Art & Design
MoMA to Organize Collections That Cross Artistic Boundaries
A 1963 work by Masahisa Fukase will be part of a multidisciplinary exhibition next spring at the Museum of Modern Art. Credit Masahisa Fukase
Within the Museum of Modern Art’s announcement on Tuesday of coming exhibitions were signs of a seismic shift underway in how it collects and displays modern and contemporary art — changes that are expected to have a powerful impact on the museum’s renovation
While curatorial activities used to be highly segregated by department, with paintings and sculpture considered the most important, the museum has gradually been upending that traditional hierarchy, organizing exhibitions in a more fluid fashion across disciplinary lines and redefining its practice of showing art from a linear historical perspective.
Next spring, for example, when the Picasso sculpture show moves out, MoMA will reinstall its fourth-floor galleries with works from the 1960s, mingling artists and objects from around the world — from a Jaguar to a James Rosenquist painting. They will be selected by six departments in a more experimental, intuitive style that Ann Temkin, a chief curator, referred to as “unlearning what we’ve learned.”
This new, less siloed way of doing business is shaping the museum’s renovation and building expansion with the firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro. Galleries could be more flexible and open, like those in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building. Perhaps departmental names designating the galleries could be eliminated altogether.
“All of these exhibitions and efforts to look at the collection afresh will inform the installation of the exhibitions in the new building,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the museum’s director.
“How do we become more nimble — willing to peel open departmental practices?” he added. “Yes, we can change. There was no tablet from Moses that said this is the way we have to be structured.
“It’s not ‘Painting and Sculpture,’ ‘Drawings and Prints.’ It’s the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”
This looser version of MoMA counters the conventional wisdom that has grown up around the museum, one that Roberta Smith, an art critic at The New York Times, described in 2010 as “a reluctance to question the linear unspooling of art history according to designated styles that remains the Modern’s core value and its Achilles’ heel.”
The evolving multidisciplinary — indeed, uncorporate — approach has not been tried by many encyclopedic art museums, although the smaller Walker Art Center in Minneapolis often shook up art-historical orthodoxies under its former director Kathy Halbreich (now the MoMA’s associate director).
Ms. Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, said the museum was “reflecting a more widespread shift from thinking in categories — or thinking in so-called canonical narratives — to thinking about multiple histories. Having a sense of curiosity, rather than a desire for pronouncement.”
There is evidence of the new approach in shows like the Jackson Pollock survey, which is in the print galleries and was organized by the print curator, but also features paintings.
“It’s changing the idea that prints are something secondary and instead are really integral to the artist figuring out what he or she is doing,” Ms. Temkin said. “That could not have happened 20 years ago here or anywhere else.”
Similarly, the show “Transmissions” focuses on the connections among artists in Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. Tellingly, the exhibition was organized by curators from a mix of departments: media and performance art, photography, and drawings and prints.
And the exhibition “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War” is in the print gallery, but includes drawings, photography, painting and sculpture.
Time was when curators seeking to use a piece of media from a different department had to fill out a formal loan form.
But for the last year, curators in all departments have been engaging one another in workshops to discuss coming exhibitions. “We brainstorm,” said Martino Stierli, the chief curator of architecture and design.
This boundary-crossing approach partly reflects a generational shift; all seven of the current chief curators have been at MoMA for less than 10 years. They have come of age in the art world at a time when lines are blurring — an artist who makes sculpture might also make video — when influences are less Eurocentric, and when top-down pronouncements about what is and isn’t art seem outdated.
“I’m not naïve about the fact that the Museum of Modern Art is a very influential institution, but I think the way we can be influential today is different,” Ms. Temkin said. “It’s not, ‘This is good; this is bad.’ It’s that ‘This is worth looking at.’”
She added, “And these things are in relation to other things — whether it’s putting works by women on the wall or putting a print next to a painting.”
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