MoMA Mia: Art In All Its Glory Expansive Makeover May Take Your Breath Away, And So May Hefty Prices
November 19, 2004
By MATTHEW ERIKSON, Courant Staff Writer
NEW YORK --
From the sixth-floor balcony of the newly renovated
Museum of Modern Art, only a half-inch-deep sheet of glass separates
you from a 110-foot drop to the museum's sunlit atrium.
That feeling of vertigo amid the airy spaciousness of architect Yoshio
Taniguchi's $425 million makeover might best sum up the museum
experience.
There's not only the dizzying scale of the expanded building and the
staggering way the museum's art is displayed in sprawling new galleries
but also a new admission fee of $20 that might have you reeling after
you've left the lobby doors at West 53rd/54th streets.
Welcome to the mega MoMA. After a 31/2-year renovation and the
costliest, most extensive reconstruction in the museum's 75-year
history, MoMA reopens Saturday amid huge anticipation and super-size
prices.
Iconic artworks such as Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and Picasso's
"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" come back from their temporary home across
the East River in Queens to share the limelight with Taniguchi's
minimalist design, scores of recent acquisitions and new public spaces
that include three retail stores, a fine-dining restaurant, a bar and
cafés.
The new MoMA nearly doubles the capacity of the former building; the
total exhibition space has grown from 85,000 to 125,000 square feet,
providing for the showing of large-scale artworks not possible before.
For instance, the sixth floor's 18-foot-high ceilings - space intended
for temporary exhibitions - now accommodates James Rosenquist's
86-foot-long anti-war pop-art mural "F-111." The work is illuminated by
skylights that frame the adjoining 52-story Museum Tower, built during
the museum's last renovation in 1984.
Below on the fifth floor are views of surrounding midtown buildings as
well as some of the most famous paintings and sculptures from MoMA's
collection: post-Impressionist masterworks by Matisse, Picasso, Miró
and others non-sequentially arranged in galleries looking out onto the
atrium. A grand staircase connects the fifth floor to the fourth
floor's post-World War II paintings and sculptures. Matisse's 1909
painting "The Dance" overlooks the stairway.
The third floor accommodates extensive photography, drawings,
architecture and design galleries. "Elvis" - Andy Warhol's painting,
that is - makes a surprise visit in the photography exhibit, while the
design gallery includes everything from body sponges and chairs by
Charles and Ray Eames to an MTA New York subway sign and a vintage 1946
Cisitalia 202 GT sports car by Italian car designer Pinin Farina.
The attention to design is reflected in every aspect of the museum,
from the streamlined faucets in the restrooms to the Danish Design
furniture that inhabits the restaurant and cafés. Don't expect to find
many seating areas among the galleries, however. Visitors to the old
MoMA, fond of musing on Monet's "Water Lilies" from a bench in an
intimate space, will now have to do so standing in the
5,000-square-foot second-floor atrium, which also contains Barnett
Newman's sculpture "Broken Obelisk" and large-scale paintings by Jasper
Johns and Willem de Kooning.
The atrium leads to the gymnasium-size Contemporary Galleries, whose
22-foot-high ceilings and column-free space holds more super-size art,
including the sculptural work "Bingo," consisting of three sections of
a house façade that artist Gordon Matta-Clark cut and reassembled. The
museum's second floor also includes works by Gerhard Richter, Jeff
Koons, Richard Serra, On Kawara and Matthew Barney as well as a media
gallery of films and videos.
The first-floor lobby connecting West 53rd and 54th streets opens onto
the museum's much-loved sculpture garden, updated with new landscaping
and slightly lengthened. One of three retail shops on the museum's
first floor sells the usual museum souvenirs of books, calendars,
posters, coffee cups and more.
For $6, you can buy a MoMA letter opener; for $8, a MoMA tape
dispenser; for $5, MoMA rubber bands, 16 altogether "in assorted
styles."
The MoMA Museum and Design Store and the larger MoMA Design Store
across the street sell oval ice cube trays, designer salt-and-pepper
shakers, toasters, coffee makers, Danish knife stands, chic vases and
chairs, among other not-so-cheap merchandise. Yes, MoMA has gone
Pottery Barn.
Be prepared to pay dearly in the eating places as well. A cup of coffee
in the fifth-floor terrace café will set you back $4, while sandwiches
cost a minimum of $10. Brace for much higher prices when the restaurant
The Modern opens in January.
The museum's high admission fees are already a sore spot with New
Yorkers. Besides the $20 general admission fee, seniors and students
pay $16, although there is no charge for children 16 and younger.
Saturday's opening-day admission is free, and the museum has announced
plans for free admission Friday afternoons between 4 and 8.
"We believe that the experience of the museum is greater than it ever
has been, that there's more art on view than there ever has been, that
it's better installed than it ever has been, and that the relative
value merits the cost," says museum director Glenn D. Lowry.
"No one is shocked about spending $45 or $100 going to the theater or
going to the opera or going to the symphony or going to see the ballet,
and there are already many museums in the U.S. and elsewhere that
charge $20 or the equivalent," he says. "I suspect that half, if not
less than half [of museum goers], will pay full price. Most people will
choose to come through membership." (An individual annual membership is
$75, which allows free admission.)
On a recent afternoon, two protesters stood outside the museum's 53rd
Street glass-and-black granite façade. One wore a sandwich board of a
$20 bill stamped with "freemoma.org"; the other was an artist living in
the city. When it was pointed out that the admission price is no
different from the price of two movie tickets, Dan Levenson replied, "I
feel that the museum has a more exalted mission than `The Incredibles.'"
Started in 1929 in a rented space at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, MoMA
moved three years later to its current address, a former palatial
townhouse owned by John D. Rockefeller. Over time it underwent four
other expansions, and in 1996, adjacent brownstones and the Dorset
Hotel were purchased and later demolished to make room for the current
facility.
You can get an impressionistic sense and poignant appreciation of the
museum's roots and its development, appropriately enough, in the
museum's basement. "Rescue Archaeology," a new exhibit by artist (and
Hartford Art School graduate) Mark Dion, shows the results of a series
of archaeological excavations he conducted of the sculpture garden and
surrounding areas.
Similar to other projects Dion has conducted at the Thames River and in
Venice, the historical artifacts - detritus from the MoMA site - are
cleaned and displayed in a treasure cabinet (made of aluminum,
suggestive of the museum's sleek new look) and three fireplace mantels
salvaged from the brownstone buildings. Wallpaper samples, coat-rack
remnants from a former restaurant, mailboxes from the old hotel, even a
microphone from a 1990s exhibit in the sculpture garden are among the
ephemera on view.
For those somewhat overwhelmed by MoMA's new bulk and higher prices,
there's something a little comforting in these mementos of the museum's
more modest past.
Expansive Makeover May Take Your Breath Away, And So May Hefty Prices
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