Word: moma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...than almost all the acreage of WPA murals that preceded them in the 1930s. They were almost immediately bought, half by the Phillips Collection and half by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and were in fact the first paintings by a black artist to enter MOMA's collection. It seemed to both Alfred Barr of MOMA and Duncan Phillips that Lawrence's series represented a unique conjunction of black experience, history painting and a modernist idiom. They were right. From Benjamin West to Robert Rauschenberg, American art is sown with attempts, varying between utter bathos...
Sometimes an exhibition will define the work of a major artist for a whole generation. So with the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective in 1980. Now New York City's MOMA has done it again, with "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective" (through Jan. 12), devoting most of its space to an enormous survey of Matisse's paintings, drawings, collages and sculpture curated by art historian John Elderfield...
...Pierre Schneider in Paris, to mark the artist's centenary. It contained 250 works, and its catalog weighed 2 lbs. It seemed, at the time, exhaustive. This one has rather more than 400 works, and its catalog tips the kitchen scales at 5 lbs. 7 oz., outweighing even MOMA's Picasso catalog by 11 oz. It isn't a show to approach casually, even if the coming box-office jam allowed it. But Elderfield's panorama of Matisse's achievement is so exhilarating, so full of rapturous encounters with one of the grandest pictorial sensibilities ever to pick...
...Only MOMA's resources -- its own collection, Elderfield's connoisseurship and the accumulated borrowing power that is the peaceable blackmail of the museum world -- could have produced this show. Its essential component, never seen in such depth outside Russia before, is the paintings bought from Matisse's studio 80 years ago by those two inspired and obsessed collectors, Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, now divided between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow...
Starting two decades later, MOMA also plunged heavily on Matisse; Alfred * Barr's belief in Matisse's supreme importance to modernism, at a time when the artist was widely considered to be a decorator (albeit a great one), gave New York City a collection of incomparable breadth. Some key paintings are absent, chiefly the crucial Luxe, Calme et Volupte, 1904-05. But there are not many holes in this tapestry, and given the cost of insurance and owners' growing reluctance to expose artworks to the risk of travel, it may be that no museum will ever be able to mount...