New vibrancy for a grand old collection

Intellectually, one can know the deep importance of something while forgetting the awesome power that comes with actually experiencing it. So it has been with the collection of painting and sculpture assembled during the last 75 years by the Museum of Modern Art.

Common knowledge asserts its unparalleled quality, though most of it has been out of sight during the museum’s 2 1/2 -year expansion project. Now that the collection has been reinstalled in a new, $425-million building in Midtown Manhattan, opening to the public Saturday, seeing it again is an experience of a different order: I rocked back on my heels.

New art museum buildings generate considerable excitement nowadays -- so much so that we have given the international phenomenon a name. “The Bilbao Effect” is a complex of circumstances that runs on the profitable energy of cultural tourism. Medieval religious pilgrims traveled to Santiago de Compostela to gain proximity to miracles at an outpost at the end of the world. Baroque-era pilgrims went to the power center of Rome to be near fragments of imperial antiquity. Modern ones travel to fabulous far-flung treasure houses for painting and sculpture.

Frankly, though, all I really want from an art museum building is an unobstructed view with good light. Yoshio Taniguchi, the Japanese architect of the new MoMA, has provided ample quantities of both. He’s also provided more and, in a few areas, less -- more about that in a moment.

But the permanent collection is the thing, and MoMA is reopening with all 125,000 square feet of exhibition space devoted to it. The place looks like a Mercedes showroom -- a finely tooled apparatus for the precision act of looking at art -- with volumes of luminous space formed by sleek, luxurious, planar surfaces.

Galleries in the new MoMA are stacked on six floors. The ground level is where you’ll find the famed sculpture garden, still under construction during a recent preview. The top floor is where temporary exhibitions will be held, starting next year.

Since most visitors come to an art museum for a special exhibition, placing these galleries at the top makes sense. Should you choose, you’ll then be able to work your way down through the permanent collection galleries. The fifth floor holds art from the 1880s to World War II, mostly European. The fourth floor picks up the story in the United States in the 1940s, continuing through the tumultuous 1960s.

Pride of place is given to the School of Paris and then the New York School, as has always been the case at MoMA. Still, a slightly different emphasis is at work in the installation, which was organized by chief curator John Elderfield and his colleagues Anne Umland, Ann Temkin and Joachim Pissarro. The accent comes at the beginning.

For years the introductory image has been Paul Cezanne’s “The Bather” (1885), a lumbering figure in a chiseled landscape, who steps forward like a new Adam groping for stability in the modern world. MoMA has always started its story of Modern art with French Post-Impressionist painting, and “The Bather” is still installed in the first room -- but now over to one side. Instead, the painting you see first is by Paul Signac, a minor follower of Georges Seurat.

In speckled daubs of paint Signac shows a dandy in profile, his arm extended across a bright whorl of patterned color as if some otherworldly carnival ringmaster. A top hat and cane in one hand, he offers an exotic flower with the other. The work is grandiloquently titled “Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic With Beats and Angles, Tones and Colors, Portrait of M. Felix Feneon in 1890.”

The picture is a brilliant introduction for the collection -- and not just because Feneon was a prominent art critic of the day. (He was also a war-ministry clerk, art dealer, collector and anarchist rabble-rouser.) It announces that MoMA’s vaunted history has room for minor artists. It also asserts that the individual example better be first-rate; Signac may be minor, but this painting is superlative.

Best of all, the selection is polemical. How? The recent museum fashion for text-heavy thematic installations is kicked to the curb. Feneon was important because he was the first critic to insist that Modern art was modern because it emphasized art’s distinctive material qualities, independent of subject matter. Formal innovation held aesthetic primacy. Literary meaning was swept aside by those enameled “tones and colors.”

Choosing Feneon’s portrait to inaugurate the new MoMA kills two birds with one stone. It asserts that the museum’s legendary founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., shared those sympathies. Yet the context in which the collection is now seen has changed dramatically from Barr’s time (he retired in 1967 and died in 1981). Signac’s is not the painting Barr himself would have chosen. I’d guess Elderfield did because artists today, like those in the 19th century, live in an era when academic theory has a near death-grip on art practice. Celebrating Signac’s surprising portrait of an academy-buster is at once historical and contemporary, familiar yet fresh.

It will also drive some people nuts, which is another reason to applaud. At a preview, one notoriously fusty critic was heard to shriek, in reference to what he imagined was being done to Barr’s legacy, “This is patricide! Patricide!”

Well, yes; and I suspect the late Alfred would be pleased. Why embalm art or its history?

“The Bather” is also a powerful enough masterpiece to set up a chain reaction of stunned responses as you move through subsequent, carefully installed galleries. Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse,” Matisse’s “The Serf,” Umberto Boccioni’s large bronze figure of a striding man who seems to dissolve in space -- these and other works resonate back to Cezanne’s secular Adam.

The new installation of classic painting and sculpture is almost uniformly excellent. (And Picasso’s newly cleaned “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the 20th century’s greatest single work, will leave you gasping.) MoMA’s old galleries were domestic in scale and essentially linear, unlike the multidimensional history of Modern art. But the new galleries are not. Publicly scaled, these rooms offer opportunities for curatorial flexibility and visitor serendipity.

Some hold work by a single artist (18 by Matisse, nine by Brancusi, etc.), while others are devoted to separate but related tendencies (Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, for example). A gallery analyzes the intense artistic dialogue between Picasso and Georges Braque and, later, between Picasso and Matisse.

Wonderful moments have been orchestrated. Wall-hung, a trio of big glass cases featuring small Surrealist baubles deftly recall department store windows. Wordlessly, the installation conveys the raucous, accidental collisions of the commercial street, which were indispensable to the development of Surrealist art in the 1920s and 1930s.

Also smashing is the gutsy installation of Matisse’s “Dance (I)” at the top of Taniguchi’s elegant, neo-Bauhaus stairwell between the fifth and fourth floors. The artist painted a version of the 1909 work for the stairs of a Moscow collector’s home. Suddenly, when seen as the backdrop to a spiraling circulation path, the mural’s ring of exuberant figures moving clockwise gains a striking new dimension.

Oddly, the only gallery that flops is the one devoted to the early 1950s New York School. Following a beautiful room of eight Jackson Pollock paintings, it features a nice juxtaposition of a 1953 Matisse paper cutout with an abstraction by German emigre Hans Hofmann, whose teaching was instrumental to New York painting. But the room is also jam-packed; everything from Willem De Kooning’s snarling nude, “Woman, I” to vaporous clouds of sponged color by Helen Frankenthaler jostles for attention. This motley crew tries way too hard for a Big Statement.

MoMA’s third floor is where three arts with great currency today are found: abundant if conservative displays of photography, drawing and design -- including architecture. But Taniguchi’s new building makes its own potent show. His sleek design, all blacks, whites and grays, may be visually reticent; but it underscores the role urbanism played in creating a distinctly Modern art.

The long lobby that cuts through from 53rd to 54th street is as much a public thoroughfare (no admission fee required) as nearby Fifth and 6th avenues. It intersects with an interior atrium -- 110 feet tall! -- around which the galleries are organized. This soaring space, a kind of “negative skyscraper,” crushes most of the art installed there. (Claude Monet’s 42-foot-wide “Water Lilies” triptych, meant to envelop a viewer, looks like a puny purple smear.) But even New Yorkers do what tourists automatically do outside: Look up and gape. Welcome to the city.

Tanaguchi has cut the corners out of many galleries. These floor-to-ceiling windows don’t let in light (the glass is tinted) so much as let vision out, into the Midtown jumble. White oak floors give beneath your footsteps, diminishing museum fatigue, while deep reveals at the junction of walls and floors make the rooms feel suspended and weightless. This light, theatrical urbanity is taken to fullest advantage in the glorious installation of a monumental Donald Judd sculpture in a fourth floor lobby, with a backdrop of the Midtown skyline seen through a glass wall. Wow!

Where MoMA stumbles badly, though, is on the second floor -- a huge, double-height, loft-like space for art from 1970 to 2004. Some superlative individual works by established artists (Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman) are juxtaposed with related ones by younger talents (Rachel Whiteread, Josiah McElheny). But the attempt at a synoptic overview of an epoch defined by explosive globalization is random and incoherent.

Here’s one symptom of MoMA’s bigger problem: A lovely small drawing by Vija Celmins at one end and a graceful big drawing by Toba Khedoori at the other end are all that you will encounter by Los Angeles artists of the last 30 years. No Chris Burden, no Mike Kelley, no Lari Pittman, no Charles Ray, no _______ (you fill in the blank). Now multiply that glaring gap by a dozen other regions, including entire continents.

New York’s legendary provincialism didn’t matter much when art was a tiny enterprise engaging a handful of practitioners. Now it’s just embarrassing. New York has finally become Paris -- a bountiful place to visit to see what great art used to be. The stunning new MoMA is its magnificent shrine.