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

Among the most fetching offerings are three new restaurants, all designed by Bentel & Bentel of Locust Valley, N.Y., each with a view of the sculpture garden. The most elegant is The Modern, located on ground level where the Taniguchi structure intersects with the museum's 1939 International Style building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, and the 1964 Philip Johnson addition. The principal features of The Modern are a luminescent glass wall leading into the restaurant proper, where visitors find a marble bar with a lighted glass base and, behind it, a glass wine wall that takes full visual advantage of the 2,200 bottles it displays. At the second level, Cafe 2 projects a mood more nearly vernacular, but it is especially noteworthy for the overhead lighting and the clean design of its tables and chairs. The utilitarian-looking Terrace 5 on the top floor serves as a chocolate and dessert cafe that also offers sandwiches, cocktails and wine.

In sum, visitors to this exceptional complex of spaces, representing the collective achievement of Yoshio Taniguchi and his colleagues, must recall one of the impulses central to the founding of the Museum of Modern Art three quarters of a century ago: all the visual arts--painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, design, photography, film and architecture--are of equal importance in this remarkable institution, entrusted as it is with the sustenance of the best of contemporary culture.--Franz Schulze

Linda Nochlin is the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

Franz Schulze is a professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois.

Kenneth E. Silver is a professor o f fine arts at New York University.

Charles Stuckey teaches art history and museum studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Brooks Adams is a writer living in Paris.

Joseph Jacobs is currently writing the modern section for the 7th edition of H. W. Janson's History of Art.

Nancy Princenthal is a critic based in New York.

Postscript

s

The temporary exhibition galleries on the sixth foot were put to full use for the first time in early February for "Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection" [to Apr. 25]. MOMA's first large-scale show in its new premises, the exhibition celebrates an extensive corporate gift to the museum. Among the 74 works on view, 44 have long been promised to MOMA. Ownership of some of them was transferred to the museum as early as 1992; others are designated "partial promised gifts, 2002"; and 30 others remain with UBS.

The exhibition is dominated by large-scale paintings, though works on paper, photographs and a couple of sculptures provide an enlivening mix of mediums of the kind called for by several of our contributors to this section. Spanning about 40 years, the collection is particularly strong in works from the '70s and '80s. A large 1975 Philip Guston confronts the arriving visitor; the hanging is not chronological, but instead juxtaposes works in a lively fashion to emphasize formal, thematic or historical connections. Small, photo-derived grisaille paintings by Artschwager and Richter from the early '60s have a transfixing quality that belies their modest scale. A powerful Clemente canvas from 1987 is traversed by a slashing diagonal pattern of repeated overhead views of a luxury liner with four smokestacks that resembles the Titanic. Lush and/or looming abstractions by Elizabeth Murray, Brice Marden, Terry Winters and Richard Serra emphasize the collection's penchant for strong visuality. Outstanding is a six-part suite of tall, narrow paintings of dancers, one figure to each panel, by Susan Rothenberg, commissioned in 1988 for the PaineWebber dining room; 10 feet high, the canvases march across a single wall in the new galleries' 18-foot-high spaces, creating an almost filmic (or Futurist) sense of motion. Taken as a whole, the UBS display complements the inaugural contemporary selection on the second floor, which has, in general, a less sensual and more conceptual bent.