MOMA’S BILLION-DIRHAM MAKEOVER
▶ The new space will show more works by women and ethnic minorities, writes David D’Arcy
The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens its expanded galleries to the public today. This renovation, conceptualised by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Gensler, and which cost about $450 million (Dh1.6 billion), adds a third more space and replaces parts of the museum built or renovated in 2004. Fifteen years seems recent, until you consider that contemporary art seems to reinvent itself every six months, if not every day.
Airy and massive at the same time, with an additional 3,716 square metres, the museum has broadened at its site, in a canyon of skyscrapers on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. It now occupies three floors in an 82-floor, near complete, tower designed by architect Jean Nouvel, who also worked on Louvre Abu Dhabi.
In metal and glass on six floors, with a discreet overhang to indicate its main entrance, the museum that once elbowed its way onto a genteel street in 1939 (a year after its founding) blends in at street level among its taller neighbours. That shouldn’t be a problem for its visitors. Moma is the only museum for blocks in any direction.
What’s different, besides the expanded space, is that Moma now shows more new work by women, ethnic minorities and by artists from countries that the museum never represented. You’ll see galleries of Chinese art and the work of Ibrahim el-Salahi of Sudan.
Earlier this year, before a four-month closure to finish the job, the museum’s director, Glenn D Lowry said: “We have an opportunity to re-energise and expand upon our founding mission – to welcome everyone to experience Moma as a laboratory for the study and presentation of the art of our time, across all visual arts.”
The architects saw their job as more practical. For Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the challenge was to transform a set of buildings that began with a 1939 structure, and included expansion and renovations from 1964, 1984, and 2004. “It was kind of an exquisite corpse on the street, a rag tag set of buildings that never quite worked together,” he says.
“A lot of what we were trying to do was to stitch all of these pieces back together – both inside and out, but mostly inside,” he notes. “Our mission statement, which we worked out with the Museum of Modern Art, was three-fold – first, to aerate the place, to make it more flowing and more porous – inside, and between spaces inside the building and to the city and the streets of New York.”
“Second,” he explains, “we wanted to bring art back to the people and back to the streets, to integrate the museum back into the life of New York City. “Third – we wanted to make new kinds of spaces that reflected the fluid ambition of the curatorial mission, to do things that they had never been able to do before, with different kinds of spaces.” Quoting his partner, Elizabeth Scofidio, Renfro says: “We were archaeologists and surgeons at the same time.”
For intimacy, the new design adds wood (for the first time at Moma), to soften the noise and warm up the white-walled chill of its last renovation. Yet, intimacy is a challenge for any place that now welcomes 3.5 million visitors a year, and can expect more once it reopens. “You’re not going to keep people out, so how do you actually make enough space and give enough options to people?” Renfro says.
Balancing intimacy and immensity is one task. Balancing the new with the modern is another one. The art on show is a mix of the new Moma and the old. Remember that the museum, founded in 1929, is 12 years older than the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D C.
Art is now in the sleek new lobby, which leads back to the museum’s serene (and untransformed) sculpture garden. All of that floor will be free to the public, at the suggestion of the architects. The dreamy and sometimes sinister paintings of the Kenyan-born painter Michael Armitage are part of it.
Upstairs, cartoonish robot-like figures from China are on the floor of the vast atrium. There’s more than art at work here. It’s an entry area for families with children, and a cooling-off chamber for children who fidget in the conventional galleries. The museum is clearly anticipating crowds of all ages and the tastes that come with that mix.
And older visitors may find Moma’s cherished marquee masterpieces in unanticipated groupings, with Pablo Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a glaring group of women, positioned in the same gallery as Faith Ringgold’s centrifugal 1967 scene of figures fleeing a shooting. Juxtapositions are everywhere. So, fortunately, are Picassos.
And so are mini-shows, such as the Armitage exhibition. Displays are devoted to the influential African-American Betye Saar, now 93, and to the performer and “fisherman of social absurdity,” Pope L.
Another surveys LatinAmerican geometric abstraction from the mid-20th century. Only visitors who take the long march through those 200 works will find, midway, the 1942-1943 masterpiece
Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian. Elsewhere, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies from 1914-1926 are stuck in a corner.
There are a lot more jolts. No doubt there will also be some fine-tuning at Moma once the public piles in. But the museum hasn’t forgotten what put it on the map. If Van Gogh and Matisse are moved around, it won’t be too far.