Gemma Tipton inspects New York's Museum of Modern Art, remodelled for a cool $850 million.
Founded in 1929, New York's Museum of Modern Art was the first museum to be entirely dedicated to contemporary art in the world. Now, 75 years later, MoMA has just reopened following a two-year, $850 million renovation and extension project. The reopening was heralded with a series of parties and events that were as eagerly anticipated as was the return of the art inside the museum's new walls. The minimum gift to secure an invitation to the most elite of the events, the 75th anniversary dinner, was reported to be $2 million. Forty patrons had given $5 million, and three had donated more than $50 million.
The artists were invited to a separate event, and "Tuesday Night" seemed far cooler to get into; being sort of like an art safari, where you could wander and wonder in an "is that really Richard Serra, looking at a Richard Serra?" kind of a way.
It was fun also on Press Day to watch the TV crews lining up for shots of the masterpieces. "Here I am, in MoMA," was spoken over and over again into different cameras; a reporter from New York One repeatedly recording (and fluffing) her lines in front of Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, while the next groups in the queue grew steadily more frustrated, and her producer kept telling her, "No no, too serious."
And the superlatives flowed. "This building is an amazing contribution to New York City, to Art and to Glory," said Jerry Speyer (MoMA vice-chairman). "This is New York City's most spectacular building; and it has brought magic to 53rd Street," announced Robert Menschel, the museum's president, not to be outdone. Director Glenn Lowry called the new building "magisterial", while chairman of the board Ronald Lauder said the reopening would "help to redefine contemporary art in the 21st century". The word "perfection" was uttered so often, it seemed to hang in the air.
So, hype aside, were they right? Can the best part of a billion dollars buy perfection? What should a "perfect" museum of contemporary art look like, anyway?
Back in 1929, things were different. Gertrude Stein is quoted to have said, rather sniffily, that one could either be modern, or be a museum - but not both. Nonetheless, the fact that it had no real competition meant that MoMA's first director, Alfred Barr, had a fairly clear field to go around Europe buying up whatever he fancied. As a result, MoMA has such an incredible collection of Matisses, Monets, Picassos, Cézannes, Mondrians, Braques, Brancusis, Van Goghs, that a trip around its collections feels rather like a trip around the history of art since 1880; which is hardly surprising, since MoMA basically wrote the history of art since 1880
Initially, MoMA planned to sell work, to "deaccession" things after 50 years, but unsurprisingly that idea didn't last too long. Things get a little patchier post-War however, and you could be forgiven for thinking that there are now two stories of Western contemporary art - the American and the European. Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, for example, are not very central to the recent art history that MoMA tells.
The other "dual" story of contemporary art museums and collections is told in architecture. In 1997, Frank Gehry's titanium Guggenheim opened its doors in Bilbao and redefined what an art museum could look like. That same year, MoMA selected the architect for its own rebuilding project. In a limited competition that included invited submissions from Tate Modern architects Herzog and De Meuron, and the iconoclast Rem Koolhaas, MoMA opted for the understated, minimal modernism of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, who had never undertaken a project outside his home country before.
As MoMA's curator of architecture, Terence Riley, said when I asked him about the decision, "once the MoMA and the Guggenheim picked their sides of the argument, the argument stayed there " locked between the notion of museums as works of art in themselves, or as machines for showing art.
"Yoshio Taniguchi's building", said Riley, "demonstrates that there doesn't have to be only two poles to the debate, that you can have both."
The "artistry" in the architecture of the new MoMA actually feels more technical than creative. If the art-metaphor is to apply, it is the artistry of minimalism rather than of abstract expressionism. MoMA is now undoubtedly beautiful, but beautiful in a remorselessly efficient sort of a way that can also feel rather cold.
Taniguchi has made some extremely elegantly-proportioned white spaces for showing art. The walls are floated from their support structures, stopping short of the white oak and terrazzo floors, with the result that the sense of heaviness you get in Tate Modern's galleries is delicately absent. "Give me the money, and I will build you a museum," said Taniguchi. "Give me enough money and I will make the architecture disappear."
There are some flourishes where the architect has indulged his creativity, making moments of excitement in the otherwise restrained building. The sweep of a massive window, dropping away to the street four floors below, induces a sudden sense of vertigo. The views from different levels of the atrium balconies extend glimpses of galleries to visit, to treasures beyond.
The museum now stretches along the larger part of 53rd Street, and all the way back to 54th, and the foyer is also an access route from one street to the other. This is a trick that Tate Modern also adopted, using tallies of people just passing through the space to boost their visitor numbers, although at MoMA you won't be able to get upstairs to actually see the art unless you pay the new, hefty (and extremely contentious to New Yorkers) $20 admission fee.
Inside, the green slate floor and white walls have a serenity that will probably be swamped when full of visitors, but which are nonetheless stunning. A short flight of steps leads to a 110-feet-high atrium with a glass wall giving onto the sculpture garden. The entire building is structured around a series of views, either onto the garden, onto 53rd Street, or down into the atrium, meaning that the massive size of the building (it is 630,000 square feet, while the Guggenheim Bilbao is closer to the 250,000 mark) is still negotiable, and you never feel that alienating sense of being trapped in a maze, which some of the world's larger art museums can create.
Nevertheless, size is a problem. On the sixth floor, the temporary exhibition galleries are just too huge, dwarfing works such as Ellsworth Kelly's Sculpture for a Large Wall, and making you wonder how big some artists will have to start working to get the sense of scale and immensity they are seeking with their work in today's behemoth galleries. A similar problem occurs in the second-floor lobby, where Monet's Water Lilies looks far less significant floating in the expanse of white space than it did in its own chapel-like contemplative chamber in the old MoMA.
I asked John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture, if he planned to move the painting, given that it didn't seem to "work" in its new position. "It is part of the job of curators to make newer works seem familiar," he said, "and to help older works seem new again. Left to themselves, they can start to look like reproductions. Water Lilies has been seen on everything from tea towels to postcards, and it has been hung there [in the lobby space] to help it to look as strange now as it did when it was first painted."
This demonstration of how much placement affects the way we see a work of art is also a powerful argument against the Guggenheim, museum-as-work-of-art-in-itself, style of building. As Terence Riley puts it, "in a museum like Bilbao, when the architecture breaks all the rules, what rules are left for the art to break?"
All art museums give a sense of location and identity to the work they show. At Bilbao we see art as entertaining spectacle and extravaganza; at the MoMA it is art as part of the establishment, the blue-chip investment, the institution. In fact, so much about the new MoMA underlines again and again how much of the art world at this level is predicated on money.
From the wealthy collectors and patrons, to the astronomical prices paid for some artists' works (I spent a while in front of recent acquisition, Jasper Johns' Bushbaby, trying to equate what I was seeing with its $3 million valuation), the cash-for-cultural-credibility exchange seems to be etched on every pristine surface of the new museum. It is also fascinating, in an anthropological sort of a way, to watch a billionaire up close, wondering if the relationship of someone to a work of art that they could actually afford to buy, and may have even donated, is somehow different.
In the two years that it was closed, New York missed MoMA, and when the museum finally opened to the public, people queued for hours to see its treasures again. The general consensus was that the building was a complete success; but many people questioned the way the curators have laid out the collections, the works they have chosen to show, and the ones that have been left out.
In the old MoMA, contemporary art was shown like "pearls on a string", in a linear progression through art history, implying that there was a clear development from one movement to the next. In the new spaces, the visitor has more choices, they can see how art movements have cross-fertilised each other, spawned different styles, various ways of making.
Curator John Elderfield's ideal of challenging the familiarity of well-known works has led to several criticisms of the placements of works such as Matisse's Red Studio, and Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, as well as the Monet Water Lilies, but it will take the MoMA team a while to get to know their new building, to experience how it works in practice. Taniguchi himself said, before it opened, that there was no way to really judge it until it was filled with people and art.
There were many ways in which I expected the new MoMA to answer questions about the best way to show and see contemporary art, and there are many ways in which these questions remain unanswered. Always a fan of plain white cubes as ideal spaces for looking at art, I found MoMA to be too austere, too self-consciously perfect, almost over-produced.
On balance, I think that the building represents the perfect example of a 20th-century museum, rather than one that will point the way to the future for the 21st. It is more like a full stop to a story practically played out, than a launch pad for the next new thing. On the other hand, artists have always adopted strategies to say what they want to say within the museum, subverting it, qualifying it. Perhaps a museum which owns so much of everything, which catalogues so definitively what contemporary art is (and isn't), will be harder to subvert, but it will happen. I have every faith in that, even in MoMA.
The Museum Of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, admission, €20