Word: moma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...build and will require an additional $2 million a year for operating expenses. One does not go spending such amounts on the marginal and the controversial -- on what modernism used to be when the chairman of the Met's 20th century department, William S. Lieberman, 62, formerly of MOMA, was scarcely a gleam in his Irish mother...
...whole story of 20th century art. The Met's modern collection is not equal to that task anyway. Apart from decorative arts and furniture, it consists of some 6,000 works and is smaller than the Whitney's; it hardly begins to compare in scope and depth with MOMA's 65,000 objects...
...century's opening decade, alas, Hoffmann and some Werkstatte colleagues were retreating into florid ornamental applique and comfortable Sacher-torte treacliness. Sharp geometry had only been a phase. At MOMA, a painted silver box (1910) is hardly recognizable as Hoffmann's work. In Viennese design, the purifying fin-desiecle rebellion had taken place later and then ended earlier than anywhere else in Europe...
...most significant architect was an apostate from the older generation. Otto Wagner was, surely, the world's first great modernist. The MOMA show includes a fine display of his masterpiece, the steel-and-glass interior of the Postal Savings Bank (1904-06). It was an architectural space exuberantly of its age, right on the boundary between the classicized past and the industrialized future...
...strong curatorial case can be made for ending the story in 1918. It is too bad, however, that the MOMA show, unlike its Vienna and Paris predecessors, omits all but a bit of political context. There is scant reference, for example, to the troubling de facto alliance between the Secessionist aesthetes and Vienna's populist right against late 19th century liberalism, or to the right-wing regime that ran the city during the % Werkstatte's glory days, or to the unpleasant fact that the bank Wagner designed was established as an alternative to the "Jewish banks." By remaining ahistorical, MOMA...