George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "MoMA’s Expansion and Director Draw Critics" @nytimes by Randy Kennedy
Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, overlooking the sculpture garden. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times
Glenn D. Lowry, who will soon begin his 20th year running the Museum of Modern Art, has a longstanding practice of taking time each week to visit artists’ studios. Which is why he could be found one recent morning along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, watching the glass-blowing sculptor Josiah McElheny and assistants fashion a vessel from molten lumps, a process almost Elizabethan in its rituals.
“It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s balletic, the way they move and work together.”
During his ambitious tenure at the museum’s helm, Mr. Lowry has choreographed a highly complex ballet of his own, one that has not always gone as smoothly. The most visible, and often most divisive, part of this dance has involved real estate, the museum’s frequent moves to carve space for itself from the dense heart of Midtown.
And its latest expansion, which begins Tuesday with the first stage of the controversial demolition of its architecturally distinctive neighbor, the former American Folk Art Museum, has brought to a boil many long-simmering complaints from art critics, artists, architects and patrons not only about the museum’s overall direction but also about its director.
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As the number of visitors has more than doubled during Mr. Lowry’s tenure — to almost three million annually — there have been complaints from veteran patrons that the museum has grown too fast and lost much of its soul in courting the crowd.
Mr. Lowry is himself sometimes personally blamed for the museum’s image as a place that has become cold and corporate, that exercises its power too blithely and that is often out of touch with the sensibilities of contemporary artists. And within the museum, his forceful reshaping of a once-balkanized museum known for its powerful chief curators has resulted in complaints that the director has consolidated too much power around himself, sometimes making it difficult for curators to organize shows they think are important.
Over several hours of interviews recently, Mr. Lowry, 59, by turns resolute, reflective and cautiously defensive, sought to play down the long-term impact of the folk art building demolition on both the museum and himself. “Obviously I’m deeply empathetic to the feelings that that has elicited from a community we really care about,” he said. “On the other hand, sometimes you have to make really tough decisions if you think they’re right.” The decision has occasioned some “dark nights of the soul,” he said, but added: “If one’s tenure boils down to a construction program then something fundamental has been missed. And what I think is essential is the collection, the programs and the people.”
Many critics warn that MoMA’s second expansion in a decade — which will create an “art bay” open to West 53rd Street where “spontaneous events” could be accommodated; free admission for the entire first floor; and a new combination gallery-and-performance space — will move the museum only further in a crowd-pleasing direction, eroding the seriousness and critical distance from popular culture that built its reputation.
While the museum’s most dominant board members remain behind Mr. Lowry, other patrons strike a note of caution about its direction, worrying about MoMA’s becoming a place geared more for social interaction than thoughtful contemplation. “There are a number of us on the board who don’t want to see the museum become a mere entertainment center,” said Agnes Gund, who joined the board in 1976 and served as its president from 1991 until 2002.
Recent criticism of the museum has been remarkable for the depth of its anger. Jerry Saltz, in New York magazine, wrote that the expansion plan “irretrievably dooms MoMA to being a business-driven carnival.”
But Mr. Lowry said that for the museum to embrace art that is increasingly interactive and pop-culture infused, it had to risk such opposition. Under his leadership, he said, the museum has not only dived more energetically into contemporary art but has also broadened its overall focus to include more Latin American and non-Western art and more work by women (critics say it still has a long ways to go). It has also been more welcoming to performance-based art, though some of its forays — like the actress Tilda Swinton lying inside a big glass box — have been ridiculed as pandering or ham-handed.
“If we were being criticized for being timid, that would upset me,” Mr. Lowry said. “But if we’re being criticized because we’ve engaged spectacle or we engage popular culture in interesting ways,” then it does not worry him deeply.
When he was chosen to become the museum’s sixth director in 1995, Mr. Lowry was an unusual candidate, a Harvard-trained scholar of Islam lacking broad experience in modern or contemporary art. In five years running the Art Gallery of Ontario, he oversaw a major expansion but also the layoffs of half the museum’s staff amid steep government funding cuts.
During his time in New York, he has overseen the most fundamental transformation of the Museum of Modern Art in its history. It has almost doubled in size while increasing exhibition space, to 125,000 square feet from 85,000. Its endowment has almost quadrupled, to nearly a billion dollars. Extensive collections — in Conceptualism, Modernist photography and work from the Fluxus movement — have been acquired, as well as major pieces by artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra.
Over his tenure, the full admission price has also more than tripled, to $25 from $8, and Mr. Lowry has become one of the nation’s highest-paid museum chiefs. He earned $1.8 million a year in salary and other benefits as of the most recent disclosures and lives rent-free in a museum-owned apartment with his wife, Susan, a landscape architect. (The couple have three grown children.)
Peers at other museums have described Mr. Lowry’s early years in the job as marked by sharp competitiveness and a thin-skinned sensitivity toward criticism. Recently, they say, he has grown more collegial and more sure-footed in the museum’s artistic terrain. But they add that they sense a continuing frustration in him at not being viewed the way, for example, Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate art museums, is seen in London, as a visionary curatorial molder of an institution.
Robert Storr, a former senior paintings and sculpture curator at the museum and a vocal critic of Mr. Lowry’s, contends that he has “gutted the museum in terms of its curatorial traditions and made it a very unpleasant place to work,” in part because he “simply does not understand modern and contemporary art and is rivalrous with the people who do.”
“I love the museum, and I don’t want to be seen as a MoMA basher. I am not,” said Mr. Storr, who left the museum in 2002 after 12 years and has been dean of the Yale University School of Art since 2006. “But I fear some of the damage done is nearly irreversible.”
Mr. Lowry evinces little of the frustration described by his critics. And he denies he has sought to consolidate directorial power for his own sake but only to push curators to operate more collaboratively, to make the museum more nimble.
“I hope that I’m the kind of person who leads from behind, not in front,” he said recently in his office, where a Donald Judd sculpture hangs behind his desk. He declined to address Mr. Storr’s criticisms specifically. “The fact that he’s an ardent critic of the institution is something that we all have to live with,” he said, “but it doesn’t take away from his talent.”
But Mr. Lowry said he has been deeply concerned with a perception of the museum and of himself as corporate.
“It leaves me somewhat puzzled,” he said, protesting that he does not come from a business background. But, he added, “It’s a moniker that has stuck, so it clearly has some traction.” His own passions, he said, continue to be what they have been since the day he rejected a pre-med education and dived into art as a scholar and later a curator at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries: artists, art history and research.
Mr. Lowry’s tenure was praised by Marie-Josée Kravis, the museum’s board president; Sharon Percy Rockefeller, a trustee whose family was instrumental in the museum’s founding; and Jerry I. Speyer, the board chairman and real-estate magnate. “I think it would be a mistake for him to be influenced by a handful of people who have personal grudges,” Mr. Speyer said.
He added, “The best way to frame it is that I think Glenn could run any American company he chose to run, any foundation he chose to run, any university he chose to run.”
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But lavish as such praise is, it probably does not describe Mr. Lowry fully as he would like to be described. “Glenn, from the beginning, didn’t want to be seen as a manager,” Ms. Gund said. “I do think it has had some effect in the past on who was there and who decided to leave. But that’s in the past, and it should probably be left in the past.” She added