The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, January 2008

I have visited the Museum of Modern Art at least a dozen times: however, I have not been there in probably twenty years. I have not seen the latest renovation. On my first visit in 1960 it was one of the very few museums in the world focused exclusively on modern art. Then, in contrast to The Metropolitan Museum, it stood out as a unique and exciting and stimulating experience. Compared to the Whitney, at that time its neighbor, with its focus on American art, it had a greater value in that its collection had international status. The most recent museum, in those days, The Guggenheim, had a similar focus but less interesting artworks.

In 1960 the Edward Durrell Stone building still had the feel of being new: it was one of the few Modern buildings in New York City. Among the others at that time, the Seagram’s Building, Lever House, The United Nations building, and the Guggenheim, there was a strong sense that modern architecture was to be an exciting new era. The 1964 MOMA addition maintained that character and provided the museum with more gallery space and more public areas. The art seemed comfortable and with ample spaces around it.

There was always, however, a strong dichotomy in this museum: the top floor galleries housed the unique and stellar early 20th century European, primarily French, collection while the floor below it, with a narrower emphasis on mid century, primarily American art, seemed to be a far less important continuation. Many of the well-known names of modern art seemed to be missing. American museums are for the most part teaching institutions but there was always the sense here that this was not a survey of modern art so much as a collection created by a group of persons with a specific interest. There has been little indication over the years of there being a desire to see the collection grow, unlike the Mc Nay, in San Antonio, which was a fixed collection but which the trustees have understood must show growth in order to maintain the sense of a living institution. Other areas of interest, at MOMA, photography, prints, design, have always seemed fragmentary at best.

On this most recent trip, in the Architecture and Design galleries, there are works that I have seen many times over the years: I assume the models on display, by Fuller, Keisler, and Rietveld, are the only models in the collection. The design collection looks as if it had been conceived and built in the 1960’s, and then soon after neglected.

There are now galleries for prints and for drawings. These are welcome. The current exhibition, Latin American Prints, was uninspired however: certainly it did not compare favorably with a Latin American print show that I saw two years ago at the San Antonio Museum of Art, nor with that museum’s Nelson Rockefeller Collection of Latin American Art.

In the past the photography section was so small that I can hardly remember ever having seen it. There is now a nice sized gallery and each artist is represented with a selection of works. Most American Museums show only one work for each artist…apparently their holding as so “vast” that were they to show two or more works some artist would be omitted and the visitors would feel slighted. As a result most American museums look like boxes of Whitman Samplers.

But taken as a whole, these collections seem not so much a museum as a cabinet: it all seems limited and narrow.

I did appreciate that there is a gallery for the works of Mondrian and that an overview of his development is shown, as is that of Calder. The breadth of the Picasso collection is thrilling. And as always, the first gallery, the works of Cézanne, are breath taking. I once said to a friend that I thought it odd that the museum collection opened with eight Cézannes. Yes, he said, but each of them is a masterpiece. And so they are. But as other than antecedents to what follows these seem remarkably out of place.

Painting and sculpture continue to be segregated, painting on the inside and sculpture, for the most part, outside, as if they were two very distinct and different ways of thinking. I suppose, technically, they are but they do have a relationship that I do not sense here.

In my experience this is one of the few museums in America that does not have a collecion of twentieth century ceramics.

Every American city now boasts not only a Museum of Fine Arts but a museum of modern art as well Almost without exception those Museums of Modern, or perhaps Contemporary, Art are new buildings designed by name architects…unfortunately many of those architects are European, or more recently Japanese, continuing the 19th century American tradition of going “abroad” for truly “significant” cultural trappings. But, of course, American museums are surveys of world culture with a token reference to American art. Each of these museums makes the claim that their building is as beautiful as the works they contain. (This is not always true, however.) In each of these buildings the works are presented in a style first created by The New York Museum of Modern Art: all of the works are at eye level with one work in each vertical unit of space. The walls are almost always off white.

In its new space, MOMA continues this now universal presentation. And like the other museums, it offers a variety of dining configurations but all of them gourmet. I have come to believe that for many museumgoers being in close propinquity with the great wealth of the board members is that museum’s primary allure. The gourmet restaurants with their elitist menus are there to provide that opportunity: they do not serve the general public, only The Ladies Who Lunch.

The architecture of the new space, and I am not so sure I consider it architecture as more correctly interior design, is modern although in a regressive sense, perhaps to better harmonize with the original and well restored Stone building and the fifty story tower above it. Except that it represents a conservative corporate American architectural preference, it lacks a sense of contemporary design. Certainly it does not compare favorable with the Glass and the Fine Art museums in Tacoma, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, nor does it have the overly spacious quality of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary art.

Upon entering the museum, the amorphous character of the lobby surprised me: after queuing for the wicket, there was no sense at all as to how one was to proceed. The architect has not directed us. (Perhaps the mass of humanity milling about obscured the path of discovery.) Frank Lloyd Wright would have made this perfectly clear. Once I saw the ticket takers, after an overly long search for the coatroom, the only indication of forward momentum was the view into the garden.

Climbing the grand staircase, such as it is, a reduced, modern reconcepualization, I felt dread seeing the helicopter over my head: I have seen this many, many times. I was hoping to discover something in industrial design of more recent vintage. Later, seeing the old Ferrari (Jaguar?), I was pleased that it had at least been mounted on the wall. Variety is always welcome.

On the second floor I found the escalators on my own and rather by default. (It was only when I came out of the galleries, after the visit, that I discovered that the escalators were indeed accessible on the ground floor.) I saw no indication for elevators and I was not about to climb six flights of stairs, in a museum twelve stories, although I saw none of those either. The information desks appeared to have been tucked into dark corners as if on second thought. Throughout the museum the design of the traffic flow is extremely poor.

The sixth floor gallery for special exhibits was poorly indicated, it seems to have the floor to itself and it comes off as a corner room high up in the attic. One visitor there announced to his companions that he was going out into the corridor: “I feel claustrophobic”, he said. I sympathized with him.

In every new museum there is one area where the architect is permitted to make a grand statement and to present a moment of architecture as an art form. Here, as in most of the others, this occurs in the atrium. Although large, this space is so much an “interior” space as to further induce claustrophobia. The catwalks on each floor at the side of the atrium are fun but the catwalk seven floors above and across the lobby below in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is magnificent.

But the greatest difference between this museum and all of the others is that this continues to be the definitive collection of early 20th Century European masterpieces. However, it now looks like an old collection; it shows us that modernism is dated. In fact, the sense of the dead past pervades this museum. I believe this is the fault of the design and the planning and the recent, desultory collecting. I did not sense the dead past at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when I visited the Lane collection, nor at the Mc Nay, nor at the eternally evolving Metropolitan Museum of Art just up Fifth Avenue.

On the fifth floor front there is a floor to ceiling window looking out over Fifty Third Street at the small park behind the CBS Building. A new monolithic high rise beside that, across from the museum, the old Sperry Rand building on Fifty Second Street, and the RCA Building beyond created a distinctive, monumental cityscape. All of these building jammed together left only a small square of sky at the upper left of this composition. Although it was a sunny day, the sky without a cloud, there was no sunlight and shadow here; this view was dark and gray and seemed to be a twilight world, a Fritz Lang Metropolis. Looking down into this gray mass I could see that Frank Lloyd Wright’s warning that the city as conceived in the early twentieth century would eventually strangle itself had come to be the reality. Indeed: there is no sunlight, no air and no respect for others, or for anything other than rent money, in this world of the damned.
Nor was there sunlight in the museum garden. And that I think is the problem with this new museum building and with this museum: it sits in the center of the towering corporate world. Like that world it is insular and closed-minded. It too lacks air and light. Despite its new housing, it rests on its former success, a dated collection, as if that were complete, finished, and that under no circumstances will it be tampered with. The Museum of Modern Art: it is all about the past. The world, however, has moved on.

George Seurat: The Drawings. Museum of Modern Art, NYC. January 2008

Seen most often one at a time and here and there, a retrospective of the drawings of Georges Seurat would seem to be a welcome opportunity. And certainly I made the effort to travel many miles to see this exhibition. But I am sorry to say that seen in great number, one hundred thirty five drawings, the work is greatly disappointing.

The beginning works were student work done in the Ecole des Beaux Arts academic manner. Pale gray pencil, or charcoal, is used to delineate the contours, through line, as well as to shade and suggest form. In a series of drawings from the classic examples, statuary, the craftsmanship is flawless: every area of the form is extremely well studied, the proportions are absolutely perfect, and the overall effect is of a drawing breathed onto the paper. As artworks, however, they have that rigid art school look and feel about them: one wonders, having made such a perfect drawing as each of these is, why a person would make yet another? As student work one can understand the concept of mastering a technique through repetition, yet as works in an exhibition they illustrate why the Ecole fell from favor at that time: they are without vital import, they are merely technique. As these drawings make very evident: a person can be trained to do this. And indeed they have been: we can see this same mastery in the works of Palko, Zick, and Tuscher, as well as in thousands of other classically trained artists.

One senses that Seurat somewhat shared that awareness of that school’s diminished reputation: once on his own he almost immediately began to draw in a different style. Perhaps aware of the impressionists concern with light and air, he began to focus on light as one of the necessary components for delineating form. Of the three plastic elements we can see that he was most interested in form, as, in his paintings, he would be most interested in color. In both the drawings and the paintings his concerns can be seen to be primarily intellectual. Intellectual content is perfectly fine in artworks but with Seurat it looks rather like the means for illustrating a polemic.

The museum’s interpretation tells us that the artist was very particular about the effect he wanted to achieve, using a specific paper because of the way it would react with his conte crayon. Most artists would understand this great pleasure that one feels using a specific medium. And certainly it is a beautiful effect, dragging the black crayon over the rough paper so that the sparkle of white glitters in the darkest areas. But I am always suspicious when an artist relies on the same materials over and over: I begin to suspect a devotion to effects.

The interpretation also tells us that he went out of the central city to an area known as “The Zone”, a sort of no man’s land between city and suburb. I think this indicates the problem with these works: neither the area nor these drawings have character, both lack vital import; the drawings are masterfully executed but they lack meaning. If an artwork is viewed as a shared experience, the artist must have and digest the experience before he can share it with us. These drawings from “The Zone” are merely exercises in a technique the artist was attempting to develop. By using “The Zone” he was presenting works for consideration that had no precedents: the observers would have to address the reality presented on these pieces of paper. There would be no familiar areas to serve as the basis for a critical comparison. In and of itself, that is fine. But, again, this lacks character, this lacks a shared experience. This is not a world in which the character of the people have given it personality: it is a drab, characterless no man’s land.

By contrast, in the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz, in which light also models the forms rising out of darkness, even though the environment might be equally nondescript, the focus is on the vital import, the feelings expressed by the artist.

In another series of drawings, the nightlife of Paris, we see the usual scene as depicted by Manet, Degas, and Latrec but in the Seurat technique.

In regard to that technique, the drawn line has now vanished and we see merely modeled form, and, for the most part, form isolated in blackness and coming into roundness where the light touches it. There is the quality of the luminous as if these had been inspired by early photography. But where the light touches the form it is so limited as to suggest that the artist is exploring technique rather than a visual experience, as if he were exploring how much or how little he needed to state to manifest his concept. As a drawing within a series of drawings during an artist’s development, this would be interesting. But there are so many of these drawings that we only see that his development was extremely slow and that he perhaps too much loved his materials, they were not a means to an end but an end pleasure. Rembrandt’s pen and ink landscape drawings are wonderful because he used the medium to record an impression, a vision, and his delight. They are beautiful drawings because of that, not because of the way the pen scraped across the coarse paper; the medium was the vehicle not the raisone d’être.

Seen as a whole, there is a development in the works. The first drawings are pale, light gray on white paper with the modeling only on the form. In the middle period the forms rise out of blackness. And in the last period, the forms are modeled using the whole of the gray scale and in a midtone gray environment. Very likely this latter change was motivated by his preparation for moving on to the paintings. Except for a few, and most notably in the portrait of Andre -, there is little sense that these drawings were intended to be finished art works.

In that Seurat was a contemporary of the impressionists who used the devices of composition found in Japanese woodcuts to create new designs and arrangements within picture space, it is odd that rather than follow that development, or seek another, he adhered rigidly to the academic practice of a centered, classical balance.

There is an absence of a sense of time. In his writings on the Italian Renaissance painters, Berenson tells us that it was not linear perspective that made those work different from the Gothic artists, it was the introduction of the presence of time. There is in painting a double concept of time: time present and time passing. In Seurat there is form and light and materials, but there is no sense of time. These drawings, as a result, are little more than technical exercises.

There is also very little indication of spontaneity; each of these drawings began with a concept and each of them has the sense of being a contrivance to illustrate that concept. As many of these were executed in the studio from sketches done in situ, it would have been very interesting to have seen some of those sketches from the field.

I sense this same studio contrivance in Seurat’s paintings. Those have interest as an intellectual development within a larger art movement but as paintings considered on their own, they too are in the end only the exercise of a technique. Despite their flash of color, they lack the spark of life. They come off as brilliantly executed exercises that can be seen to have been time consuming and tedious to make. Pissarro, always curious about new ideas and new developments, tried only a few paintings in this style, and then he moved on. There is a tendency to wonder, had Seurat lived longer, how soon and in what other direction he might have moved. But considering that his is at heart a “rigid” personality I doubt that it would have been too far one way or the other.