The Museum of Modern Art is female

We live in a threshold time, the old order breaks down. "May you live in interesting times", was the title of the just ended art Biennale in Venice, based on a supposedly Chinese curse. Determined times of change bring a lot of suffering and uncertainty. They offer the opportunity to overturn the old order, but also in their injustices out of the window.

Long enough to have resisted the museums of Modern art , however, to integrate the works of women and minorities in their collections. What good art is, has been prescribed from above, and in the important curator sat in armchairs wise men with pale complexion.

a Paradox that a return to white rule thought in the United States, as it is in the Alt-Right movement, or the Tweets and actions of the current President, apparently, has begun to make demands for equal rights of women and minorities to break through. As a democratic against control, so to speak: Welcome to the new Moma.

More space and re-structured

The mild early winter sun casts an abstract pattern on the New York street canyon, and the entrance to the command centre of the Modern is presented as unimpressive as ever. After the house has already doubled in 15 years, thanks to the renovation by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, his exhibition space, which is crammed in the midst of the sea of Houses, Midtown New York, adds the latest To the development and Expansion of the still another third is added.

The architectural firm Diller and Scofidio (in Switzerland, it "remembers" your Expo-cloud in Yverdon) has not only increases the exhibition space, but also the entire structure of the three million people a year visited the Museum, streamlined and unified. The neighboring American Folk Art Museum has been sacrificed to the space-hungry Moma quite a few exhibition are in alignment extend in the almost-finished black apartment house next to it, for the Jean Nouvel is responsible.

The Lobby is reminiscent of a waiting room in an airport. Photo Iwan Baan

Even if the story of the latest expansion of the Museum, which cost more than half a billion dollars, according to the monetary megalomania that characterizes the modern art currently: Of pomp and gold glitter you see here is after the conversion, nothing at all. The new Moma looks close to modest. Neither the art nor the architecture, aim to Overwhelm the audience.

It is clear: In the since the end of October, accessible new premises at 53. Road is celebrated in the expensive "victory art", but rather a democratic right to equality before the achievements of the creative intellect – identifies as the driving force of contemporary art and will be presented.

As a district centre

The first view after the entrance goes up to the top, to the glazed first floor, where there is a Creativity Lab for the collective imagination to the centre of the action. It is the so-called People's Studio; visitors are asked to take self-color, plastic, or woven into exceptional fabrics in the Hand and it is up to the artists to do the same. Here it is discussed, read, experimented. You will feel at a district centre reminds – or to an Installation by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, as you recently on the forecourt of the railway station, Biel has taken place.

The view of this people Studio down in the substantially enlarged Lobby, no Palace hall shows – with such adorned the museums so far, gladly, but a space partitioned room, an airport waiting similar. Tired visitors to take a breather here on narrow chairs, before you plunge back into the struggle for Survival on the streets of New York.

view a gallery of Vincent van Gogh's painting "The starry night" (1889, to the left in the picture). Photo Moma

And the art? Who's afraid of a politically correct uniformity in the presentation of the Collection, is immediately disabused. Here brilliant conservators have to be paved with a keen eye and a dramatic sense of restriction on new paths through the world's best collection of modern art. The rooms are small, the title of each presentation concise, short, and yet the well-known exhibits, make fantastic metamorphoses, just the fact that you are unexpectedly combined.

In this case, this Opening goes far beyond simple measures also. So you have Pollock in addition to the works of Jackson the his wife Lee Krasner is not hanged, their art but to that of her husband. The change goes so far that there is in the new Moma, no rooms more, all of which are dedicated to abstract expressionism, but only those that the hot is completely different, such as "Out of war".

collection with pieces from the Depot, enriched

In the hall "In and Around Harlem" you will discover art that was produced at the same time as the abstract expressionism (which is in a Ruch to be the CIA as a cultural weapon against the Soviet Union of having been abused) in New York. Everywhere was also enriched from the vaults: Mark Rothko's spiritual colour have become land less often, but you will encounter a work by the Indian Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, the scratched under the influence of Zen-Buddhism, white shapes in the Golden base.

If one finds next to Van Gogh abruptly, the pottery of George Ohr, the "mad Potter of Biloxi", the secret forerunner of abstract expressionism is valid, you admittedly already somewhat out of the concept. What's the point? And then you realize does, how well it is the "starry night" to play for the revered Original, a kitschy post card, but to be a work of art that is taken seriously, this can again be according to its meaning questioned.

order without art-historical terms for the period

the themes of The rooms include things like "Paris 1920" or "From soup cans to Flying saucers". Departments of Dada, Pop Art or impressionism, you will not find. The attempt to circumvent the art-historical terms in the hall lyrics completely, could be denounced as a little ridiculousness.

the so-Called restitution of art there is (a kind of art-historical women - and minority ratio). But your presence lights up a rule, such as the presence of the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral between Léger, Picasso, and Brancusi in the space to the Parisian avant-garde.

Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907, left in the picture) in addition to Faith Ringgolds "American People Series #20" (1967). Photo Moma

There are rooms that give the audience what it wants (the entrance fee is finally $ 25): Henri Matisse, and Monet's "water lilies" have their own cabinets, Constantin Brancusi, psychic sculpture harmonies are appropriately housed next to a view of the city.

And then there are halls in which the nerves of the visitors with obvious provocations are strained, if, for example, a painting by the African-American artist Faith Ringgold 1967, a race riot, is hung with Picasso's masterpiece "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) together with a visible disadvantage for Ringgold.

it is Different with Frida Kahlo, whose "self-portrait with hair cut short, and" in the sparingly populated room between Meret Oppenheim's fur Cup and René Magritte's picture puzzles (psssst! Surrealism, even if it does not say so) suddenly becomes so much more sense than on an embroidered pillow.

A model for Zurich?

at least since the mid-fifties, the Moma is the taste-forming Institution of the world order in General. Not least because of the previously celebrated art-historical "Royal route" progressive individualization of art as a natural evolution postulated, which fell together so nicely with the political and economic mood of liberalism.

crowned the current attempt by the Moma, to lead the museums in a different, democratic, inclusive, solidaristic direction of success? Will be followed by other museums, such as the one just to jump to the other side of the home course and end-of-Kunsthaus Zurich, with their collection of hanging, and their attitude to the history of art?

In David chipper fields new construction in Zurich had it for experiments, at least space enough. Of course, the example of the Moma, which will be held in each hall in New York, clearly, can follow only houses with exceptionally strong collections. Since each exhibit must sit and fit, only then the Neuhängung can convince.

And so, you can get lost suddenly in a space, such as "Responding to war," between the dramatic canvases of Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann and José Clemente Orozco, and did not know that it Is well stirred due to the here is so powerfully shown, suffering, or out of sheer luck in the face of this fantastic art?

the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53. Street, every day from 10 to 17.30 open

Created: 29.11.2019, 16:22 PM