“L—d!” said my mother, “what is all this story about?”—“A Cock and a Bull,” said Yorick.
—The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.

It has come as no great surprise that the series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art called “MOMA2000,” which began in the fall of 1999 with a focus on “People,” “Places,” and “Things” in art drawn from the years 1880–1920, has given us in its culminating survey of the period 1960–2000 a show largely concentrated on politics, propaganda, and pop culture. [1] From the outset, after all, it was one of the primary purposes of “MOMA2000” to offer the museum public a revisionist account of the history of modernism—a new “narrative,” as the MOMA authorities happily described this rewriting of history. It is in the nature of this new narrative to accord a radical priority to stories and subjects at the expense of form, style, and a variety of other aesthetic considerations heretofore deemed essential to the comprehension and judgment of modernist art. Accordingly, the three ambitious exhibitions that have comprised “MOMA2000”—“ModernStarts,” “Making Choices,” and the current “Open Ends”—have been designed to conform to this new narrative, which effectively deconstructs the aesthetic assumptions upon which the museum itself was founded.

In “MOMA2000,” modernism has thus been stripped of its aesthetic ontology in the name of a hierarchy of preferred subjects, with politics and pop culture now—in the “Open Ends” finale to the series— foremost among them. In the absence of aesthetic considerations, critical judgment— which includes, of course, curatorial judgment—has reverted to a system that looks more and more like a parody of the system that governed the pre-modern official Salons, in which landscape painting, for example, was deemed to represent a lower order of pictorial achievement than history painting, and all works of art were classified according to subject matter.

This was the system that was successfully overthrown by Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists in one of the crucial early chapters of the history of modern art, and its demise remained—for artists as well as critics—one of the foundations of artistic thought in the heyday of the modernist movement. It was upon the aesthetic implications of this modernist rejection of academic hierarchies that the collection and exhibition policies of the Museum of Modern Art were based during the greater part of its history.

This did not mean, either in the art world at large or at MOMA itself, that there was no recognition granted to styles and ideas that dissented from modernist practice. One need only cite the sympathetic attention accorded by MOMA to the realist art of Edward Hopper, the political art of the Mexican muralists, and sundry other varieties of Regionalist, Social Realist, and Magic Realist art in the 1930s and 1940s as evidence to the contrary. What it did mean, however, was that a useful distinction was made—useful precisely because of its aesthetic efficacy—between what Matthew Arnold once famously defined as “the master-current” of an epoch and the many competing currents of artistic endeavor that inevitably accompany mainstream imperatives.

The idea of a discernible master-current in the art of the modern era is now much ridiculed in certain academic and museum circles, and the campaign to discredit it is one in which MOMA in this country and the new Tate Modern in Britain have taken the lead. And there are, to be sure, many reasons to reject the idea. It undoubtedly smacks of elitism, and certainly doesn’t conform to the strictures of political correctness. Aesthetic judgments about art are definitely not an equal-opportunity enterprise. And the very thought of a master-current inevitably suggests that many widely admired works of art would have to be considered—well, minor. Above all, the idea of a master-current suggests the existence of masters and mastery in art, which is a way of thinking about art that runs contrary to both the spirit and practice of the contemporary art scene in this first decade of the twenty-first century.

Yet, there is this to be said for the idea of a discernible master-current in the art of the modern era: the greatest artists of the period believed in it and set their goals by it. Whether this master-current was thought to be represented by Courbet or Manet or Matisse or Picasso or Mondrian or Miró or Giacometti or Pollock—for the idea of a master-current is nothing if not dynamic— it was an idea that existed, first of all, in the minds of the artists who were acutely aware of where they stood in relation to it and where they aspired to stand. In other words, they were acutely aware of their historical situation. To reject this idea of historical chronology in the presentation of art to the public—especially to today’s public, which is severely handicapped by an absence of cultural memory—is therefore to reject a fundamental component of modern artistic thought. Which, to say the least, is a very odd thing for an institution that still calls itself the Museum of Modern Art to be doing.

When “ModernStarts” [2] opened in the fall of 1999, some of the installations were so brilliant and the overall level of aesthetic quality so extraordinary that the deficiencies and distortions governing its organization did not at first glance seem all that important. On subsequent visits to “ModernStarts,” however, the distortions of history—or what might better be called the denials of history—became more and more apparent, and foremost among them was MOMA’s decision to deny the birth of abstract art any specific attention in an exhibition purporting to cover the period, 1880– 1920, in which abstraction first emerged as a powerful modernist imperative.

In an exhibition which claimed to bring the public an account of the way “People,” “Places,” and “Things” were represented in the modernist art of those four decades, abstract art proved to be an intellectual embarrassment. Making its first appearance in the years immediately prior to the 1914 war, it was undoubtedly the most radical of all the innovations which modernist painting and sculpture can lay claim to, and it continued to dominate much of avant-garde artistic thought and practice for the remainder of the modernist era. Yet because abstraction could not be easily made to conform to the curatorial scenario that governed “ModernStarts”—a scenario wedded to some loosely conceived notions of “figural” representation—the birth and influence of abstract art were not deemed sufficiently important to merit special attention.

This is not to say that abstract paintings and sculpture were not included in either “ModernStarts” or the exhibitions that followed. On the contrary, they were sort of smuggled into “MOMA2000” under false passports, so to speak. They were assigned their places according to the themes that were alleged—in some cases by the artists themselves but more often by the whims of the curators—to be the subjects of their work. And by that act of bad faith, the aesthetic importance of abstract art was simply dropped as a subject to be discussed.

In his introductory essay for the catalogue of “ModernStarts,” John Elderfield, himself an authority on the history of abstract art, admitted as much. “It had originally been our idea to devote a separate section to abstraction,” he wrote.

We felt that this was necessary, not only because of the intrinsic importance to our period of the creation of abstract art, but also because of the difficulty of its comprehension, even now, nearly a century later. It took quite a long time before we realized that, by dealing with abstraction separately, we were creating enormous problems for ourselves, and quite possibly for the viewer, too.

And so the difficulty of comprehending abstract art was compounded by a decision to pass it off as something else.

In “Making Choices,” the second installment of “MOMA2000” that purported to give us an account of the 1920–1960 years, abstraction was more generously represented, to be sure, but once again the abstract paintings were tethered to a variety of subjects and stories—a few actually relevant to the art, but many not—that had the effect of blunting their impact as abstraction, especially for viewers encountering them for the first time. Consider, as an egregious example, the hapless fate of Miró’s Birth of the World (1929). This painting is surely one of the greatest in the entire canon of abstract art, a judgment silently confirmed by the fact that it was shown twice in “MOMA2000”—first in the “ModernStarts” segment, though it doesn’t belong to the period ostensibly covered by that segment, and then again in “Making Choices.” In neither context, however, was it made possible to understand the place that the painting occupies in the aesthetic history of abstract painting—a history that can be traced from Kandinsky to Arp to Miró, and then from Miró to the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School. André Breton’s characterization of Birth of the World as “the Demoiselles of the in-
formel”—meaning, of course, that it occupied a place in the history of informel abstraction comparable to that of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the history of Cubism—got the matter exactly right. But in “MOMA2000” the painting was twice orphaned from its own history. And so were many other major examples of abstract art.

This is not to say that figurative painting always fared much better in “MOMA2000.” It was a pleasant change to see examples of Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Rackstraw Downes, Philip Pearlstein, and certain other figurative painters on the walls of the Modern after so many years of neglect, but there was a double downside even to this unexpected benefaction. Many of the pictures selected for “Making Choices” were minor examples of the artists’ work, and even these pictures were accompanied by so many really inferior examples of figurative painting from MOMA’s collection that the entire attempt to remedy prior neglect of contemporary figurative painting ended in a considerable muddle. And in the “Open Ends” segment of “MOMA2000,” which purports to account for the 1960–2000 period, there is scarcely a trace of the best American figurative painting to be seen here in recent years. So an attempted remedy for prior neglect in “Making Choices” is followed by current neglect in “Open Ends.”

Clearly, the curatorial mindset at MOMA is still so fixated on whatever can be construed as “avant-garde”—a term now more aptly applied to restaurant menus and sex-change surgery than to anything happening in the world of art and culture—that painting itself is no longer of compelling interest if it cannot claim to be “about” some sensational political subject. Which brings us to the single most astonishing aspect of “MOMA2000”: its elevation of Gerhard Richter’s cycle of paintings about the fate of the German terrorists known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang to a position of unrivaled preeminence in the art of the last four decades—the only achievement of the period addressed in “Open Ends” to merit a special monograph of its own. [3]

Richter completed this series of fifteen paintings, called October 18, 1977, in 1988. MOMA acquired them for its permanent collection, at a price that was said to be $3 million, in 1995, which was when they were first exhibited at the museum. To underscore the exceptional importance which MOMA attributes to Richter’s work, for which a retrospective exhibition is planned for 2002, the museum has now published a hardcover book—Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, written by MOMA curator Robert Storr and running to some 150 pages of text, pictures, and notes. What Mr. Storr has given us in this book is not exactly a study of Mr. Richter’s art, though some very grand claims are made for the October
18, 1977 paintings in the course of what amounts to a prose elegy mourning the demise of the radical political “ideals” of the 1960s and 1970s. Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and their fellow political terrorists are thus eulogized and sentimentalized as fallen warriors in this struggle to realize those ideals, and Gerhard Richter is acclaimed for his artistic heroism in commemorating their political martyrdoms.

As I am cited in Mr. Storr’s text as one of the “right-wing commentators” who registered a “hostile response” to the October 18, 1977 paintings when they were first exhibited at MOMA in 1995, it may be appropriate for me to quote some passages from the article I wrote on that occasion in The New York Observer.

In 1968, in what was then West Germany, there was formed a leftist terrorist organization that called itself the Red Army Faction but quickly became better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang—named for its principal leaders, Andreas Baader, who was then twenty-five, and Ulrike Meinhof, who was then thirty-four.

Even by the demented standards of the time, the Baader-Meinhof Gang was renowned for the viciousness of the violence it conducted against innocent victims who were deemed to be class enemies. Those selected for kidnapping and assassination—people prominent in business, finance, and public life— were, in fact, a lot like the kind of people who serve on the board of the Museum of Modern Art. They were people of wealth and distinction earmarked for extinction precisely because they were people of wealth and distinction. In the minds of Baader, Meinhof, and their cohorts, that was justification enough for a sentence of death.

In 1976, the gang was arrested and imprisoned, and about their deaths I wrote as follows:

On October 18, 1977, three members of the group—including Andreas Baader—were found to have shot themselves in their jail cells. A little earlier, Ulrike Meinhof had hanged herself in her cell. According to a statement by the Museum of Modern Art, “Though their deaths were pronounced suicides, the authorities were suspected of murder.”

I then quoted the following passage from Walter Laqueur’s The Age of Terrorism (1987) on the gang’s political ideals:

Their policy was not to fight for the “oppressed and exploited” in their own country but to destroy the “islands of wealth in Western Europe,” to act as agents of a Third World which existed only in their imagination: hence their collaboration with terrorists from Latin America and the Middle East.

About the October 18, 1977 paintings, I wrote:

As examples of the art of painting, alas, they don’t amount to much at all, and would certainly have little claim on the attention of the art world without the support of the political legend they were created to evoke. They consist of blurry, arty renderings of news photos of some of the protagonists, their huge public funeral procession, their prison cells, and so on. The gray, blurry images are deliberately meant to be difficult to “read,” and the problem of their legibility is said, of course, to be an important part of their meaning.

Mr. Storr’s new book on the subject is a distended gloss on the alleged problem of reading not only Mr. Richter’s paintings but also the political ideals they were created to commemorate. As political analysis, much of the text is a tendentious humbug, for it repeatedly exalts what it pretends to find ambiguous in both the so-called ideals and the real-life crimes of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. And as art criticism it is similarly tendentious in pretending to find problematic what is plainly evident to the naked eye: that Mr. Richter has produced a series of paintings that attempt to aestheticize the politics of terrorism. To take refuge from that reality in the looking-glass world of moral ambiguity is itself an act of moral evasion.

What makes both the exhibition of the October 18, 1977 paintings in “MOMA2000” and the publication of Mr. Storr’s monograph important, however, is what they may signify about the future of the Museum of Modern Art. Like the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum, MOMA now seems to be determined to transform itself into a sort of museum of material culture where aesthetic issues are sidelined in favor of trendy social and political narratives. This, certainly, is the course that has been traced in many of the separate sections of “MOMA 2000” over the past year. In retrospect, I think we shall look back on “MOMA2000” as having been a trial run for the greatly expanded MOMA of the future. With the Gerhard Richter retrospective already scheduled for 2002, I think we can count on it.

Notes
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1. “MOMA2000” opened with “ModernStarts: People, Places, Things” (October 1999–March 2000). The second part, “Making Choices,” was on view from March 16–September 12, 2000. The final installment, “Open Ends,” opened on September 28, 2000 and runs until January 30, 2001. Catalogues for each of the exhibitions were published by the Museum of Modern Art and are distributed by Harry N. Abrams. Go back to the text.
2. See “Rethinking modernism,” by Karen Wilkin, in The New Criterion (January 2000). Go back to the text.
3. Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, by Robert Storr (151 pages, $35). Go back to the text.