The new modern: itineraries: in which seven critics and art historians traverse the Museum of Modern Art's immense new complex, highlighting what they liked most and speculating on future directions for this perpetual work-in-progress

But the American work of this period is no less interesting than the European; it is just different, and that is what makes it exciting. Dove, O'Keeffe, Hartley, Demuth, Davis, Joseph Stella, and the great photographers Stieglitz, Strand and Walker Evans, to mention but a few, made a distinctly American art that deals with American issues. While Dove's quest to capture universal forces parallels Kandinsky's interests at a similarly early date, his paintings were made in an American context and are about the American experience, an experience that has roots in Emerson, Thoreau and the Hudson River School painters. The same search for the spiritual can be seen in O'Keeffe, whose powerful 1917 abstract watercolor, Evening Star, No. III, is displayed in the second-floor drawing galleries.

Also in the drawing galleries is Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's wonderful mixed-medium work, Dada Portrait of Berenice Abbott (ca. 1922-23), another reminder of the many stories not being told in the painting and sculpture galleries. There, the story of New York Dada is missing: all Dada is lumped together, making no distinctions between the politically acerbic Berlin Dada of Hausmann, Grosz and Hoch; the psychological, proto-Surrealist Cologne Dada of Ernst; and the witty, philosophical New York Dada of Duchamp, Picabia and Man Ray. While in New York during World War I, Duchamp was in many respects an American artist, at moments preoccupied with making a distinctly American art. This is well documented in regard to his famous urinal, Fountain (1917), a "monument" to the superiority of American plumbing as well as to American popular culture.

For that matter, it would be interesting to put the late work of Mondrian, who ended up as a New Yorker, in an American context. His 1944 Broadway Boogie-Woogie hangs with his earlier de Stijl works, as though it is just another Neoplastic painting. But this is an American picture, driven by the pulse of Manhattan and the beat of jazz. In many respects, it has more in common with Davis's colorful, syncopated landscapes and cityscapes than with de Stijl. Nowhere does MOMA acknowledge the preoccupation of American artists with capturing the unique vitality of the American city and the nation's technological and financial savvy, an obsession with no counterpart in Europe.

There is perhaps no greater challenge than trying to install tens of thousands of square feet of unfamiliar galleries on a tight deadline. Taking a well-traveled route is sometimes wise. But hopefully when the construction dust settles, the story of modern art will be retold, more along the lines of the innovative "Modern Starts" exhibitions, the series of mixed-medium permanent collection shows presented the year before the museum closed for construction. By whatever means, the story of modern art must eventually acknowledge that, already in the first half of the 20th century, great art was being made on both sides of the Atlantic.