Word: moma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ultimate loss to art's hyperinflation may be wider and less tangible than this. Quite rightly, MOMA's Varnedoe rejects the idea that "there was some mythical period, now lost, when art was seen only as the shining purity of aesthetic experience. As long as there has been art to sell, art has been something to buy." But he, like many others, is worried by "the crazy sense of disproportion in the world that puts an extra glow on the art object...
...been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a series of great and (for this generation of museums and their public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of scholarship and curatorial skill: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Velazquez, Poussin, up to MOMA's current show of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist years and, perhaps, Seurat to come...
...recourse for some museums is to raise funds by selling work from their permanent collections, as MOMA recently did. In order to purchase an indubitable masterpiece, Van Gogh's Portrait of the Postmaster Roulin, for an undisclosed price, the museum sold and exchanged seven paintings. But this encourages museum trustees to think of the permanent collection as an impermanent one, a kind of stock portfolio that can be traded at will: not a good omen...
Kirk Varnedoe, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, confesses that he (like most of his colleagues) is haunted by the image of the big collector looking at his Van Gogh over the fireplace, the picture that, like thousands of others in America, was promised to a museum -- as Irises had been. "At one time," muses Varnedoe, "he might have looked at it and said, 'Well, there's the Porsche I didn't buy.' Now he says to himself, 'That's my children's education for three generations, a villa in Monte Carlo, a duplex on Fifth Avenue...
Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," which goes on view this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is by far the most demanding show MOMA has ever done. Whatever one's stamina for comparing nuances of pictorial meaning, it will be taxed by this long sequence of more than 350 mostly small, mostly brown works of art that fill two floors of the museum through Jan. 16. This will be the array of Cubist evidence at which future scholars will look back. Curator William Rubin, director emeritus of MOMA's department of painting and sculpture...