The High Church of Modern Art

Today marks the official opening of MoMA’s new education center at 4 W. 54th St., the final installment in the museum’s renovation and expansion. This seems like a good occasion both to assess the latest structure and to reassess the project as a whole.For it should be the part of criticism not only to appraise a given cultural artifact, but to modify the thrust of that judgment as the conversation evolves around the object. Although my assessment of the MoMA expansion remains as it was two years ago, when the new museum was finally unveiled, the conversation has shifted noticeably. Thus, at a time when many were swooning over the supposedly Oriental delicacy and tony austerity of the structure (for Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times, “The expanded museum is a serene composition that weaves art, architecture and the city into a transcendent aesthetic experience”), I felt it necessary to fumigate the place of such talk. Now, however, that the word has gone forth, as though from some cultural commissariat, that one is not to like the new MoMA, it has become necessary to point out that Yoshio Tanaguchi’s building complex is really somewhat better than many are willing to admit.I bring this up because, as regards MoMA, a certain false criticism, approaching humbug, has emerged among many right-thinking New Yorkers, especially those most connected to the fields of art and architecture. Even people who initially applauded the building have modified their enthusiasm, now that the general mood has congealed into tepid dissatisfaction.These criticisms amount to resentment at the sheer size of the building complex. MoMA is “The Man,” the grown-up authority figure against whom all self-styled vanguardists want to rebel. However anarchic the modern movement may have been, MoMA, in its scrupulous and high-minded manner, has purged that rebellion and assimilated it to the forces of order.Rich and various is the vocabulary of contempt. Corporate, antiseptic, lacking in human scale: All expressive of MoMA’s failure to supply that fuzzier, softer something we humans apparently go for. Most of all, the imperious central atrium, rising to the height of a 10-story building, is singled out for crushing the ant-sized humans at its base. Nor does it help that, in an architectural climate that favors blobs and exploded masses, the relentless symmetries and regimented right angles of the expanded Modern seem, if you’ll pardon the expression, square.Yet this indisputable bigness is the necessary consequence of several factors. Just as the Church of Rome is no longer that makeshift synagogue where the early Christians once met in clandestine congress, so the very idea of modern art, of which the MoMA is the material projection in three dimensions, has come a long way since Courbet hastily assembled the first Salon des Refusés. As for the specific form that Mr. Tanaguchi’s expansion has taken, he was forced to work with the complex set of architectural givens. All these illustrate the International Style, but in varying degrees of competence and each in a slightly idiosyncratic dialect. In the circumstances, Mr. Tanaguchi should be applauded for developing a varied and flexible idiom of his own that can accommodate all the others.To understand that success, it helps to ascend to one of the higher floors of the new Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, which contains a dozen classrooms, several theaters and screening rooms, a library, and an employee cafe. This building looks out over the famous sculpture garden, into the windows of the nearly identical gallery building across the way. From its windows, especially the sixth floor open-air terrace that adjoins the library, it is possible to appreciate the adroitness with which, from several perspectives, the shifting rhythms and varied textures of the museum’s insistent angles arrange themselves into visual harmony.But Mr. Taniguchi’s latest building is more than what it looks out on. Within the context of its strict rectalinearity, it allows itself some bold and original strokes. Both the monolithic street wall to the north of the new center and the monolithic gray cantilever of its roof richly engulf the curtain-walled structure within. An impish perforation in the dark street wall and the drizzle of horizontal mesh that connects it to the pizzicato of pale verticals along the rim of the sculpture garden, all display considerable intelligence and skill in squeezing whatever life is left to squeeze out of the International Style.The interior of the building, perhaps the most utilitarian part of the entire MoMA complex, is sober, respectful, and, to all appearances, functional. The entrance way, which displays a Ferrari on one of the walls and a length of Warhol’s cow wallpaper on another, is perhaps the least successful part of the new building. Yes, I suppose that it is in the best taste, that the art is valuable and that the fluorescent classrooms into which one descends below grade contain all the requisite amenities. But taken together, the mood of the place recalls to a remarkable degree that institutionalized and sacerdotal high seriousness that characterized MoMA’s 1984 expansion as well as the one or two expansions prior to that. Given such consistency, it seems likely that the Modern got what it expressly wanted. And though Mr. Taniguchi’s contribution to the museum as a whole is not an unqualified triumph by any means, short of tearing down what was already there and starting from scratch, it may well be the best we could have hoped for.jgardner@nysun.com

The High Church of Modern Art

The High Church of Modern Art

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