Mixing it up at the MoMA

Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC

In a recent NY Times article about the MoMA's newest Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Ann Temkin, I was happy to read the following from a woman perhaps more knowledgeable than anyone else regarding modern and contemporary art:

In the year and two months since she succeeded John Elderfield in the job, Ms. Temkin, 49, has been working to break with the past herself — most surprisingly, perhaps, in her approach to the so-called permanent collection. Ranging from van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889) and Matisse’s “Dance (I)” (1909) to de Kooning’s frenzied “Woman, I” (1950-52) and Andy Warhol’s “Gold Marilyn Monroe” (1962), this collection — or rather a selection from it that has been on view for decades — has done more than any other to define modern art and shape the public’s understanding of its history. The 26 rooms of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, which have housed these highlights of the collection on the fourth and fifth floors of the Modern’s “new” building since it opened in 2004, might reasonably be regarded as sacrosanct: the heart of the museum and of modern art generally.

But under Ms. Temkin, the permanent collection display is quickly becoming less permanent. Galleries that once changed only when works were loaned out are now subject to frequent renewal. For the first time, media other than painting and sculpture appear frequently throughout the Barr galleries. Artists who never quite made it into official “schools” are getting more play, and schools that the museum once passed up are getting pride of place.

Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture “Quarantania I” (1947-53)

Even small changes, like swapping out a single well-known artist for another, can make for major shifts in the museum’s familiar and stately narrative of modernism’s progress. The fourth floor, covering the early 1940s to the early 1970s, used to begin with Jackson Pollock’s “Stenographic Figure” (1942). Now Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture “Quarantania I” (1947-53) sets the tone for the entire era.

Ms. Temkin emphasized that she was not pushing for wholesale change. “I want the visitors who come back again and again to encounter new work, but some of their favorites will be there. We want them to eat their cake and have it, too.”

But her larger point, she said, is an art historical one about how a familiar parade of greatest hits is misleading to viewers. “I want to be true to the collection and what really goes on in art — that there’s more than you can possibly know, rather than the falsely reassuring view that you can get your head around it all,” she said.

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Despite the shifts, Ms. Temkin knows that some greatest hits, and some famous chapters of art history, are not optional.

Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” isn’t going anywhere. Room 2 on Floor 5, with Cubist works by Picasso and Braque, won’t be morphing radically. “This is pretty tightly choreographed,” she said. “We’re the one place in the world where you can see the development of Cubism all together. It would be perverse not to do that.”

But she is committed to a more experimental approach. “Some things may not work out,” she said, but “fear of failure” should not be an obstacle to undertakings like her unframing of the abstract works.