Word: moma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Museum of Modern Art in New York City -- consisting of work done since 1970, the year of his first one -- has just opened. He is one of the very few American artists to get this double crown in their lifetime, thanks to the enthusiasm with which William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, views his work. It is hardly an exaggeration that MOMA treats Stella as Jackson Pollock's true dauphin in the lineage of American abstract painting...
...striped paintings like "Die Fahne hoch" to the galvanic dance of fake-shadowed solids in the Cones and Pillars series of the '80s, from the decorative pastelly flatness of the late-'60s Protractors to the wave of polished aluminum, gray as sea fog, that swells across the wall of MOMA in a magnificent piece with the Melvillean title of Loomings, 1986, Stella wrings more pictorial feeling from abstract art than anyone else alive. His big paintings, when they come off, are almost unique in their confidence: they project a sense of grandeur rather than the usual American inflation of scale...
...fireworks: there is something funereal as well as celebratory about the sight. It seems improbable that anyone (other, perhaps, than Stella) will manage to wring more from the constructivist impulse. If you want to see the common ancestor of these frenetic and space- grabbing objects, it is upstairs at MOMA, a little thing of rusty tin: Picasso's 1912 Guitar. Thinking about Picasso, Stella had come to realize that "it's not the presence of a recognizable figure in Picasso that in itself makes things real, but his ability to project the image and to have it be so physical...
...totaling $250,000 given early in the century by Retailer George A. Hearn for acquiring contemporary American paintings, the Met did not have an active department of contemporary art until Henry Geldzahler joined it as / curator in 1967; and even then it was seldom in real competition with either MOMA or the Whitney...
They have also plunged deep into the art of the '80s to build a base for the year 2000. Given the shrinking number of 20th century masterpieces filtering onto the market and their relentlessly inflating prices, the Met will never be able to catch up with MOMA. But its gravitational pull as an institution should not be underestimated. The Met is the greatest general museum in America, and its new wing marks what may be the final phase in the competition for modernist icons. Quite a few of the privately owned works that Lieberman was assumed to have lined...