MODERN MASTERY
As Melbourne’s NGV prepares to showcase a selection of MoMA New York’s masterpieces celebrating 130 years of modern art, Sophie Tedmanson discovers the museum’s riches.
On a crisp spring morning New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a bustling hive of art appreciation and activity. In a gallery on the fifth floor, tourists in a cluster are jostling for position in front of Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night; another group stares quizzically at Picasso’s controversial Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; and others stand awestruck by the beauty of movement in Matisse’s magnificent Dance (I). Edward Hopper’s New York Movie catches my eye on a wall near a lift, and one floor down, a group of schoolchildren sits quietly drawing in front of Mario Merz’s Fall of the House of Usher, with its neon unicorn horn. In a corner gallery, an elderly woman sits alone contemplating Agnes Martin’s minimalist six-panel With My Back to the World, a calm space amid the bustle of New York’s most famous contemporary art museum. Outside unseasonal snowflakes fall silently past the window; the serene scene is mesmerising.
In an adjacent room my breath is taken away by Cy Twombly’s Four Seasons, a quartet of giant cream panels of dripping paint, moods and scrawls evoking the seasons; I keep being drawn back to Primavera, the pink and red florals summoning spring. Around another corner reveals more American greats: Warhol, Ruscha, Lichtenstein, a gallery full of Jackson Pollocks (including Number 1A 1948, which features the artist’s famous handprints autograph); and, of course, Jasper Johns’s American Flag. Downstairs in the cafe, a group of Millennial girls are debating whose is the most Instagram-worthy selfie with Isa Genzken’s Rose II, the giant stainless-steel rose stem that stands proud outside in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden, juxtaposing the modernity of the building’s internal façade.
This is modern art at its finest: captivating, revelatory, emotional and engaging.
MoMA is the contemporary-art centrepiece of New York. It’s one of the most significant museums in the world and is run by one of the most influential directors of modern art, Glenn Lowry, who presides over the museum upstairs in the MoMA offices. He is tall, with a firm handshake, determined stare and personable yet forthright manner, and is dressed in the arty uniform of a black turtleneck and black pants. His office is oddly bare – the bookshelves above the couch are empty, but there are several piles of books stacked neatly on the floor. I ponder whether this is purposefully