Can MoMA go modern?

Late in 1996, trustees of the Museum of Modern Art gathered at a Rockefeller family estate in the historic Hudson Valley north of New York City. The Rockefellers had been instrumental in founding the museum, now universally known as MoMA, in 1929, and were long its principal benefactors. For the retreat the trustees brought along an illustrious group of artists, curators, architects and other museum friends. The topic of lively discussion: Whither MoMA?

The brainstorming session led to the hiring of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi a year later to design his eighth art museum -- and his first large-scale building in the United States. But something else was pressing. The gathering represented a gut-level recognition that, artistically speaking, the modern world was passing MoMA by. The museum’s history was unparalleled, but the Modern wasn’t so modern anymore.

With the approach of the millennium, not to mention MoMA’s 75th anniversary this month, decisions had to be made. At the end of this month we will discover in earnest what direction that eminent group of art world figures decided to take. All indications are that the “New MoMA” is placing its bets on contemporary art.

On Nov. 20 the doors open to the public on a massive new edifice, which has been rising at a furious pace at the legendary address, 11 W. 53rd St. That was the site of a five-story townhouse leased by MoMA from John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1932. A scant 2 1/2 years earlier, the fledging museum had its brave but nervous debut in a nearby office building -- just 10 days after Black Tuesday, when the stock market crashed and the Roaring ‘20s collapsed into the Great Depression. The museum’s move to its own quarters just as Wall Street was finally bottoming out signaled how Rockefeller wealth could insulate the adventurous young institution from catastrophic harm.

Today MoMA’s brand new home, complete with a renovation and slight enlargement of its famous outdoor sculpture garden, has been built at a staggering cost of $425 million -- more than $650 per square foot. The building sprawls to encompass nearly half a city block in Midtown Manhattan. Its elegant facade, rising six stories above the street, is a geometric composition of absolute black granite, silvery aluminum panels and white, gray and striated glazed glass. A 12,400-square-foot lobby, which spans the block with entrances on 53rd and 54th streets, is a carpet of green slate quarried in New Hampshire, shipped to Germany to be precision-laser cut and then shipped back to Manhattan for seamless installation. (Half of the sleek, elegant, light-filled building, including offices and the education wing, will not be completed until 2005.)

It is a long way from the Great Depression to this. The last renovation and expansion, completed in 1984, resulted in a malformed hodgepodge of exhibition spaces and a circulation system that most closely resembled a suburban shopping mall. By contrast, the new museum started virtually from scratch.

Its size nearly doubled. To get an idea of how big the new building is, start with the fabulous spiral museum for abstract art that Frank Lloyd Wright built on Fifth Avenue for Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1959 -- now multiply it by 12. And add to the construction cost hefty expenses for real estate acquisition, a greatly enlarged operating endowment, a temporary outpost in a renovated Queens warehouse and other miscellaneous costs, for a total capital campaign (not quite fully raised) of a whopping $858 million.

A cautious debut

On that bucolic 1996 day in upstate New York, as MoMA’s friends pondered the museum’s future, the ambitions of the institution were radically different from what they had been in 1929. Back then, the serious American audience for Modern art numbered in the thousands -- at most. The museum was born in a spirit of evangelism.

Modern art was a cause, a struggle for artistic legitimacy undertaken with diligence and zeal. Extraordinary social and cultural turbulence was being generated in Depression-era America by a volatile economic system, changes in industrial manufacturing and a new era of mass communications. Cultural critic Paul Mattick has observed that, given the context, the paintings of Modern European artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin and Seurat represented something distinctive.

Their art was forward-looking aesthetically, while being tied to an Old World tradition. The paintings and drawings considered quotidian experience, rather than esoteric myth or the grandeur of history. They were the handmade products of artisans in small workshops, not the complex goods of engineering, the factory and mass production. Their uniqueness as objects of the hand, the eye and the heart embodied an idea of individualist worth.

At a moment of collapse, their display in the special place that is an art museum sent a clear signal. These and similar qualities of stable, progressive, personal value were important to modern American society.

The irony was this: In 1929, when MoMA opened its doors with a gala exhibition of French Post-Impressionist painting by these four masters -- the first in-depth show of its kind in the United States -- the work was far from cutting edge. It might have been a curiosity to the public, but not to avant-gardists. Van Gogh and Seurat had been dead for nearly 40 years, Gauguin and Cezanne for about a quarter-century. New art in Europe was very different from these earlier artists’ intensely colored landscapes and penetrating figurative scenes.

Advanced painters in the 1920s were probing the mysterious labyrinth of the unconscious mind. Sculptors were investigating the possibilities of transparent plastics as material. Artists were examining geometry and mathematics as structural frameworks for purely abstract compositions. Rectangles, disks and trapezoids took the place of sunflowers and Tahitian maidens.

Today, the equivalent to the Post-Impressionist show would be an inaugural exhibition for the new building featuring paintings by Jackson Pollock, John McLaughlin and abstract art in the 1950s -- not very up to date. At its debut 75 years ago, MoMA was simultaneously avant-garde and retrograde, unconventional yet cautious. It has been that way ever since.

During the museum’s first year in Rockefeller’s rented townhouse, an exhibition that gave birth to the term “International Style” emphasized the radical use of concrete and structural steel in architecture, celebrating the first new construction system for building since the age of the Gothic cathedral 700 years before. The show changed the way the built environment would henceforth look -- including the International Style museum MoMA erected for itself in 1939, at the site of the old townhouse. The current renovation and expansion restores that original sleek facade, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone.

Meanwhile, one of the most popular paintings in the museum’s unparalleled collection of 20th century art is the sentimental “Christina’s World” (1948) by American artist Andrew Wyeth. The famous picture shows a crippled farm woman sprawled in the grass, in a gesture of yearning toward the family homestead perched atop a distant hill. Painted in an acutely Realist style in the wake of World War II, it represents an arch-conservative view of American womanhood -- of Rosie the Riveter, set loose from traditional domesticity by the epic demands of war, now aching to recover her “natural” place at home.

This coexistence of forward-looking and backward-glancing aesthetics was also very much in evidence when MoMA opened its last major building renovation and expansion, 20 years ago. A hefty catalog of the collection was produced for the occasion, replete with the landmark works by Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Mondrian, Miro and scores of others that make this the greatest assembly of its kind in the world. (A new catalog, prepared under the direction of chief curator John Elderfield, is being published for the opening of the new building.) But the final entry in the painting and sculpture section of the 1984 book is telling.

It shows a monumental canvas by Sandro Chia -- a now largely ignored minor painter associated with the Italian Neo-Expressionist movement, sometimes called the Trans-avant-garde. After 216 pages of largely stellar examples by a host of mostly European and New York artists, coming upon this ersatz grand finale makes you wince.

Contemporary art has always been problematic at MoMA. As a definitive narrative the museum’s collection begins to peter out somewhere in the 1970s -- or even earlier. Four of the artists most influential for new art today -- John Baldessari, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman and Edward Ruscha -- emerged in Southern California in the 1960s. Not one is represented in the 1984 catalog of the painting and sculpture collection. (A later Nauman print and an even later drawing are included.) Their work has since been prominent at the museum, but only with benefit of considerable hindsight.

The tumultuous 1980s only made the fit between MoMA and contemporary art more difficult. The internationalization of the art world was underway, with the simultaneous emergence of L.A. and Germany as artistic powerhouses. Their rise signaled an early phase of today’s global conversation in art. The museum’s collection is a rich chronicle of the School of Paris and its transformation, after World War II, into the New York School. That story, always too narrow in any case, was becoming obsolete.

Plenty of evidence of MoMA’s predicament was turning up in the museum world too. Museum directors and curators don’t always like to admit it, but theirs is an intensely competitive profession. Museums devoted specifically to contemporary art were mushrooming in the United States and abroad. More dramatically, two bigger challenges appeared.

The once-sleepy Guggenheim Museum had been making noise for half a dozen years about establishing an international chain of loosely connected contemporary institutions, each branded with the Guggenheim name. By fall 1996, word was filtering out of the small, faded industrial city of Bilbao in the Basque region of northern Spain that a project nearing completion was truly startling. A massive, architecturally unprecedented new Guggenheim branch designed by Los Angeles’ Frank Gehry would soon become one of the most famous buildings in the world.

In London, meanwhile, the historically staid Tate Museum was pushing ahead with ambitious plans to split in two. The city was consolidating its position as the financial capital of Europe and, like countless others before it, would anoint its prominence with art.

Tate Britain, a nationalist museum to chronicling the history of British art, would remain in its old home at Bankside. Across the Thames in a rugged, working-class neighborhood, Tate Modern would encompass global contemporary art. The new museum would occupy an enormous abandoned power station, to be renovated by the young Swiss architectural team Herzog & de Meuron.

Tate Modern and the Guggenheim Bilbao had one thing in common. Huge, architecturally impressive buildings, they did not contain permanent collections of stature or depth.

MoMA, by contrast, found itself in the opposite position. A cramped building housed an amazing collection, but with no place to grow.

The likelihood that Bilbao and the Tate would ever be able to assemble strong collections of earlier Modern art -- Picasso to Pollock -- was virtually nonexistent. Contemporary art was the only viable option. It is available, in continuously renewed supply, and less expensive. Collectors were everywhere. If MoMA was going to stay competitive, it could not stay still.

In Taniguchi’s design for the massive new building, exhibition space on West 53rd Street balloons from 85,000 square feet (coincidentally, the size of Tate Modern’s galleries) to 125,000 square feet (the size of Bilbao’s). In 1999 MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry announced a plan to merge the venerable museum with the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, a once charmingly ragtag alternative space that opened in a derelict public school in 1976.

The alternative-space movement began in the 1970s as an option to the commercial limitations of art galleries, and to the general neglect of contemporary art by museums. The merger between MoMA and P.S.1 reflected how brand new art had become thoroughly interwoven into museums by the end of the millennium.

Renewed focus

Moma’s commitment is evident in the new building’s layout. The galleries are stacked above the ground floor lobby in five stories. At the top are temporary exhibition rooms, with the “Old Master Modern” collections on the next three levels going down. Just above the lobby on the second floor is the big space for contemporary art, as wide as a city block and free of columns.

These contemporary galleries are the most easily accessible rooms to a visitor just in off the street. And new art is prominently announced in the inaugural program.

The permanent collection will fill almost the entire building through January, but the first large-scale temporary exhibition (opening Feb. 4) will be “Contemporary Voices: Works From the UBS Art Collection.” The corporate collection was assembled under the auspices of former MoMA board President Donald B. Marron. More than 70 works -- 44 donated to the museum, plus an additional 35 or so on loan from the financial services firm -- will be on view.

The first design show, after an inaugural exhibition of Taniguchi’s museum architecture, will be “Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape,” a 20-year survey of urban public spaces. In March the first large solo exhibition will assemble a decade of work by the young German photographer Thomas Demand, age 40.

The new MoMA is arriving in a spirit of healthy collegial competition fueled by an obvious desire to regain some lost luster as an influential agent in the discourse around contemporary art. For all this emphasis on the new, however, something of the museum’s familiar conservatism still shines through.

The UBS corporate collection is richest in artists who emerged before 1990, with familiar giants including Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. Demand is among the most visible recent advocates of “big German digital prints,” a photographic genre in vogue for many years. Although globalization has brought countless Asian, South American, African and other artists to the forefront, selecting a European artist for the first solo sticks close to the museum’s roots.

So does the choice of Taniguchi as architect. An exquisitely refined designer, he endorses an almost hyper-Modernist aesthetic. Its origins were celebrated in MoMA’s International Style exhibition more than 70 years ago.

As the museum prepares its anniversary celebration, one revealing sign of how the world and its relationship to contemporary art has changed dramatically is the museum’s much-remarked decision to boost the general admission price to $20. In 1929, when a movie ticket cost less than a quarter, that entry tab would have equaled about two bucks. MoMA’s galleries would have been empty of visitors.

But not today. The $20 ticket price, the highest of any general art museum admission in the nation, is directed at dual constituencies. One is locals and aficionados of a certain class -- those who will bypass the single-admission fee because they can manage a $75 annual membership ($150 for a family). The other is tourists, who have a list of sites to see and expect to pay.

Art has long been an instrument of financial and spiritual investment. At the sleek new MoMA, the concept of cultural capital is taking on a contemporary glow.