MAJOR WORKS

Iconic artworks have been let loose on the Australian public from New York’s most famous museum and the result is spellbinding

New York’s most famous gallery brings a blockbuster of an exhibition to Australia, with paintings by Kahlo, van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso and Warhol

It must take a lot to dazzle the director of New York’s famed Museum of Modern Art, but Glenn Lowry seems blown away with an Australian gallery’s treatment of some of its most precious works. In Melbourne to help launch MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Mod

ern and Contemporary Art on June 8, Lowry was full of praise for the dynamic curation of works. He also admitted to experiencing moments of shock on a walk-through with National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood the day before .

“We had it to ourselves,” Lowry told press assembled before the show’s opening. “I would turn a corner and see Dali’s The persistence of memory or the extraordinary Frida Kahlo [ Self

Portrait with Cropped Hair] and I would think, ‘Why did we lend that? What were we thinking?’

This is art sharing at the highest level. The extraordinary offering to Australian audiences is happening partly because of MoMA’s limited space for its 200,000 strong collection as it undergoes a major extension.

Whatever the reason, Ellwood is thrilled. He says he was already “the happiest director in Australia” after the Victorian Government committed $200 million to expand Melbourne’s art precinct with a stand-alone NGV Contemporary gallery and a centre for performing arts. “To have MoMA and this expansion [news] here in the same week takes it to Nirvana,” he says. MoMA and the NGV attract three million visitors each a year.

MoMA at NGV, which runs until October, is expected to entice an even bigger audience than the NGV’s best-selling van Gogh, Degas and Triennial blockbusters.

The names do not come any bigger nor reputations more colossal than those occupying the walls, floor and airspace across the ground floor of the NGV today. The show is the biggest in the NGV’s 15-show Winter Masterpieces series and includes major works from van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Dali, Kahlo, Picasso, Duchamp, Pollock and Warhol. There are more than 200 works spanning about 130 years of incredible artistic fertility.

Works from the major art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries are drawn from MoMA’s six curatorial departments: painting, sculpture, photography, architecture and design, drawing and prints, film and media and performance. The exhibition unfolds across eight thematic sections, which are also loosely chronological.

This approach marks a thrilling change from displaying by type for Lowry, and one he describes as helping to stretch the imagination of the world-renowned American art institution.

“We have traditionally, since the 1970s, displayed our collection in a cellular fashion,” Lowry says. “We collect by department and we display by department and what that meant was that it fractured these relationships [between mediums]. Here at the NGV the vision we hope to realise is on display.

“There are moments when you walk into a room and you will see extraordinary design, furniture, drawings and paintings, and then you will move to another space and see an incredibly intense focus on contemporary design and then go into another space and see photography with film and painting. That intermixing, that ability to zero in on one medium and locate it in the rich fabric of a larger conversation in different media, is what we are trying to realise.”

The show opens with the section Arcadia and Metropolis, examining how artists in the late 19th century responded to urbanisation. “It is quite an unbelievable start,” says Ellwood, standing with Lowry before an awesome foursome of master- pieces by Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh and Seurat.

“When MoMA opened its doors in 1929, it opened with an exhibition of these four artists. The first director Albert Barr considered them the foundational artists of what he called contemporary arts. We thought it was essential for this exhibition to lay out that DNA of the museum.”

The second space, The Machinery of the Modern World, covers the rise of avant-garde movements including Cubism, Futurism and Dadaism and references MoMA’s landmark 1934

Machine Art exhibition. “It was one of the most radical exhibitions you can imagine,” says Lowry. “And one of the stars of that exhibition is here, Sven Wingquist’s [ Self-Aligning Ball Bearing, 1907]. It’s one of my absolutely favourite objects.

“The idea that something as functional as a ball bearing or propeller or fan could be loaded, coded and embedded with an aesthetic that was every bit as important as Boccioni’s [sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, also on display] meant the museum was looking to find linkages between the practical and industrial in the high arts, and to obliterate some of those distinctions.”

A New Unity presents movements from the 1910s-1930s including Russian avant-garde, De Stijl and Bauhaus. In Inner and

Outer Worlds, a hit list of Surrealist masterpieces is unveiled, including by Magritte, Joan Miro, Kahlo and Max Ernst, as well as Dali’s 1931 The persistence of memory.

“I can’t believe we lent this,” says Lowry, laughing. “I just hope my trustees don’t notice it’s gone. This is not only Dali’s great masterwork, it is one of the most beloved and cherished paintings of the MoMA and, I would argue, the entire history of Modern Art.

“One of its great pleasures is it packs such an enormous punch in such a small package [24cm x 33cm]. It’s one of those images you think you know because it’s been reproduced so often. You have this idea that it’s large [but] its intensity, its magic, is derived by its scale, its compression of space, and it’s in that compression of space that time is warped.

“Dali is thinking about this just after Einstein’s general theory of relativity, so the notion of how time is experienced is a current conversation. And Dali’s ability to stretch it, compress it, turn it upside down and ultimately melt it was his way of commenting on the complexity of the notion of time and space.”

Abstract Expressionism exemplars including Jackson Pollock with his drip paintings, and other mid-century giants including Alexander Calder with one of his famous mobiles, are shown in Art as Action.

The biggest section, Things as They Are, explodes into the ’60s in saturated colour with Marilyn Monroe screen prints by Andy Warhol. On the opposite wall are iconic, comic-strip-in- spired works by Roy Lichtenstein. Alongside Pop works are Minimal, Conceptual and Performance Art pieces. The 1980s and 1990s are surveyed through Immense Encyc

lopedia. It explores appropriation (think Cindy Sherman’s faux fashion shoots) and a mood of anxiety that grew along with the rise of AIDS. An incongruously formal 1980-82 brass plaque by Jenny Holzer reads “Some days you wake up and immediately start to worry. Nothing in particular is wrong. It’s just the suspicion that forces are aligning quietly and there will be trouble.”

Flight Patterns shows MoMA’s global focus in the past 20 years and its attempts to gender-balance the collection. Ideas of movement and migration are often expressed digitally, as are emotions — there are even emoji. Installation works run throughout, including Roman Ondak’s

Measuring the Universe, in which gallery visitors are invited to mark their height, along with their name and the date of their visit, on the walls.

“I think one of the things Roman and his generation of artists really caught on to was the idea of participation, that we collectively have a hunger to make art ourselves, that you can come together to make a work of art,” says Lowry.

This is what he believes the curators of this show have done, too, by finding common ground across visual languages in a way he describes as “absolutely poetic”. Exhibition continues at NGV International, 180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne until October 7. ngv.vic.gov.au For your chance to win a trip to Melbourne to see MoMA at NGV, enter our competition opposite. The author travelled to Melbourne as an NGV guest