ART REVIEW : Nearly Flawless Cache for MOCA

When anything goes right in this world our tendency is to look for the catch. Last month the Museum of Contemporary Art was bequeathed a gift of 18 works from the Rita and Taft Schreiber collection, including prime examples by such masters as Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti and Arshile Gorky. The news made the front page because the works are rare and rumored to be worth in excess of $60 million. It looked like a real windfall for art-hungry MOCA.

The cache has just gone quietly on inaugural view until Oct. 18. The public--surely incited to suspicion by such generosity--now has an opportunity to stare this gift horse straight in the kisser.

What they will see is a virtually flawless trove installed with such grateful reverence, it’s enough to make you smile. The Pollock--a classic 1949 drip painting called “Number 1”--has a wall entirely to itself. As you look at it you can hear an awed and tremulous curatorial voice whisper, “And this . . . is our Pollock.”

No wonder. No contemporary museum can regard itself as complete without an obligatory memento from the artist who managed to redefine painting after Picasso had apparently done it all. But this is no third-tier relic; it’s a helluva picture with its tangled skeins of color electrified by crazy arabesques of white and silver. At different instants it looks like brambles, liquids and galaxies, but mostly it just looks like this amazing man-made thing that is like nothing ever made before it.

The first time I ever saw a Pollock I just burst into tears.

Turn around and there is a Piet Mondrian, a little 1939 job called “Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow.” Actually, it’s mainly a black-and-white grid with the colors squeezed off to the corners. It’s so simple, but the interrelationships of rectangles set up fugal vibrations. You begin to understand that modernism was about the adventure of stripping art down to its barest essentials to discover the wonderful resonances of basic axioms.

To get to the gallery housing the Schreiber donation, you have to walk through two others. One houses a roomful of pile-driver Franz Klines that are sort of like great jazz drum solos. The other has some big Mark Rothkos that throb with colors as dense as passages from Beethoven. Part of an earlier purchase from the Panza collection, they are intensely impressive. The mind says, “Hey, this is a serious museum.”

You walk into the Schreiber room and the mind does a double take.

“Hey, this is a really serious museum.”

The donation has vintage examples of classic modernism that are just what was needed to give the permanent collection a certain, well, gravitas . The ensemble has a golden spike quality that seems to anchor the institution. And it’s instructively installed.

In one corner there is an Alexander Calder sculpture and paintings by Joan Miro and Arshile Gorky that are like some great triple home run. Miro bashes the surrealist ball molding it into a funny kidney shape that makes it possible to be abstract and figurative at the same time. Calder--on third--slides into home plate shaping it into a biomorphic sculpture that is at once elegant, ominous and funny. Arshile Gorky races in from second (in New York), trips over Calder, making the base moist and sexy, thereby setting up the sensual, highly physical qualities of Abstract Expressionism.

Hold on fans! It’s turning into a quadruple play! Mark Rothko turns the ball into a football and from a solid to a liquid, then sneaks it to Morris Louis who turns it into a liquid solid. Amazing. First time in history anybody ever batted in three home runs and made two touchdowns in the same game.

The gift horse grins broadly. We search somewhat

frantically for a yellow stain or two. Well isn’t it a bit of an outrage that the little Mark Tobey isn’t hanging closer to the Pollock for comparison? And isn’t it a tragedy that the George Rickey mobile isn’t moving and that it isn’t close to the Calder, being that Rickey is Calder’s finest and most underrated inheritor?

Well, OK, so it’s not exactly a tragedy.

Not every work in the gift is a blockbuster or every artist a great master. On evidence, that just shows that the Schreibers collected for personal reasons and knew how to pick prime works by lesser known people.

It doesn’t usually seem to matter that Pierre Alechinsky is far less revered here than in Europe, but the Schreibers found a wild little painting that shows him at his best. We tend to forget about Nicholas de Stael because he died early and leaned to decoration, but there is real poignancy in the three works here. The Dubuffet is unpretentious but captures the kernel of his Art Brut.

None of that needs making up for, but if it did the Giacomettis would do it. Frankly, the artist is sometimes a bit too steeped in the celebration of European ennui and Angst but the two “Tall Figures” here find him at his best moment after the surrealist period. Nearly eight feet tall, each depicts a nubile young woman. Instead of the expected Lolita qualities we get spectral presences that impart serious thoughts about human vulnerability and its persistent tendency to triumph over its own weakness.

For once everything went right. The Schreiber gift is unalloyed philanthropy in an era of shameless greed, artistic authenticity in an age of brass. Wow.