FOR AS LONG AS most visitors to the Museum of Modern Art in New York can remember, the permanent collection galleries started with Cézanne’s great Bather of c.1885, his stride forwards perhaps symbolising the leap the viewer was about to make into the bewildering pathways of twentieth-century art. With the re-opening of the Museum in November, the bather has surrendered his position to Paul Signac’s portrait of the anarchist-cum-critic Félix Fénéon (reproduced on the cover of this issue). This bold exchange, suggestive of the showmanship that animates the story of modernism, while continuing to assert its formalist traditions, brilliantly raises the curtain on the superb re-installation of the Museum’s collection.

The brilliance of the placing of Fénéon’s portrait, with its master-of-ceremonies panache, arises, in part, from its startling contrast to the coolly understated tone of its surroundings. Seven years ago, when MoMA selected the architect for its latest renovation, international debates concerning the design of new museums were at fever pitch. In awarding the commission to Yoshio Taniguchi, who had never previously worked outside his native Japan, and whose refined, self-effacing brand of Minimalism is the antithesis of modish grandiloquence, the Museum was proclaiming its own disengagement from these debates. It has proved a shrewd decision. Taniguchi has been widely quoted as saying that his ambition at MoMA was to make the architecture ‘disappear’. It is a mark of how successfully he has fulfilled his aim that the ingenuity and grace of his solution to the problems specific to the Museum’s city location have gone relatively unnoticed.

For most of the sixty-five years since MoMA found a permanent home on 53rd Street, its history has been one of incremental expansion as its collections swelled and as additional space adjoining the original museum building became available. Following the last major reconstruction by Cesar Pelli in 1984 it seemed unlikely that MoMA would be able to further colonise its landlocked midtown site. Only the fortuitous circumstances under which, in the late 1990s, it was able to purchase an adjacent hotel and several brownstone houses, allowed it to embark on its most audacious project yet, transforming its campus of buildings into a unified whole, now doubled in size to some 640,000 square feet. The old museum was ruthlessly disembowelled. Taniguchi has preserved only the 53rd Street façades of Goodwin and Stone’s 1939 International Style building (with its restored piano canopy), Philip Johnson’s steel-and-glass East Wing addition of 1964, and Pelli’s Museum Tower (the lower seven floors of which are incorporated into MoMA’s galleries), as a record of the Mus-eum’s past. To the west of these, he has made his own unobtrusive addition, while to the north, along 54th Street, he has designed a single, continuous façade of black granite, aluminium panels, and finely fritted, clear, and grey glass. Between these two axes Taniguchi has laid out his new mus-eum in a microcosm of the grid-lined city it inhabits. Central to this conception was his decision to reinstate the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden as the focus of the whole complex, reclaiming its south terrace and extending its eastern and western terraces. These are now framed by the giant porticoes of his two new structures, the Education and Research Building (scheduled for completion in the next eighteen months) and the David and Peggy Rockefeller Building which houses the new galleries. Pelli’s tower has become the Museum’s campanile and, to counterbalance its strong vertical thrust, Taniguchi has created a broad, low-ceilinged lobby connecting the north and south entrances of the Museum, and serving as a public pedestrian thoroughfare between 53rd and 54th Streets.

Seeming to float above the lobby is the most dramatic coup of Taniguchi’s design: a soaring, sky-lit atrium, rising 110 feet, around which are stacked five floors of galleries. This Pira-nesian space, overlooked by high balconies and sky bridges and pierced by windows of varying dimensions, articulates (in places, rather dizzily) the spatial logic of the new Museum (Fig.I). Spilling out into the atrium on the piano nobile level are the galleries devoted to contemporary art: three huge, double-height, column-free rooms which make it possible for MoMA to exhibit for the first time large-scale sculptures and installations, together with a soundproofed space for showing video and film projections. Four suites of galleries for rotating displays of drawings, prints and illustrated books, photography, architecture and design are situated on the second and third floors. The galleries showing the ‘historic’ collection of painting and sculpture, spanning 1880 to 1970, occupy the fourth and fifth floors of the new building, while the sixth floor is given over to two temporary exhibition galleries.

For anyone familiar with the old MoMA, the most significant change is the inversion of the previous sequence of the collection galleries. The decision to exhibit work from the last three decades nearest the entrance may signal, as the director Glenn Lowry has asserted, a reaffirmation of the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art.1 Nonetheless, first-time visitors will surely want to ascend to the fifth floor, there to begin a chronological tour d’horizon of the collection. Ever since the 1960s, when MoMA belatedly began to put its collection on permanent view, its installation has remained broadly faithful to Alfred Barr’s famous diagram outlining the entangled genealogy of modern art. But whereas the linear progression of the old galleries resulted in an arrangement that was unduly prescriptive and hermetic, their new configuration opens up several possible routes through the collection. A combination of both fixed and variable spaces, with multiple entrances and exits, introduces a welcome degree of visual serendipity, while never losing the thread of the story that MoMA was invented to tell. Although some of the intimacy of the old rooms has been sacrificed, there is a pleasing variety of scale to the new galleries, all of which have been auto-nomously conceived to give an account of a specific movement or subject. Throughout, elegant detailing provides the most sympathetic conditions for viewing: immaculate light oak floors; a three-centimetre shadow gap between the floor and walls which makes the latter seem almost weightless; and discreetly efficient track lighting. Only the pristine whiteness of the walls is perhaps a little harsh.

Devised by MoMA’s chief curator, John Elderfield, the hang, while consistently assured throughout, achieves at times – as in the rooms devoted to early Picasso and Cubism and to Matisse – an eloquence that is breathtaking. One of its outstanding triumphs is the way it constantly illuminates and refreshes familiar friends – not least the Museum’s most iconic work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which (newly cleaned for the occasion) has been released from its former poky chamber to take its rightful place in the marvellous survey of Cubism. If any criticism is to be made of the displays on the upper floor, it is of how much of the Museum’s holdings have been omitted: no Modigliani, Derain (post-Fauvism), Soutine or Balthus (all awkward customers); not a single British artist is included; and even the Americans, except for expatriates such as Man Ray and Calder, are apologetically relegated to a corridor. When the focus moves after 1940 to New York, despite recent attempts to fill some lacunae in its post-War holdings, the Europeans are short-changed. Surely the international influence of Joseph Beuys, for example, might have been recognised by the inclusion of more than a solitary work? Of home-grown artists, Jackson Pollock’s work is superbly shown, in a room to itself, although this somewhat detracts from the achievements of his fellow Abstract Expressionists. Pop art, which the Museum was slow to embrace in the 1960s, remains inadequately defined, but Minimalism is exceptionally well represented.

Although Alfred Barr initially envisaged the Museum’s collection as ‘a torpedo through time, its nose the ever advancing present, its tail the ever receding past’, for much of its seventy-five-year existence MoMA has had an ambivalent attitude towards collecting contemporary art, latterly becoming increasingly cautious in its endorsements. The sampling now on view has a deliberately provisional feel to it, in contrast to the synoptic overview offered of the historical collection; but the works in the cavernous new galleries are incoherently laid out, betraying all the signs of having been selected by committee. Likewise, attention needs to be directed to the erratic display of works in the Museum’s various public areas. Matisse might not have minded the placement of his Dance (I) at the top of a staircase – the second version of this decoration was intended for just such a position – but no Museum can afford to tuck away a painting of such calibre. The fastidious Donald Judd, however, would certainly have objected to the installation of his late, huge polychrome sculpture at a forty-five degree angle in the loggia to the fourth-floor galleries, thereby rendering it inert. And suitable works have not yet been identified for placing in the atrium, which dwarfs even Barnett Newman’s Brobdingnagian Broken obelisk and Monet’s forty-foot-wide water-lily triptych.

In anticipation of its re-opening, MoMA has been rapaciously adding to its holdings, and new acquisitions are shown off throughout the Museum. But it has also been disposing of some of its possessions at an alarming rate. De-accessioning of works deemed superfluous to the collection has been a long-established policy, enabling MoMA to acquire key additions such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Van Gogh’s Starry night and Picasso’s ‘Ma jolie’, all purchased with funds realised from the sale of works in the 1934 Lillie Bliss bequest, the first major donation to the fledgling Museum. But while this stamp-collector’s approach may be valid in the case of, for example, duplicate photographs, the benefits are not always clear when applied to the sale, for instance, in 2003 of one of Picasso’s 1909 Horta landscapes because a similar work by the artist was already in the collection, or in order to ‘upgrade’ the representation of an individual artist: Francis Bacon’s newly acquired late triptych seems a poor exchange for his Dog of 1952, sold two years ago.

The total cost of MoMA’s capital project is a staggering $858 million, of which the Museum’s trustees alone have contributed $500 million. In view of such munificence it would be churlish to complain of the prominence their names are accorded across the walls of the new galleries. Meanwhile, the increase of the admission charge to twenty dollars has met with widespread criticism. While MoMA is, of course, a private museum, operating in an increasingly competitive market, it is to be hoped that, at the very least, it can find the means to extend its meagre four hours of free admission a week. Unique among modern museums, MoMA has played a decisive role in shaping the course of the movement it was founded to document and in broadening its appreciation. The public should not be deterred from seeing this history so magnificently spelt out as it now is in Manhattan.

1  For the Museum’s own account of the principles behind its reconstruction, see Designing the New Museum of Modern Art. By Glenn D. Lowry. 56 pp. incl. 56 col. pls. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004), $9.95. ISBN 0–87070–163–0. Publications issued to coincide with the re-opening of MoMA appear on p.52 below.