George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "MoMA: A Museum That Has Lost Its Way" @wsj by Eric Gibson
Not 10 years after its most recent, top-down renovation and expansion, the Museum of Modern Art is building again. Last week, director Glenn D. Lowry announced the broad outlines of plans for yet another enlargement on its western end. This one will embrace three floors of a residential tower being designed by Jean Nouvel and the site of the former American Folk Art Museum, a 2001 Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building that will be demolished. Clearly MoMA is a museum in a hurry. But to go where?
When the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed building opened in 2004, it looked as if Mr. Lowry's model for the new MoMA had been London's Tate Gallery. Prior to the arrival of new directors, Nicholas Serota at the Tate in 1988 and Mr. Lowry at MoMA in 1995, the two museums shared many traits. Both had storied collections: MoMA's was classic modernism—roughly from the late 1880s through the 1940s—while the Tate's was British art from 1600 to the present. Though both mounted exhibitions of contemporary art, they were prevented from engaging with the present in anything close to a full-bore fashion by institutional inertia and limitations of space.
Pablo Picasso's 'Guitar' (1914). Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In 2000 Mr. Serota opened Tate Modern, a decommisioned power station on the Thames that had been refurbished as a museum of international modern art and a kunsthalle, its cavernous spaces dedicated to exhibitions of the latest installation art and similar experimental work. The same year the original 1897 museum was rechristened "Tate Britain" and dedicated to British art, historic and contemporary.
The MoMA unveiled in 2004 was likewise a hybrid institution. In addition to galleries for temporary exhibitions and the permanent collection, the new facility featured a 110-foot-tall atrium gallery, a media gallery and a block-wide, high-ceilinged, column-free space with reinforced floors, all new to MoMA and designed for contemporary art. Mr. Lowry is thinking along the same lines this time. One of the few details in his announcement was "a new flexible, double-height glass-walled gallery for contemporary art and performance."
Mr. Lowry deserves credit for making MoMA part of the contemporary-art conversation. The public now expects museums to show new art, and without accomodating its audience MoMA risked slowly drifting into irrelevance. If much of its contemporary fare comes across as slight or superficial, more stunts than anything else—notably Marina Abramović's 2010 performance in which museum visitors were invited to sit and stare into her eyes for as long as they could stand it while she remained immobile—well, such are the times we live in.
But there's one big difference between the Tate and MoMA: Mr. Serota's commitment to the new has not come at the expense of the old. While Tate Modern has been expanding, he has overseen a complete reinstallation of Tate Britain's permanent collection, placing some 500 works on view to reveal the full sweep of British art. It opened to wide acclaim last year.
By contrast, MoMA under Mr. Lowry has long seemed to have an ambivalent, even hostile relationship to its own past. The first indication came with "MoMA2000," a millennium-timed sequence of collection reinstallations that replaced its traditional chronological organization with one that mixed artists, periods and styles. In so doing it abandoned its longstanding view of the history of modern art as a steady evolution driven by a succession of innovators, a view famously codified by founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. in the "family tree" of modern art he published in the 1930s. Instead, we got a level playing field where all artists were equally accomplished and notable mainly for their "affinities." Thus Paul Cézanne's "Bather" (c.1885) was juxtaposed with a 1993 photograph of a boy in a bathing suit by contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra—the man famously described by Picasso as "the father of us all" simply one artist among many working with the figure.
Then, when the Taniguchi building opened four years later, I and some others noticed that despite the dramatic increase in total exhibition space—to 125,000 square feet from 85,000—the museum seemed to have fewer works of classic modernism on view than before the expansion. My hunch received a confirmation of sorts when I called the press office and was rebuffed in my request for those before-and-after numbers. We prefer to talk about square feet, I was told. Nothing has changed since to dispel that initial impression.
Finally, there is what can only be described as MoMA's rapacious campaign of deaccessioning. In a May 2004 article, cultural journalist and blogger Lee Rosenbaum reported in the Journal that MoMA had sold nine paintings from the permanent collection at that year's spring auctions for a total of $25.65 million. But this was, she wrote, "just the tip of the iceberg."
"In the past five years MoMA has sold 12 other works from its painting and sculpture collection and hundreds more from other departments," she continued. "What makes MoMA's sales unusual is the quality and financial value of its offerings, which include major works by two of modernism's defining masters, Picasso and Braque."
One of the biggest of these was the 2003 sale of Picasso's "Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro" (1909), a proto-Cubist landscape from one of the most important phases of the artist's career. In pre-Taniguchi days it could often be seen hanging with "The Reservoir, Horta," a closely related work painted during the same "campaign." When asked about this sale by Ms. Rosenbaum, "Mr. Lowry observed that there would be 'nothing wrong' with having both pictures, 'if we were a Picasso museum.'"
This was a foolish thing to say because, as Mr. Lowry well knows, MoMA is a Picasso museum—of sorts. Until Paris's Museé Picasso opened in October 1985 MoMA's collection was the biggest and most comprehensive anywhere, and a key feature of its identity. In the catalog preface of his 1972 exhibition "Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art," then-chief curator William Rubin proudly announced that the group of 85 paintings and sculptures on view "constitutes by far the most complete and important public collection of Picasso's art, boasts a number of his unique masterpieces, and offers a virtually step-by-step revelation of the development of his Cubism." It was in recognition of the museum's longstanding commitment to his work that in 1971 Picasso donated his sheet metal "Guitar" (1914), arguably the most important work of 20th-century sculpture.
Still, Mr. Lowry's comment spoke volumes about his vision of the museum. Small wonder that cosmetics heir Leonard A. Lauder last year decided to give his unparalleled collection of 78 Cubist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than MoMA.
For all its success—expansions existing and planned, huge crowds, lots of buzz—MoMA today is an institution that has lost its way. Disconnected from its past, impatient with the present and tearing into the future under the vague banner of "The New," it has ceased to be the sui generis institution it had been throughout much of its history. Instead it is virtually indistinguishable from every other museum of modern and contemporary art around the world.
The proposed expansion offers the museum a chance to reanchor itself. The new megaMoMA will add 40,000 square feet of gallery space to what it has now. If it chooses to, it will be able to mount the broadest, deepest and in every way most comprehensive installation of classic modernism in its history. The reception of its recent exhibition "Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925" suggests there's as large a constituency for that as for the museum's contemporary programming. It drew nearly one million visitors during its four month run.
How does MoMA now see the history of modern art? How does it propose to make sense of all that has happened since the 1880s? Above all, when it comes to classic modernism, does it think that the past is just another country, or of continued relevance to the art life of our time?
The answers to these questions will determine MoMA's identity for a long time to come, and with it the way Mr. Lowry's tenure is remembered.
Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts editor.
Write to Eric Gibson at eric.gibson@wsj.com
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