia (1922) in the same gallery with Vuillard’s Mother and Sister (circa 1893) and Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room (circa 1930-31). It was unusual, even then, for MOMA to accord an American painting of that period such a distinctive place in the permanent collection, but it was fully justified by the superb quality of the picture. Alas, the Prendergast was removed from this sympathetic company in the Sixties when Mr. Rubin reinstalled the permanent collection in the old MOMA. It was then placed in a sort of crowded ghetto reserved for some early American modernists. This time around, though others among the early American modernists are once again consigned to a small, crowded isolation ward on the third floor, Acadia has disappeared from view altogether—and by this observer, at least, is keenly missed. But then, as we shall see, there is something definitely askew about the handling of all American art prior to 1940 in the new MOMA.
It isn’t as if every recent addition to the European painting collection is an undoubted masterpiece, either. Neither the new Klimt—Hope II (1907-8)—nor the new Schiele painting—Portrait of Gerda Schiele (1909)—can be claimed to represent either artist at his best. (Unlike the 1911 Schiele watercolor, Girl with Black Hair, which is first-rate, or the 191 Klimt landscape, The Park, which has been in the collection for some years. In this matter I am afraid that Mr. Rubin has allowed the academic art historian, with his compulsion to fill in “gaps” left vacant by his predecessors, to overrule the connoisseur for whom the quality of the specific object is the primary consideration. No doubt it was unfortunate for the museum to have overlooked figure paintings by Klimt and Schiele when some real masterpieces were still readily available, but that time has apparently passed. What is disturbing about all this is that Prendergast’s Acadia is a far better painting than Klimt’s Hope II, but so-called “gaps” in American art prior to 1940 are now of very little concern to the museum. There are other problems as well. The most surprising is to be found in the new installation of Picasso’s Les Damoiselle’s d’Avignon (1907), one of the most important pictures in the entire collection. There are few living souls who have studied Picasso’s work more closely than Mr. Rubin, and fewer still who know more about it. Yet something has gone wrong with the installation of Les Damoiselle in the new MOMA. It is crammed into a shallow space that is partially obstructed by an extremely infelicitous temporary all supporting a slightly earlier picture—Picasso’s gentler and more realistic Boy Leading a Horse (1905-6). The point, I gather—it is anything but subtle—is to drive home to us the enormous leap that Les Demoiselles represents not only in Picasso development but in all of modern painting. Yet the actual effect of this heavy-handed juxtaposition is to diminish the painting’s impact, something I would not have thought possible until now. The picture should strike us—as it struckc the artist’s contemporaries when they first saw it, and as it has struck subsequent generations ever since—like a thunderbolt; but here it is reduced to a lesson in art history. It doesn’t help matters, either, that another key picture of the period—Picasso’s Two Nudes (1906)—is virtually hidden away on the reverse side of the ugly wall supporting the Boy Leading a Horse. This is, perhaps, the most glaring example in the entire installation of the permanent collection of a tendency to allow the mentality of the seminar room to triumph over museological judgment—to allow art history, in other words, to triumph over aesthetics.
Notwithstanding such disappointments—and there are others to be noted—there is something at once magisterial and deeply pondered about the installation of the European masters, and one is continually made to marvel at the sheer quality and scope of the collection itself. As was to be expected, much space and attention have been lavished on the achievements of Picasso and Matisse, MOMA’s reigning deities. There is surely no other museum in the world where these artists are represented on anything like the same scale or anything approaching the same depth. The vast Matisse gallery—the single largest space devoted to the work of a single artist, and one of the few to enjoy the benefit of some natural light—is the greatest thing of its kind that I know of. It amply confirms Matisse’s place as the pre-eminent painter of the century and as one of its greatest sculptors, too. This is one of the galleries in the new MOMA where one feels most inclined to linger, and it was therefore a happy idea for the museum to equip the gallery with a comfortable place to sit. Matisse is the only artist who is accorded this amenity.
The largest of the several Picasso installations—a huge gallery mainly devoted to work of the Thirties and Forties—does not have quite the same power, however. The main reason for this lies entirely beyond the museum’s control, of course. Guernica (1937) and its many preparatory studies, long the centerpiece of MOMA’s display of Picasso’s work of the Thirties, were never part of the permanent collection. They had been placed on long-term loan by Picasso himself at the beginning of the Second World War, and they now repose (as the artist wished) at the Prado in Madrid. In preparation for this loss, MOMA some years ago acquired The Charnel House (1944-45), a later and smaller picture similar in theme and style. But this picture, though haunting in its imagery of death and destruction, is more an epilogue to Guernica than a substitute for it, and the largest of the paintings of the Thirties—the rather benign, oversize Night Fishing at Antibes (1939)—just doesn’t bear comparison with the artist’s strongest work. (Ironically, it is given the kind of installation that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is denied.) On the other hand, the recent acquisition of one of the great heads of the Thirties—the Head of a Woman (1932) that now dominates the gallery devoted to this period—is a marvelous addition to an already superb collection of Picasso sculpture.
There is one further criticism to be made of this Picasso gallery, and that is the way the sculptor Julio Gonzalez has been assigned to this space and thus made to seem a mere appendage to Picasso’s career. Gonzalez owed much to Picasso’s example, to be sure, but once the former was launched on the course that led him to create his masterpieces of open-form, welded-metal sculpture in the Thirties, he proved to be one of the most original sculptors of his time—and an immensely influential one, too. He should be treated like one.
Two other sculptors—Brancusi and Giacometti—have fared very much better. Our first glimpse of the Brancusi installation gives us indeed one of the truly sublime moments in our visit to the new MOMA, and return visits in no way diminish its impact. the museum has long owned some of the best examples of Brancusi’s work, and another important sculpture has lately been added—Endless Column (1918). Most of these sculptures are mounted on a raised platform, painted white, that isolates them from the space that we, as spectators, occupy, and this has the effect of enclosing them in an ideal world of their own and thereby underscoring their “perfect,” other-worldly quality. This is a brilliant solution to a difficult problem.
So is the very different installation accorded Giacometti’s work. With Giacometti, it is not distance and separation that the work calls for, but just the opposite. Its nervous, febrile, anguished imagery beckons us to draw near as it encloses us in a vision of great poignancy. There are more than a dozen of the artist’s works displayed in a very small space—just the kind of confined space in which Giacometti himself liked to work—and this turns out to be exactly right. Each of the objects is distinctly legible, yet together they create a spiritual ambiance that is somehow larger than the sum of its parts. Giacometti had come to believe that he represented the end of a certain tradition in art, and in this installation we are made to feel that we have experienced a kind of coda in the history of a civilization. In this sense, too, it is remarkably faithful to the artist’s vision.
Equally successful is the Mondrian gallery, an oasis of utopian order and purity compared to which almost every other installation and object in the museum—not to mention the world outside—looks woefully fussy and self-indulgent. This was certainly Mondrian’s view of the matter, and the gallery devoted to his work is properly infused with that sense of the absolute which so completely governed his vision as an artist.
Distinctly less successful, if not indeed inept, is the treatment given to Expressionism. Has a decision been made to downgrade the entire Expressionist movement? It would seem so. Thus, no room has been found in the galleries devoted to the European masters for the greatest German painter of the century, who is also the culminating figure of the Expressionist movement—Max Beckmann. The magnificent triptych in the museum’s collection—Departure (1932-35)—has been parked outside in the glaring light of the Garden Hall, but there is nothing by Beckmann to be found in the galleries. It does seem absurd for Chagall, for example, to be given so much space—wonderful as the museum’s early Chagall’s are—when Beckmann is given none, for there can be no question that Beckmann is the greater artist. (For that matter, even inferior talents like Tchelitchew and Delvaux are given a warmer welcome.) Still another picture that seems to have disappeared is Lovis Corinth’s Self-Portrait (1924), a far stronger painting than the highly decorative Schiele portrait the museum has gone to so much trouble to acquire.
It was a mistake, too, I think, in the one gallery devoted to Expressionism, to arrange a sort of tableau in which Lehmbruck’s two extraordinary sculptures—Kneeling Woman (1911) and Standing Youth (1913)—are made to form something like an honor guard for Kokoschka’s haunting Hans Tietze and Erica-Tietze Conrat (1909). Whereas the sculptures are heroic idealizations, the portrait is a picture of the most intense psychological analysis. Not only is there a disjunction in scale and subject matter—the sculptures representing youth and the portrait middle age—but these are works that inhabit totally different worlds of feeling, and only a taste utterly indifferent to the nuances of the Expressionist mode would lead one to think otherwise. perhaps it was those elongated fingers, to be found in both the portrait and the sculptures, that inspired this unhappy juxtaposition, but even these serve very different artistic functions. Someday the entire subject of Expressionism is going to have to be reconsidered at the museum. Elsewhere in the art world it is a particularly hot subject just now, but word of this development does not seem to have reached the museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Far more sympathetic and extensive are the installations devoted to Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. The museum’s fine de Chirico collection, which must surely be the best in the world, is given a gallery of its own, and while one feels a certain regret that a similar space could not be found for Moro, that great artist—in whose work MOMA has always taken a keen and perspicacious interest—is nevertheless well represented. So are (on another level of accomplishment) Dali and Magritte. As a result, the entire history of the European avant-garde from the Post-Impressionist period to that of the Surrealists is, except for the scanting of Expressionism, represented at a level of quality that is truly unrivaled.
Yet the exclusion of so many other American artists from this second-floor survey, which ends (more or less) on the eve of the Second World War, alerts us to what is undoubtedly the most important art-historical revision to be seen in the new MOMA. This consists of a radical downgrading of the first four decades of American art in the twentieth century. There are some peculiar omissions even from the period after 1940, but it is in its handling, or rather its mishandling, of the early American modernists that MOMA has carried out its most categorical act of historical revisionism.
This is a matter that MOMA has never been entirely comfortable with. From the day it was founded in 1929, the museum has traced a very erratic course in its relations with modernist American art. In the Thirties, while it devoted much energy to exhibiting and acquiring examples of the European avant-garde (and properly so, in my opinion), the museum tended paradoxically to give priority to regionalist, neo-romantic, and realist painting whenever it turned its attention to the contemporary American scene. With rare exceptions, the American avant-garde was ignored and disparaged. Even in the Forties, when MOMA began for the first time to take cognizance of what was stirring in American art, its grasp of what was happening was uncertain and confused. Certain things were acquired for the collection and certain artists were shown, but there was no coherent policy. For MOMA, modern art was still, for the most part, something that happened in Europe.
Despite this uncertainty, the museum in Alfred Barr’s day made a very deliberate effort to include American artists of the early modern period in its collections and in its exhibition program. Barr’s perspective on all of modern art was a highly ecumenical one; in his commitment to a particular “school” or style he was anything but sectarian. It is this broad-based, non-sectarian outlook that has now ben modified into something rather more pointed and rigid.
It wasn’t until 1951 that the museum organized an exhibition of "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America," and thereafter, with such exhibitions as “Fifteen Americans” (1952) and “Twelve Americans” (1956), both organized by Dorothy Miller, and with shows devoted to Jackson Pollock (1956) and David Smith (1957), MOMA began shifting its course to give greater attention to “advanced” American art. The culminating event of this phase of its history came in 1959 with the exhibition of “The New American Painting”—the museum’s first major survey of the Abstract Expressionists and the show that more or less established the New York School as a major turning point in the history of twentieth-century art.
Yet even in the Fifties, while this shift was occurring, there were other impulses at work. I vividly recall an evening at the Artists’ Club in New York in 1954 when Alfred Barr predicted that in the next phase of American painting there would be a return to what he called “history painting.” What he had in mind, obviously, was Larry Rivers’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), which the museum was just about to acquire for its collection. The implicit judgment was that American abstract art was probably finished. This judgment, though mistaken, was made more explicit when the museum organized a disastrous exhibition of figurative art called “New Images of Man” in the very same year that it mounted “The New American Painting” show. The truth seems to be that Barr took a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the New York School.
All of this changed in the Sixties. Except for Dorothy Miller, whose record as a curator was outstanding in this regard, the late William Seitz was probably the first curator at the museum who wholeheartedly embraced the New York School. And when Mr. Rubin came to the museum in 1967, he made it a priority item of business from the outset to strengthen MOMA’s collection of Abstract Expressionism and indeed to make it a major focus of the permanent collection.
That he has amply succeeded in fulfilling this ambition will be clear to anyone who visits the new MOMA. For the third-floor gallery space belonging to the Department of Painting and Sculpture is preponderantly devoted to the New York School. In keeping with the scale of Abstract Expressionist painting—there is actually very little sculpture in this section of the installation—the main space is fairly gigantic, the only approximate counterpart to the huge Matisse gallery on the second floor. There is much to admire—and a good deal to question too—in the way Mr. Rubin has gone about building this New York School collection, and his installation of the collection itself is enormously impressive. My guess is that it will prove a mecca for young artists for many years to come.
The implications of all this are fairly obvious. According to the new MOMA, the history of modern art until 1940, or thereabouts, belongs to Paris and its satellites, and after 1940 it is to be found in the New York School and its aftermath. Everything else is to be regarded as marginal or negligible or non-existent. mr. Rubin is not a man afflicted with a sense of ambivalence when it comes to making artistic judgments. He thinks in categorical terms. As a result, the history of modern art in America prior to 1940 has been largely obliterated. The work of a few expatriate artists remains and a few other isolated examples survive, but for the most part it is a history that the museum has simply dropped. The mean little gallery at the entrance to the third-floor installation that contains whatever remnants of this history have been allowed to survive is, as a survey of the first forty years of American modernism, simply ludicrous. And it is installed in a way that seems almost intended to inspire contempt, with pictures crowded together and a gem like Nadelman’s sculpture Woman at the Piano (circa 1917) crammed into an absurd little niche, as if it were an appliance on display in a shop. (Actually, some of the objects on display in MOMA’s retail shop are accorded much better treatment.)
To specify in detail what has been omitted in this musicological maneuver would require a volume in itself. I shall therefore cite only a few outstanding cases. Hartley is represented by a single painting—naturally, it is from his expatriate period—and Maurer by none. There is no painting by Marin—does the museum own one?—and nothing by Milton Avery! Dove and Stuart Davis are reduced to token representation, and the painters of the American Abstract Artists group are denied even that. But room has been found for a Ben Shahn—it would be interesting to know what Mr. Rubin really thinks of it—and for two minor Hoppers, and the prize acquisition is a painting called Dunes (circa 1930) by Augustus Vincent tack, who is now being “rediscovered” and pressed into service as a kind of forerunner of the Abstract Expressionists. One has the impression that the only painting in this gallery which truly interests Mr. Rubin is the Tack he acquired for the museum five years ago.
It would be a mistake to suggest that the task of selecting an adequate and appropriate representation of early twentieth-century art for MOMA is an easy one. The last thing we would want to see at the museum would be the kind of catch-all survey of minor and innocuous talents of the sort we see in so many galleries of the Pompidou Center, where ut seems to be regarded as a civil right for a French artist, no matter how abysmal his work, to be represented by something. But between that unhappy practice and the museum’s current policy there are many choices to be explored, and no one at MOMA seems to have given them any serious thought. What is now missing at MOMA as far as American art before Abstract Expressionism is concerned is precisely that—serious thought.
Even in the period after 1940 the policy seems to be to exclude any and all figurative painting unless it is European. It is this, I suppose, which accounts for the exclusion of Avery. One would have thought that, even in the formalist perspective that Mr. Rubin characteristically brings to these matters, Avery would have been thought to provide the essential link between Matisse and Rothko. But the prejudice against such art is apparently very deep, and so the link has been ignored.
For all practical purposes, then, what MOMA gives us in this third-floor installation is the history of American art as the history of the New York School and its aftermath—and from this aftermath, in the so-called “contemporary” section, almost all forms of representational art are likewise excluded. Who could guess from this “contemporary” section that the last twenty years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of realist painting? Except for a single work by Chuck Close, the policy seems to be that you have to be European to be representational. It is a policy woefully out of touch with the artistic realities of the present moment, and reflects a concept of modernism that has hardened into academic orthodoxy.
Where Mr. Rubin is most at ease—confident of his taste and meticulous in his selection—is in his handling of the New York School, and the museum-going public owes him a considerable debt for persevering in the building of the Abstract Expressionist collection. For anyone who wants to see the New York School as a whole, with major works by Pollock, Motherwell, Reinhardt, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Pousette-Dart, Tomlin, Kline, de Kooning, et al., MOMA is now the place to go. I think it was a mistake to include Morris Louis in this company, and Newman has been given a place in the collection that far exceeds his actual accomplishment, but these are matters likely to be corrected with the passage of time. I doubt, too, if every one of the minor Pollocks is worth hanging, and I regret the omission of anything by Pousette-Dart after 19
Hilton Kramer is the founding editor of The New Criterion, which he started with the late Samuel Lipman in 1982
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 July 2002, on page 0
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