12 ★ FT Weekend 19 October/20 October 2019
MoMA The museum’s lavish|
reopening is a chance to tell the story
of modern art afresh.Ariella Budick
reportsonwhether it has succeeded
T
he most effective way to
tour the Museum of Mod-
ern Art’s latest incarnation
is to treat it like the airport
it resembles: arrive early,
move quickly, and keep your eye on the
time. A high-ceilinged check-in area fea-
tures a bank of self-serve kiosks. Elec-
tronic screens and cryptic arrows direct
you to your destination. Take the south
escalator to Floor 5 for Van Gogh’s
“Starry Night”. The north elevator will
whisk you to the sixth-floor special
exhibition galleries, but if you’re looking
for the Terrace Café on the same floor,
that’s the west staircase (or elevator).From top:
MoMA’s
Paris 1920s
installation;
‘American
People Series
#20: Die’ by
Faith Ringgold;
‘Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon’ by
Pablo Picasso;
the museum’s
new entrance
on 53rd Street
Jonathan Muzikar;
Estate of Pablo Picasso/ARS;
Brett BeyerModernism upcycled
This mega-MoMA is built to manage
crowds, but it’s sure to confuse them too.
Pathways that start out logically veer
into unexpected themes or dead end at
stairwells that look like departure gates.
The finishes are sleek, the art super-
abundant, and the experience panic-
inducing. Five or six hours are not
nearly enough to take in the re-installed
permanent collection, let alone the tem-
porary shows. And because a $25 ticket
is only good for a day, non-members
absorb the whole thing at a dead run.
Thedisorientation is partly inten-
tional. MoMA spent its first decades
developing a cogent, if narrow chronicle
of modern art around a series of orderly
“begats”: great men influenced other
great men, mostly in Paris, until the sec-
ond world war, when the centre of grav-
ity moved to New York. The museum
has at last challenged itself to rethink
that canon and include more women,
places, races and currents. That’s a
noble goal, butit’s easier to shatter a
hoary art-historical narrative than it is
to reassemble a new one.Criticised for
not being inclusive enough, and uncer-
tain about how to reform, MoMA has
responded with the curatorial equiva-
lent of a tantrum: fine, you figure it out!
A chronological thread — more of a
looping, fraying ribbon, really — runs
through the galleries, periodically inter-
rupted by an assortment of mystifying
digressions and parentheticals. Escap-
ing down a staircase that leads from the
fifth floor (and peters out at the fourth),
you pass through “A Surrealist Art His-
tory”, a grab-bag of wonders where a
wall text acknowledges that “Paul
Cézanne apples, Henri Rousseau’s jung-
lescapes, and Giorgio De Chirico’s eerie
arcades may appear to have little in
common”, except for the fact that André
Breton liked them all. Who was Breton,
and why did his taste matter? If you
don’t know, MoMA isn’t telling.
Despite its sizeable education depart-
ment, with a dedicated wing of its own,
MoMA appears to have a phobia of being
didactic. Instead of teaching the public,
it sprays us with stimuli and images,
trusting trained and untrained eyes
alike to make distinctions on the fly.
This kaleidoscopic approach is frustrat-
ing at best. It’s a museum’s job to sift,
classify and organise the chaotic over-
loadartists churn up, and shunting that
on o viewers is a dereliction of duty.t
Crucial to the latest rebirth is the deci-
sion to desegregate genres and media.
Photography, design, paintings, sculp-
ture and drawings all mix and mingle,
with results that are occasionally revela-
tory and more often puzzling. In the first
category is “The Vertical City”, which
gathers Manhattan-besotted photogra-
phy by Berenice Abbott and Alfred
Stieglitz; Walter Ruttmann’s bracing
short film from 1927,Berlin, Symphony of
a City; models for two unbuilt high-rises
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; and a
poster for Fritz Lang’sMetropolis —an
array that demonstrates how com-
pletely fantasy intertwined with fast-
moving reality in the construction of
urban life. But another design and archi-
tecture sub-show that focuses on the
Bauhaus acts as an inexplicable lead-in
to Monet’s “Water Lilies”.
If you don’t like the current installa-
tion, wait: the museum has promised to
rotate a third of its permanent collec-
tion every six months. We’ve been here
before, though. Two decades ago, with
the last expansion, designed by Yoshio
Taniguchi,the museum announced
plans to rethinkits permanent collec-
tion.Experiments with rubrics like
“Modern Art Despite Modernism” and“The Rhetoric of Persuasion” xplorede
more heterodox readings of history,
with intriguing but confusing results.
When the Taniguchi building opened,
MoMA reverted to the same old yarn.
This time, the museum has burrowed
into its vaults and emerged with more
works by women and artists of colour.
That’s cause for celebration: who
wouldn’t cheer the replacement of some
second-rate male abstractionists by tal-
ents like Helen Frankenthaler and Joan
Mitchell? And since the first volley of
temporary exhibitions includes retro-
spectives of Betye Saar and William
Pope.L, plus “Sur Moderno”, a survey of
South American abstraction, MoMA has
earned itself a full-throated hallelujah.
Still, fresh perspectives demand con-
text. It’s fascinating to see “Lime Kiln
Club Field Day”, from 1914, the oldest
extant bit of footage to feature African-
American actors. The wall label makes
no mention of the black man in black-
face who puts on a broad grin as soon as
the camera’s rolling. Those details place
the film squarely within the complex
and troubling history of minstrelsy, a
legacy that MoMA leaves unexplored.
At times, new aspirations and old hab-
its get jumbled together. Undercutting
the old genius-narrative conflicts with
the need to keeplandmarks perpetually
on view. People want to know where tofind “Starry Night”, “Water
Lilies” and Picasso’s “Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon”.
That last celebrity painting
is surrounded by a retinue of
Picassos, plus a ringer from
50 years later: Faith Ring-
gold’s vivid scene of carnage,
“American People Series
#20: Die”. The juxtaposition
presents three problems:
Ringgold’s painting is a gloss
on “Guernica”, not “Demoi-
selles”. It’s also not an out-
standing example of her
work, which means she
comes off looking more like a
groupie than an artist with a
voice f her own. And finally,o
the arrangement is less radi-
cal than it seems. When the time comes
to shake up this gallery he Ringgold willt
doubtless go, while the Picasso stays on.
The two-tiered system endures, rein-
forcing thehierarchy of masterpieces.
As you wend your way towards the
present, the organisational principles
become ever murkier. The second floor
contains the mini-show “Building Citi-
zens”, which purports to show how
architects come to grips with civic val-
ues and social imperatives.As you pass
from a schematic expression of a private
house in rural Connecticut, by Peter
Eisenman, to Herzog & De Meuron’s
models for a luxury tower in lower Man-
hattan, to Zaha Hadid’s unrealised
sketch for a park on the edge of Paris,
there’s an argument lurking in the back-
ground. It’s about the tension between
architects’ aesthetic impulses and the
nuts-and-bolts need for housing that is
cheap, plentiful and liveable. But it’s an
argument that’s never made.
The ample halls on 53rd Street echo
with other unclosed cases and unan-
swered questions. What distinguishes
this institution’s approach toart from
the Whitney’s, the Guggenheim’s, the
New Museum’s, or that of commercial
galleries?Has MoMA grown big enough?
Curators could have included more
women and even rewritten the 20th
centurywithout an extra $450m worth
of eal estate; the mission’s got nothingr
to do with square footage.
At the heart of these riddles lies the
core conundrum: what is Modernism? nI
art, it has fragmented and metamor-
phosed; in architecture and design, it has
consolidated into an aesthetic that is
revanchist, ubiquitous and monolithic.
Its avant-garde days long in the past, the
utopian movement has become a classic
style, and the building, designed by the
formerly renegade firm Diller Scofidio +
Renfro, is indistinguishable from the
midtown officesthat enfold it. No matter
how hard curators labour to loosen cate-
gories or toy with timelines, they must
go to work each day in an utterly conven-
tional monument to corporate chic.moma.orgWhen the time comes to
shake up this gallery het
Ringgold will doubtless go,while the Picasso stays on
OCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201917/ - 17:06 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD12, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 12, 1