Word: moma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...published more than 40 years ago by the American art historian Robert Goldwater. Hence the extreme interest of the show that kicks off the Museum of Modern Art's 1984-85 season, " 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern." (Primitivism, for MOMA's purposes, means the use Western artists made of tribal works; it does not denote the art itself, which, from "ethnic art" to the disastrous French "art negre," is bedeviled by a whole vocabulary of more or less racist condescension.) The exhibition is large, though not exhausting-218 tribal...
...design is perhaps the glass-sheathed escalator bank grafted onto the museum's north wall, overlooking the sculpture garden, which distantly recalls the glass escalator tube on the face of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. But whereas the Pompidou's tube is a mere people mover, MOMA's moving staircases work in a celebratory space, full of light and air. The view through the glass as one mounts and descends can only sharpen the pleasurable contrast between nature and culture that was the point of Philip Johnson's original garden design. The escalator bank is Pelli...
...strengths of the old MOMA was its feeling of intimacy. One could just stroll in off the street and look at some great art in a small room. There was none of the architectural muscle flexing that is conventionally meant to prepare its audience for a Major Experience. MOMA's staff, especially its director of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, put a very high priority on preserving this feeling in the new structure. It was, Rubin argues, a key element in the intentions of modernism itself. Relatively few "classical" modernist paintings-Picasso's Guernica being an obvious exception...
...essence of MOMA is, of course, its permanent collection of painting and sculpture, which is the greatest of its kind in the world. The old building could show about 15% of it, or 600 works. Now Rubin puts its capacity at "upward of 800." More important than the simple gain in space, however, is the gain in historical clarity achieved through the rehanging...
...specialty, the art of the 20th century, has an intimidating, Bismarck-like tread that induces a kind of resentful faintness in some of his colleagues. But nobody could accuse him of not thinking long and hard about whatever he scrutinizes, and he has been responsible for some of MOMA's curatorial masterpieces, including the 1980 Picasso retrospective and the 1977 show of late Cézanne. To rehang a collection like MOMA'S-to make new neighbors and inflect old contexts-entails very great responsibilities, because so many of the paintings and sculptures are the classics, the test...