Art: Revelation on 53rd Street

The Museum of Modern Art reopens after a $55 million facelift

By last Friday, the “month of the red eyes” was drawing to its long-prayed-for close on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street. The sculpture garden was a wilderness. White birches, still in transplantation shock, were leafing out but not in time; stacks of unset paving stones lay everywhere, amid mounds of builders’ sand and the plastic-swaddled silhouettes of old friends: Rodin’s Balzac, the art nouveau subway entrance, a giant Claes Oldenburg mouse. All through April the museum’s governing triumvirate, consisting of its director, Richard Oldenburg, its chairman, William S. Paley of CBS, and its president, Blanchette Rockefeller, had been escorting pods and squads of journalists up and down the cinder blocks, ducking the clusters of electrical cable and skipping over the air hoses, as though the chaos and lateness did not exist or were, in themselves, some kind of artwork. But by the end of the week, the Museum of Modern Art, a refurbished dame, was more or less pulled together: slip awry, flushed under the powder, panting somewhat, but ready for the preopening openings, the dinners, the disputes and the final arrival of the general public on May 17.

There is no fonder acronym in art than MOMA, as this 55-year-old institution has long been known. One cannot imagine New York City, or modernism itself, without it. More than any other museum in the world, MOMA is identified with its subject and defines its history. It was not the intention of Alfred Barr (1902-1981), the first director and ideological shaper of the museum, to create a Louvre for something that seemed, in 1929, as vulnerable and problematic as modern art. Nevertheless, that was what happened. One cannot open a periodical without being told, yet again, that modernism is our institutional culture—a point both repetitive and inescapably true. Its official status was mostly confirmed, over the past half-century, by the steady, scholarly proselytizing of MOMA.

Before Barr, the idea of dedicating a whole museum to modernism as a culture, embracing design, photography, architecture and film, as well as painting and sculpture, had not emerged. At its origins, MOMA was intended as a constantly unfolding encyclopedia of the new. No institution can remain on that kind of cutting edge forever, and by the 1970s MOMA was muffled in its own success. All its departments had well-funded rivals in museums across the country. By 1980 modern art was an industry, involving hundreds of thousands of people. In the face of such expansion, MOMA became more preoccupied with being the guardian of a closing epoch. At the same time, the mass audience for modern art that it had helped create was causing problems that amounted, at times, to chaos.

So MOMA had to expand. It also had to find a different financial base. Both these matters, when embodied in a plan that was made public in 1976, caused some livery controversy. To get more money, the museum came up with the idea of a 44-story tower of luxury apartments, an unprecedented step for a tax-exempt institution that, in the view of Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable, proved “the most artful real estate deal ever devised.” Reckoning in the six floors that constitute the base of the tower but belong to the museum, the exhibition space has now more than doubled, from 40,500 sq. ft. in the old building to 87,500 sq. ft. in the new. Circulation, conservation, storage, office space: all needed improvement and most have got it, at a total project cost of about $55 million. The appointed architect was Cesar Pelli, dean of the School of Architecture at Yale. Construction began in 1980.

Radical though the changes have been, the word hardly applies to Pelli’s design. When the original museum structure, by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone, opened in 1939, the architectural tone of 53rd Street—and of midtown Manhattan in general—was set by brownstones, mansions and beaux-arts commercial buildings. It was a world of rich, plum-pudding surfaces. When MOMA raised its polemic International Style façade of glass and polished marble, with those futuristic Swiss-cheese holes in the roof canopy, it looked apparitional. But now the context has shifted again. Thanks to the competitive urges of developers, the very idea of the glass tower has acquired a bluster it never had before; its epitome is the kind of boy-pharaoh glitziness favored by Donald Trump. One of the problems for MOMA, therefore, was how to preserve the lineaments of its original self—the Goodwin-Stone façade—while, on the one hand, maintaining a decent relationship with the surviving brownstone mix of 53rd Street and, on the other, giving the tower a properly snooty aesthetic distance from its more declarative midtown neighbors.

For this difficult task, Pelli proved an excellent choice. His signature material is glass, and he is one of the very few architects who can still squeeze some poetic drops from the overworked convention of the curtain wall. Basically, he does this by playing down the frame of mullions and spandrels and emphasizing the wall’s nature as a pictorial surface, a sheet rilled with color patches and reflections. MOMA’S street façades, sheathed in blue-gray and white glass, extend and echo the window bands of the 1939 facade on the lower floors; and when the tower takes off into the sky, it does so with a degree of sober deliberation—story by story, as it were, rather than in one big rush. Dividends have been wrung from Pelli’s calm style. The new MOMA does not creak with intrusive imagery. It does not look like an airport, a temple, a constructivist factory, a tomb or a fortress, to cite the five most popular types of recent museum. And it is blissfully free of the kind of capricious, name-dropping revivalism, the coy and schematic quotes, that some critics number among the joys of postmodernism.

The only ostensible reference to another building in Pelli’s design is perhaps the glass-sheathed escalator bank grafted onto the museum’s north wall, overlooking the sculpture garden, which distantly recalls the glass escalator tube on the face of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. But whereas the Pompidou’s tube is a mere people mover, MOMA’s moving staircases work in a celebratory space, full of light and air. The view through the glass as one mounts and descends can only sharpen the pleasurable contrast between nature and culture that was the point of Philip Johnson’s original garden design. The escalator bank is Pelli’s mam flourish. The galleries themselves are neutral, not Architecture with an A.

One of the strengths of the old MOMA was its feeling of intimacy. One could just stroll in off the street and look at some great art in a small room. There was none of the architectural muscle flexing that is conventionally meant to prepare its audience for a Major Experience. MOMA’s staff, especially its director of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, put a very high priority on preserving this feeling in the new structure. It was, Rubin argues, a key element in the intentions of modernism itself. Relatively few “classical” modernist paintings—Picasso’s Guernica being an obvious exception—were carried out with the sense of public declamation that suffuses the great machines of an earlier age. The natural direction of modern art was inward. Barr had no doubt about that, and his belief in the necessity of intimate rather than ceremonial encounter has been cleanly transmitted from the old to the new museum.

The essence of MOMA is, of course, its permanent collection of painting and sculpture, which is the greatest of its kind in the world. The old building could show about 15% of it, or 600 works. Now Rubin puts its capacity at “upward of 800.” More important than the simple gain in space, however, is the gain in historical clarity achieved through the rehanging.

Rubin is one of the world’s most voluminously informed and tough-minded art historians. His approach to his specialty, the art of the 20th century, has an intimidating, Bismarck-like tread that induces a kind of resentful faintness in some of his colleagues. But nobody could accuse him of not thinking long and hard about whatever he scrutinizes, and he has been responsible for some of MOMA’s curatorial masterpieces, including the 1980 Picasso retrospective and the 1977 show of late Cézanne. To rehang a collection like MOMA’S—to make new neighbors and inflect old contexts—entails very great responsibilities, because so many of the paintings and sculptures are the classics, the test pieces and the beloved chestnuts of modernism.

This collection is the protein of our cultural imagination, so familiar that some of its contents (Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Girl Before a Mirror and Three Musicians, Matisse’s Red Studio—the list goes on and on) have acquired the amphibious durability of things that constantly renew themselves as masterpieces while expanding in mass consciousness as cliche. Like the Louvre, MOMA presents itself as a circular definition: it owns key works, and one of the reasons why they are considered key works is that it owns them. One does not shake this bucket lightly, but the marvelous thing about Rubin’s rehanging is the confidence and discretion with which he has embedded fresh lines of thought between familiar images.

One among dozens of examples is his treatment of cubism. Every art student “knows” that cubism began with Picasso’s convulsive image of 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. But did it? And if it did, what connects the knitted, thoughtful, intricate surfaces of analytic cubism to the Dionysiac qualities of Les Demoiselles? If not, what did Picasso’s coercive gesture really influence? Rubin’s hanging of the cubist gallery suggests a direct line between the early work of Francis Picabia and Les Demoiselles, and argues that the violence of Picasso’s isolated painting was one of the ingredients that got metabolized through Picabia, into Dadaism.

The new hanging not only sets up fresh dialogues between onepainting and another but also bathes even the most familiar images in a new clarity. MOMA’s Mondrians have never looked fresher or more imbued with light. Its matchless Matisses now constitute one of the great museum rooms of the Western world, a chapel of intense, astringent sensation, wrought to the highest pitch of decorative intelligence. After such delectations it is a fairly sharp descent to the ground floor, where a huge survey show of 165 contemporary artists has been organized by the senior curator of painting and sculpture, Kynaston McShine. However uneven in quality, this survey at least signals MOMA’s renewed intentions to keep track of current painting and sculpture.

The revelations of the new arrangements are not confined to painting and sculpture. The Department of Architecture and Design, run by Arthur Drexler, has been rehoused in a sequence of displays that precisely sum up MOMA’s commitment to the aesthetic object, to the design of the commonplace. From the Bell helicopter, green as a grasshopper, that dangles above the escalators to a set of ice-hockey masks glaring like Peruvian skulls from a wall, the material is superbly instructive. At the same time, the galleries offer a concise history of design from the roots of art nouveau to the offshoots of the early computer age, along with drawings by master architects and an excellent group of models of classic buildings of the 20th century. The star of these is a fanatically precise miniature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water house, 1936, which must have cost nearly as much to make (though in devalued dollars) as the original building.

Perhaps there are no second acts in American lives. But there are in American museums, and this one promises to be a triumphant success.

—Robert Hughes