Word: rubin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...negre," is bedeviled by a whole vocabulary of more or less racist condescension.) The exhibition is large, though not exhausting-218 tribal objects from Africa, North America and the Pacific playing counterpoint to 147 modern ones. In organizing the show, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, has set out to unravel a knotty subject by bringing all the resources of current scholarship to bear on it while still leaving the viewer exhilarated by the beauty and intensity of the works. About four years in preparation, the exhibition is the cap of Rubin's career...
...reason, Rubin argues, was that modernism used primitivism when it needed to, and not before. A Fang mask or a Kota funerary effigy would have been useless to an impressionist, whose ambition was to render perceptual reality as faithfully as possible. But the drift of fauvism and especially cubism was toward the conceptual: and here the idea of representing, say, a face as a flat plane with knoblike eyes and a cylindrical funnel of a mouth was infinitely suggestive. Certainly it was convenient for Picasso to rejig the human face in terms of bladelike noses and scarification lines...
...burgeoning stake in the future naturally fosters hope for the future. In political terms, a concern for the next century can turn right or left, toward economic conservatism, for instance, or toward a special determination to avoid nuclear war. Or up, into sheer ambition. Says Yippie turned Yuppie Jerry Rubin: "People are very patriotic. I'm much more pro-American than I have ever been in my life. It's not that people are optimistic about foreign policy or Government, but about their own power and achievement...
...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...
...Rubin is one of the world's most voluminously informed and tough-minded art historians. His approach to his 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...