A MOD FAN DANCE AT THE MET

The Metropolitan Museum opened its new wing for 20th-Century art Tuesday. It is named for its donor, Lila Acheson Wallace, and already there is a growing critical consensus that the collection is a bit thin.

Thin? That must be thin as in “You can’t be too thin or too rich.”

Wing? That must be wing as in flying wing where the wing is the whole thing. When the Met builds a wing, it is most folks’ idea of an entire museum. Like the rest of the fruits of the Met’s master-plan expansion, this 100,000-square-foot behemoth was designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeldoo Associates. A serious stroll through its three floors of galleries is about all the enlightenment an aesthete’s feet can stand before lunch.

Donor? Calling Lila Acheson Wallace a donor is like calling Henry VIII a bachelor. Wallace, who was the co-founder of the Reader’s Digest, died in 1984 but not before arranging the present matter and bestowing upon the museum the 32 galleries of its Egyptian department, not to mention all those nice fresh flowers every day in the Great Hall that make you like the place even when its multiform shops give it the air of a temple sold to Mammon.

We are used to New York congratulating itself with bully beer commercial gusto and little wiggles of self-love every time something good happens in the area. When the Giants won the Super Bowl, Manhattan went bananas despite the fact the Giants live in New Jersey. The relative modesty and understatement attending the launch of the Wallace wing is an endearing example of aristocratic restraint. No wonder the town is finally irresistible.

Thin? There are 8,000 20th-Century works in the collection. Only a fraction of them are on the walls for the inaugural survey. Meander into the first of 22 galleries and encounter six sparkling canvases by Pierre Bonnard, including the 1939 “The Terrace at Vernon,” among the most lyric of modern domestic garden scenes. Ignore the rest for the moment and press through the door. The poor meager little sampling includes Picasso’s landmark “Portrait of Gertrude Stein.” If that is still too tough, the ever-popular “Woman in White” is nearby.

Now, impressed by substance and softened by modesty, one does begin to notice that the selection is scarcely comprehensive and that it lacks the kinds of in-depth clusters that bespeak long and passionate curatorial commitment.

The Met’s interest in modern art actually goes back to its beginnings in 1866, but it has been fitful and divided. The public has been wary of how much of this unsettling modern stuff it wants to see in the grand and reassuring repository of the past where the most insecure cultural dabbler knows that it is OK to like everything.

The museum didn’t have a proper curatorial department for modern art until 1967. When its first curator, Henry Geldzahler, organized the first big show of contemporary New York painting ever held in its hallowed halls, there was considerable critical and public outcry. The issue was not the quality of the show but whether or not it belonged at the Met. One suspects that the muffled welcome for the new galleries still has to do with that question of propriety.

Manhattan’s folkways are of a fascination.

Formed in ambiguity, it is easy to see why the collection is fitful and why the current curator, William S. Lieberman, had to perform a skillful organizational fan dance to get the best out of his lumpy body of works.

Aside from the fact that he seems obsessed with the idea of proving the collection has some depth by showing us six works each by important artists, Lieberman did an inventive and eye-opening job of compensating through juxtaposition.

Lacking, for example, a major Fauve-period Matisse, he gives us excellent ones by Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain, restating the always useful reminder that major artists do not make all the major works. Having just gotten us enmeshed in the European avant-garde, the curator does a sudden volte-face to American art. Oddly enough, instead of looking old fashioned, the Ashcan painters, Regionalists and masters like Edward Hopper look like no-bull independents building up to their own revolt in early De Kooning and Franz Kline.

The idea is redeemed even further when Lieberman shifts back to Europe via the refined American folk art of Elie Nadelman and Florine Stettheimer.

There is no essay that lays this all out, but Lieberman is wordlessly eloquent in posing the idea that artistic uses of subconscious and sexual impulses were as present in native American primitive art as they were in Freud and Jung.

The modernism of various figurative forms is dramatized in a brilliant juxtaposition of important examples by Max Beckmann, Salvador Dali and Balthus.

By the time we get through a final first floor section on the American Immaculates we are pretty impressed. The Met owns Charles Demuth’s “The Figure Five in Gold,” Marsden Hartley’s “Portrait of a German Officer” and a trademark Georgia O’Keeffe skull painting.

Thin?

Nosiree, but about now a suspicion lurking in the back of our distracted minds surfaces. Betcha this museum wing is going to fizzle out on the upper floors devoted to contemporary art. How could the Met, with all history on its mind have anything prepossessing from the troubled waters of art since 1945? Instead of letting up, Lieberman crashes to a curatorial crescendo in his most handsome gallery, a mezzanine with tall dormer-style skylights crammed with oversize sculpture by the likes of Louise Nevelson, Tony Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Jose di Rivera. Monumental black works create an ambiance that’s like a woozy walk through soaring Manhattan skyscrapers. With wonderful irrationality, Andy Warhol’s billboard-scale portrait of Chairman Mao hovers above the whole.

That’s it. Has to fizzle out now. He’s played his trump card. Not yet. Another quick field reverse with a gallery-full of delicate Paul Klee’s and then on to the real finale. Is it that extraordinary pink marble Noguchi or Jackson Pollock’s “Pasipahae”?

Neither. It is Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm,” that extraordinary drip painting that seems to hover three-dimensionally like a Dionysian tumbleweed.

Lots of us would make humble pilgrimage to the Met if that was all there was in it.

Nice diminuendo of brassy Clyfford Stills, Rothko bass-violas, Diebenkorn on blues clarinet and an Ellsworth Kelly that plays like a chromatic xylophone. Go home now.

Not until we are made to feel that more traditional forms of latter-day figurative art have more to say than Neo-Expressionism. It takes a sympathetic eye to make a melange of Gregory Gillespie, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein look good.

There are silly moves in the galleries and most of them look like concessions to trendiness that the Met need not make. A large room devoted to a special installation by Robert Rauschenberg just doesn’t work. A photography exhibition that is supposed to be about “Faces” winds up being a paean to yuppie-culture obsession with celebrity. A gallery of decorative arts--lots of chairs--necessarily lacks the depth to do much but pander to those who would obliterate the distinction between art and decor. (Decor is art that behaves itself.)

Finally, there is the unavoidable question of what this all means to Los Angeles, since it just opened a couple of modern visual culture palaces of its own. Well, invidious distinctions are out. The two juggernaut cities live in different time warps, but there does seem to be one useful lesson here. One of the world’s mightiest museums just opened a department that lacks all the bells and whistles it would like. Yet through curatorial guile, cunning, intelligence, compassion and humor it has put together a showcase that can hold its head up among the world’s most intimidating competition. That is something we can usefully think over.