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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
Art in America, March, 2005 by Linda Nochlin, Franz Schulze, Kenneth E. Silver, Charles Stuckey, Brooks Adams, Joseph Jacobs, Nancy Princethal
Now, standing in the garden gives you a good look at some of the best new architecture in New York: a pair of great, soaring porches, six stories high, at the east and west ends of the garden (with idiosyncratically located rectangular cutouts in each, opening toward 54th Street). Another great porch--a horizontal one, two stories tall--runs along much of the south side of the garden. With four wonderfully thin, tall columns, and sheltering a large cafe, this element of the design is suggestive of some sleek exposition building of the late 1920s or early '30s, the kind that Johnson and Hitchcock might well have included in their seminal show. Taniguchi has managed to make a very up-to-date ensemble out of the museum's architectural history. In the process, he makes the museum's relationship to its own past both dynamic and elegiac.
That he has been less successful in his most dramatic gesture inside the museum--the central atrium that houses Barnett Newman's Broken Obeslisk--has been remarked upon by many others. Let me just say that it seems to be a very good idea gone wrong: bad proportions meet bad detailing. But the two floors dedicated to the historic part of the permanent collection, the fourth and fifth--the museum's glory--are handsome and well designed for their function, which is to allow vast numbers of people to stand in front of fairly small-scaled works of art. I was there on an extremely busy day, and the crowds were easily accommodated, despite many wheelchairs and strollers. I will admit that I didn't much care for the reinstallation on first viewing, but now I think that the problem was mostly my inability to adjust to seeing so many old friends--the Picassos, the Miros, the Boccionis--in unfamiliar settings. The galleries are bigger and taller than the old ones, and the historic part of the collection has wisely been returned to some semblance of its old chronological and stylistic organization. Much of the art looks splendid in the new installation, especially the Brancusis, the Pollocks, the Johnses and the Warhols.
There are problems, to be sure. The Matisse gallery, always one of the museum's highlights, has major traffic flowing right through the middle of it, so it seems less like the pilgrimage site it should be than an especially well-appointed vestibule. (On the other hand, I quickly adjusted to seeing Matisse's Dame installed in a vast stairwell nearby, a positioning that is already the subject of a good deal of art-world grousing; it seems to me that our movement, as we pass the work, provides an appropriate kinetic analogue to the movement of the terpsichorean quintet in the painting.)
A real opportunity has been missed, I think, with Marcel Duchamp. He's been relegated to a faraway corner gallery, near two unattractive exit doors, and mixed in with other Dada-related material. It's true that the museum does not possess works of the scale of his Large Glass or his Etant Donnes, both of which are in the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but it does own a Bicycle Wheel, the Three Standard Stoppages and Network of Stoppages, Fresh Widow and To Be Looked At (from the other side for half an hour), major works by any standards. It's now obvious that Duchamp has been the single most influential artist in the world for the last half-century (i.e., from Rauschenberg and Johns forward). One can hardly think of a contemporary art movement, or an artist, untouched by his example. MOMA's history of modern art would be more convincing if, at the next reconfiguring, he were squeezed in, say, right after Picasso and Matisse, where he belongs.
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