‘Exploded’ MoMA meets the press

“It’s about the art too,” one board member finally reminded the crowd during all the gloating over Yoshio Taniguchi’s redesigned Museum of Modern Art and the $858-million fundraising campaign that made it possible.

They were a floor above some of the most stirring Picassos, Matisses and Van Goghs anywhere, not to mention the room of Pollocks a flight lower, or the old Rockefeller garden, at street level, with its family of sculptures. But it was easy to lose sight of the art during the festivities leading up to Saturday’s long-awaited reopening of the best-known modern art museum in the world, now expanded and rethought, “exploded ... open to the city,” as the director, Glenn D. Lowry, put it.

On the day the international press came calling, he found himself explaining, more than any work in the galleries, the new $20 entry fee. Nearby, some of his name-on-the-wall donors were recounting the can-you-top-this process that got the place built, with one billionaire exulting over how he might at last get his enormous Serras out of storage. Then there was the soft-spoken Japanese architect himself, teasing all those people taking his picture that he didn’t understand what was so special about his “box, skylights and a garden.”

Yet even as workers hurried to finish the garden wall, there was time also to share memories that had nothing to do with the hoopla of the moment -- recollections of long-ago first visits to the 75-year-old museum that has given generations a connection to Modern art through Monet’s “Water Lillies” or Giacometti’s skeletal “Man Pointing” or even the green-and-black helicopter now looming over a stairway.

For the board member who commented that “it’s about the art too,” Robert B. Menschel, it was a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo -- of a boy and girl in a Paris cafe -- that got to him the first time he visited MoMA. In 1947, he was a student at Bronx High School of Science, and framed copies of such vintage photos were on the walls of the museum cafeteria so you could rent them, for $10 to $20, for six months. Later, as Menschel rose through the ranks at Goldman Sachs, he was able to buy originals of such works, and now he has a photo gallery in his name.

In 1996, when the board started talking about expansion and someone suggested a $150-million project, he recalled, “I said it was beneath the dignity of the museum, $150 million.”

The board chairman, cosmetics kingpin Ronald Lauder, said that by the end of that meeting the question was, “Could we raise $300 million?” After that, he quipped, “it seems like every time I missed a meeting, they raised it by $100 million.”

In remarks to the crowd, Lauder recalled the inauspicious origins of the museum conceived by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two of her female friends. It opened days after the 1929 stock market crash, on the 12th floor of an office building at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. But it cost nothing to see the exhibit, “Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh,” and the first month, 47,000 people came to the 3,800 square feet of gallery space, “women ... taking their reluctant husbands,” as Lauder described it.

Within three years the museum had moved up to John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s five-story brick townhouse on West 53rd Street, and by 1939 that had been demolished for a custom-made home, a marble-and-glass International Style box designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone.

Lauder said he made his first visit when he was 15 and also a student at Bronx Science, coming alone one Saturday in 1959, and gazed upon “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” thus experiencing the impact of seeing art in person, the realization that “Picasso with his own hand had done it.”

This week, his favorite painting still was drawing the second-largest cluster of TV cameras, after Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” And the first museum building -- the 1939 Goodwin-Stone box -- is now named for Lauder and his wife.

He will not say exactly how much he and others chipped in to earn such “naming opportunities.” But the campaign has amazed veteran philanthropists such as Los Angeles’ Eli Broad, a recent addition to the MoMA board. During the same time he was carrying the brunt of expanding the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amid recession and post-9/11 qualms, here they have raised $725 million in gifts and pledges toward their $858-million goal. “You had 50 trustees giving $5 million or more, some giving up to $50 million,” said Broad, whose first memory of MoMA is of a Warhol retrospective that “changed my view” of the Pop artist.

But the generous checks apparently do not buy you immortality in all circles. Minutes after Lauder gave his public remarks, a young TV woman asked him, “Your name please?” And what did he do for the museum?

The board chairman obliged with a smile but spared her the story of the monumental Ellsworth Kelly behind her, “Sculpture for a Large Wall,” a piece he rescued from a Philadelphia office building. Nor did he share another upside of finally having galleries large enough for Contemporary art and sculpture -- and perhaps soon the Richard Serra steel torques he bought for close to $1 million in 1993.

The four pieces of “Intersection II,” 13 feet high and 55 feet long, have not been shown since Lauder got them at the Gagosian Gallery in SoHo. But they could wind up in the new MoMA, “God willing,” Lauder said, before launching into a routine about how it had cost him a fortune to store the thing.

“I bought it for myself with the idea of giving it to the museum, but finally I said, ‘Let’s give it to the museum in a hurry.’ I was keeping it out in some storage in Queens -- thousands and thousands a month.

“I mean the happiest day of my life,” Lauder said, “was when the museum decided to put the Serra in their storage.”

Of the museum officials, the 50-year-old director, Lowry, seems to have visited at the earliest age. At 7, and with his mother, he was “utterly baffled, mystified, amazed” by the antiwar mural that Picasso created for the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

MoMA no longer has “Guernica” -- the iconic work was returned to Picasso’s native Spain in 1981 -- but Lowry now rules these galleries, and this week he became practiced answering complaints that “New Yorkers of middle-class means will no longer be able to afford to spend an afternoon with Van Gogh.”

“We are free Friday afternoons,” Lowery told one cluster of reporters after another, referring to a program underwritten by Target stores. “Children under 16 are free, always. Students at most New York universities are free, always. Those from other universities, it’s $12. Seniors, it’s $16. I wonder about all those people who are protesting how much they spend when they go to the movies.”

But he had to appreciate how one picketer was making his case outside, with art -- a giant $20 bill.

For Terence Riley, MoMA’s chief curator for architecture and design, “of course it was the helicopter” that stood out when he visited the museum as an architecture student from Chicago. That city’s great art institute did not have anything that prepared him to see a 1945 Bell 47D-1 helicopter in a museum. Now he’s used his curatorial powers to suspend that copter in a placement he compares to the Louvre’s staircase-topping Greek statue. “I think of it as our ‘Winged Victory,’ ” he says.

Riley, who was the staff liaison to the architect selection process, recalled that a hot issue of our day -- “should museums be works of art or machines for showing art?” -- was raised in the 1930s, when MoMA was contemplating its first building.

It came to embrace the second camp, while the first gained its model uptown, in Frank Lloyd Wright’s swirling Guggenheim Museum. “I’ll be frank and say that for many, many years, I think, our collection was probably better than the architecture,” Riley said.

Now, he maintained, Taniguchi’s design had resolved the duality, showing “you don’t have to say, ‘OK, I like the art, so we won’t have architecture.’ They’re not mutually exclusive.”

But soon the debate was on anew, when a writer from Spain -- home of the newest triumph of museum-as-art, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao -- asked whether MoMA fell short on spectacle. That launched Riley into a critique of museums that “tend toward the spectacular and hyper-stimulation that takes away from the art.”

Across the vast sixth floor of the museum -- flexible space for special exhibitions -- MoMA’s man of the hour was holding court with another group and comparing his newest museum to a Japanese teacup.

“Very plain, very subdued,” architect Taniguchi said. “But when you pour the green tea, the contrast....”

Alone among the principals in creating the new MoMA, his first memory of the museum is not of a painting, photo or sculpture. “People more than art,” he said.

In 1962, while he was a graduate student at Harvard, he came down for a weekend and was transfixed by the scene in the garden. “So many people,” he recalled. “People are drinking Coca-Cola in the garden.”

Now the 67-year-old architect was being heralded for creating a museum friendly to art and people alike, and of achieving his goal of creating both a peaceful place and a sense of place -- using skylights and glass walls so “you see here and there your city, ‘Oh, I’m in New York.’ ”

But Taniguchi playfully went on, “No special form. Nothing sticking out.... I don’t know if this is good architecture, or people just being polite.”

There have been only occasional dissents from the positive reviews, however -- “a letdown,” the Boston Globe critic called it, “the old MoMA all over again” -- and museum officials do not think it will be politeness that draws the “three to five years of major crowds,” by Lauder’s prediction, “millions of people.”

That’s why they’re holding off on “blockbuster” shows and pondering such matters as: Do we serve coffee to all those people waiting out in the cold?

The honeymoon period also may buy them time to fix one feature not included on this week’s VIP tours. Perhaps only in this museum, the world’s shrine to the founding of Modern art, would it be appropriate to ask: Who designed the urinals?

One of the landmark moments in Modern art, of course, was when Marcel Duchamp in 1917 submitted such a bathroom fixture, signed, to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. So one might assume that some thought went into the choice of urinals here, which are unquestionably artistic -- they’re oval and dainty, and on the petite side.

“I didn’t pick that,” Taniguchi says, away from the crowds.

Who did then? “The executive architects,” a New York firm.

“I had a different idea,” he volunteers.

These are too small?

“Exactly. Toilets -- you have to be functional, you know.”