New York’s Shifting Art Scene

The shutdown of the Museum of Modern Art’s 53rd Street headquarters and its temporary move to Queens are only the most prominent examples of how the city’s modern and contemporary art scene will be transformed during the next few years. Most of New York’s major institutions have already begun to redefine themselves and recalibrate their missions in a new century--in the same vein as revamps in the planning stages in Los Angeles at, among others, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum.

In New York, with the exception of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, virtually all have announced plans--or hopes--to expand. Just as important, many have begun to refocus their exhibition plans and even their collecting strategies.

MoMA has made its plans clear:

“What we’ve tried to do in the last five or six years is to shift the critical center of our interests from the first half of the 20th century to the latter half of the 20th century, and to continue to collect aggressively in the present,” MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry says. “Ten years from now, I would hope that the majority of our shows would have been exhibitions that focused on art since the ‘60s.”

All over town, similar strategizing is beginning to push the traditional boundaries. Collectively, these changes are redrawing the map of the world’s modern and contemporary art capital.

MoMA

With its renowned collections touring the globe and operations shifted to Queens, the limelight might begin to dim, at least temporarily, on MoMA. Will museum-goers take the subway or MoMA’s shuttle buses out to Queens, or simply visit other Manhattan attractions? MoMA hopes its roster of inaugural shows will make a Manhattan location moot.

The offerings this summer at MoMA QNS include “AUTObodies,” a selection of cars from the permanent collection, and “Tempo,” an international show about the dimension of time. Later in the year, surveys of contemporary works on paper and visionary architectural drawings are scheduled. But the meat of the calendar kicks off in 2003 with “Matisse Picasso,” a potential blockbuster followed by retrospectives of painter Max Beckmann, photographer Ansel Adams, and Venezuelan painter Armando Reveron. Prints by Kiki Smith, and paintings, objects and graphics by Dieter Roth are scheduled for 2004, the latter to be presented in collaboration with the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, also in Queens and a MoMA partner since 1999. Because MoMA, perhaps more than any museum, has codified the canon of modern art, the reinstallation of its permanent collection will be closely watched--and just exactly how the story of major figures and movements will be augmented awaits the successor of Kirk Varnedoe as head of the department of painting and sculpture.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art

Under director Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim has become a multinational conglomerate with affiliates in Venice, Berlin, Las Vegas and, most famously, Bilbao, Spain. He has sent the collection on the road and given over the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda to an eclectic mix of shows. Although established as a museum of abstract and modern art, under Krens the Guggenheim has exhibited African and Chinese antiquities, motorcycles, Armani dresses, Brazilian colonial art, Frank Gehry’s designs and a retrospective of Norman Rockwell. Critics say he’ll show whatever will attract crowds and funding, but Krens says the complaints are unfair.

“Certainly over 80% of what we do is right down the middle of the plate in terms of the general perception of our core competency,” he says, reeling off a list of retrospectives that includes Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly and Nam June Paik.

The motorcycles, Armani dresses and Gehry shows, he says, reflect his hope that “within another decade or so, we would have a very well-established department of architecture and design.” He adds that the Gehry exhibition attracted more than 400,000 visitors, making it “by far the best-attended exhibition we’ve ever had.” He defends the African, Chinese, and Brazilian shows as assembling superb objects that might otherwise not have been seen in New York.

“When you’re developing a program, do you string just one string on your violin because it’s the one that’s closest to you and the one you knew? The variety actually enhances the program and the audience,” he says, adding that in the last eight years, annual attendance has increased from about 600,000 to more than a million.

Krens feels the international Guggenheim has “an obligation to look at other cultures. In the last 20 years, the whole notion of a globally conscious contemporary art is emerging all over the world, not just in New York City and Paris.”

But his future exhibition calendar stays strictly within Europe and the U.S., with a survey of contemporary art this summer followed by retrospectives of sculptor and filmmaker Matthew Barney, Russian painter Kasimir Malevich and Pop artist James Rosenquist next year, as well as a survey of photo-based art from the collection.

Krens would like to build a downtown Guggenheim, designed by Frank Gehry. But several months ago, in the wake of budget problems caused by the events of Sept. 11, he laid off scores of workers, canceled an exhibition of Scottish Conceptual artist Douglas Gordon, and postponed the Barney and Malevich shows, all planned for 2002.

“The Guggenheim is hardly in trouble,” he says, “but the reality is that we did get hit hard by Sept. 11 because we are more dependent than most institutions on admissions revenues, and 50% of our audience comes from abroad.”

Whitney Museum of American Art

In an increasingly global art world, does it make sense to focus only on “American” art? Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney, thinks it does. The world may be commercially integrating, but culturally it remains a fractious place riven by local and national identities, and the Whitney is seeking to address this issue in its shows. An upcoming exhibition, “The American Seen,” will survey art made abroad in the last 10 years that takes as its subject the United States.

“The premise is to inquire about the nature of how Americans are perceived in the rest of the world,” Anderson says. “I think it will be a watershed in how we see ourselves.”

During the past two decades, under directors Thomas Armstrong and then David Ross, the Whitney became linked closely with commercial galleries and modish trends, offering mid-career retrospectives to artists whose reputations often declined later.

Anderson says he plans to exhibit less-known work, beginning with a summer show of second-generation Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. There will also be shows featuring feminist body-and-land artist Ana Mendieta, architect John Hejduk, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and drawings by Arshile Gorky.

But traditionally the Whitney has been an advocate of living artists, and Anderson says that won’t change, citing future shows of drawings by Ed Ruscha, as well as of work by Israeli-born photographer Michal Rovner and New York architects Diller and Scofidio. He adds that for the current Biennial (on view until May 26), the museum doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for artists to create work.

“This advocacy goes back to our founding, and it separates us from other museums that are very cautious about their involvement with artists,” he says.

With the building filled with loan shows, 99% of the collection remains in storage. The lack of space is but one of many “inherited inefficiencies” of the museum’s Marcel Breuer-designed home, built in 1966 to accommodate 200,000 visitors a year and now handling several times that number.

The museum has hired Rem Koolhaas to devise a master plan for expansion along Madison Avenue. Despite recent financial difficulties--again caused by Sept. 11--that precipitated layoffs and the cancellation of a retrospective devoted to Post-Minimalism pioneer Eva Hesse, Anderson predicts that within the next six years, the Whitney will have broken ground.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here’s a no-brainer: What are the chances of the Met exhibiting a close-up photograph of oral sex? Slim to zero, right? Yet there it was--in a white, fur-lined vitrine, no less--along with dozens of other examples of fine-art erotica in the recent Surrealism survey. The exhibition, organized by London’s Tate Modern, is a rarity at the Met: a thematic survey of 20th century painting and sculpture. (Last year’s “School of Paris” exhibition was less a cogent survey than a catchy title for the recently acquired Gelman collection.)

There have been surveys of modern photography, design, costume and prints, but unlike other encyclopedic museums, the Met for decades has been content to leave the broader story of modern art in the hands of MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney. The Surrealism show signals a change. Already there is a second important modern survey on the calendar: a show of 20th century African American art to open next year.

Standard 20th century fare at the Met has been one-artist shows of painters Dali, Magritte, De Kooning and others. Sculpture by Rodin, David Smith and Ellsworth Kelly has appeared in the roof garden, with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen now on view.

“We tend to shy away from vast omnibus subjects that get very fuzzy intellectually as to what their demarcation lines are,” says the director, Philippe de Montebello, adding, “We do like monographic shows. They’re highly focused and they bring a particular artistic personality out to the fore.”

Among those coming up are shows of Vija Celmins’ prints this fall and contemporary photographs by Thomas Struth next year. Portraits by photographer Richard Avedon open in September, Charles Sheeler photographs are planned for next year, and a Philip Guston painting show is in the works.

The Met has gradually filled out its patchy holdings of modern art, adding strength in Futurism, the School of Paris and Abstract Expressionism, mainly through gifts. In contemporary art, however, the museum lags far behind the city’s other museums, having acquired only a few major works such as Jasper Johns’ “White Flag” and, with much fanfare last year, a video by Bill Viola.

De Montebello says the charter obliges the museum “to collect in the present,” but he seems to think it makes better sense to allow some dust to settle before adding to the collection. “I think the curators in the future will be asked to skip a generation or two in their purchases of contemporary art,” he says. “There’s always plenty of time to buy the art of today tomorrow. It’s not a diminishing commodity.” And the museum is far more likely to assemble a postwar collection through donations than through purchases.

The Pierpont Morgan Library

The Morgan owns drawings, literary, historical and musical manuscripts, and books from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, and director Charles Pierce has decided to move cautiously into 20th century art.

In 2000, the Morgan proclaimed its entry into the field with an exhibition of Modernist drawings from New York private collections. Now, with “Pierre Matisse and His Artists,” the library is showing painting and sculpture, including works by Miro, Calder, Giacometti, Chagall, Balthus and others. But the Morgan’s focus, Pierce says, will be on drawings.

“Although there are collections of 20th century drawings at our peer institutions, I didn’t think any one of them was as interested in 20th century drawing as they were in 20th century painting and sculpture, photography, three-dimensional objects, and so on. So it seemed to me that there was a gap that we could fill,” says Pierce, adding that his trustees have been supportive of the change.

He would like the library to have eight or 10 masterworks by each of the major figures through Jackson Pollock, and is willing to leave more recent work to a successor.

“I’m not as keen at this point in organizing exhibitions of the alleged masters of the end of the 20th century because I think there is less agreement among knowledgeable people about who these masters are, and also one gets into the very tricky business of exhibiting works of living artists, and that is something the Morgan has not done.”

Like so many of the New York museums, the Morgan building will be updated. Next April, the Morgan will close for three years to build an expansion designed by Renzo Piano.

As yet, no modern art exhibition is on the upcoming calendar. Pierce feels it is important for the Morgan to mount a 20th century show every few years, “but it mustn’t be at the expense of our commitment to the earlier field.”

Brooklyn Museum of Art

The encyclopedic Brooklyn Museum of Art’s chronic dilemma has been how to attract visitors from Manhattan. The only proven method has been to mount must-see exhibitions like the Gustave Courbet and Louise Bourgeois retrospectives of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Director Arnold Lehman hasn’t given up on that approach--he’s presented retrospectives of Lee Krasner and Kerry James Marshall, as well as “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” which created a controversy that put Brooklyn in the spotlight, for better or worse.

But Lehman is more concerned with reinventing the institution for its local audience, rather than luring the art-going crowd from MoMA or the Met. To that end, he is “rethinking the entire program,” aiming to make it more relevant to a diverse audience.

“Our show is not going to look like a Metropolitan Museum show. That I can guarantee you,” he says. “We’re talking to different audiences. Our goal is to have an audience made up of at least 50% people of color. That in itself changes how we look at what we do,” he says. The strategy, he adds, is to examine “social engagement through contemporary art.”

Within two years, he will open new galleries for postwar art that “are going to speak to our visitors in a manner that our colleague institutions are not doing.” In the American galleries, this strategy already has resulted in thematic clusters of works with lengthy text panels and video monitors.

Lehman doesn’t know what themes the new displays will be organized by, but he says pop culture will likely play a part. Moreover, he’s put up a “Star Wars” exhibition, and will soon bring the British duo Gilbert & George, the newly acquired feminist icon “The Dinner Party,” by Judy Chicago, and a retrospective of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the few artists deified by being in the movies. The museum is embarking on a physical transformation to make its Beaux-Arts building more “community-friendly,” with a spacious entrance plaza and lobby slated to reopen by early 2004. “My hope is that you won’t know what to expect from us. If you were able to do that, I haven’t done my job.”

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Jason Edward Kaufman is the New York correspondent for London’s Art Newspaper.