Reading Response

Design History Society

7KH�0XVHXP�RI�0RGHUQ�$UW��7KH�3DVW V�)XWXUH $XWKRU�V���$ODQ�:DOODFK 6RXUFH��-RXUQDO�RI�'HVLJQ�+LVWRU\��9RO�����1R������������SS��������� 3XEOLVKHG�E\��Oxford University Press�RQ�EHKDOI�RI�Design History Society 6WDEOH�85/��http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315838 . $FFHVVHG������������������

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and Design History Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Design History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Alan Wallach

The Museum of Modem Art: The Past's Future

Introduction

Between 1980 and 1984 the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) carried out a far-reaching renovation and expansion. Following a design developed by Cesar Pelli, then Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, MOMA doubled its exhibition space, added a glassed-in atrium or 'garden hall', upgraded its dining facilities, built a new theatre-lecture hall, and vastly expanded its bookstore. To help finance the undertaking, the Museum, in an unprecedented move, sold air rights to a developer who erected a fifty-two-storey residential condominium tower (also designed by Pelli) over the Museum's new west wing.' Initially critics feared the condominium tower would mar MOMA's appearance; however, when the Museum reopened they were nearly unanimous in their praise of Pelli's design. The New York Tillies, in an editorial called 'Marvellous MOMA', pronoun- ced 'the surgery ... a success. A lot has been gained but the miracle is that nothing has been lost.'2 Robert Hughes, in an article in Timei Magazin'i entitled 'Revelation on 53rd Street', observed that 'perhaps there are no second acts in American lives. But there are in American museums, and this one promises to be a triumphant success.'3 Even Hilton Kramer, editor of the neo-conservative New Criterion and frequently a harsh critic of the Museum, concluded that despite the Museum's looming condominium tower, its mass audience more or less indifferent (according to Kramer) to art, the 'irksome sense of bustle and commotion' that made the garden hall a 'ghastly experience'-despite all this, the renovation had resulted in the best of all possible new MOMAs.4 Critical comment thus added up to a collective sigh of relief that 'surgery' on MOMA (!) had not been too radical after all. Instead of lamenting the lack of a fresh start or new direction, it tended to laud MOMA's deepening attachment to tradition. Kramer, for example, noted in the course of a some- times shrewd analysis that 'the museum's primary function [now is] to exhibit as extensively as possible

and as intelligently as possible the masterworks from its own permanent collection',5 and he quoted with evident satisfaction the words of Alfred Barr, inscribed on a plaque newly installed at the entrance to the permanent collection of paintings and sculpture, concerning the Museum's obligation to engage in 'the conscientious, continuous and resolute distinction of quality from mediocrity'.

Jo-Anne Berelowitz has observed that the term 'museum', as an encompassing signifier, 'must be granted the flexibility of a cloth that can be gathered here, stretched there to accommodate a form whose mutations are linked to the changing character of capital, the state and public culture.' The Pelli renovation was frequently explained in terms of the Museum's need for additional space, more efficient access, etc. Yet the renovation was also a 'mutation' in the sense Berelowitz uses the word, enacted upon the fabric of an institution that was, and in many respects remains, the most influential of its type. Later in this paper I shall argue that despite the opinions of the journalist-critics, their enthusiasm for plus fa change, the Pelli renovation marked a new stage in the Museum's history. To arrive at that argument I shall treat two fundamental aspects of what might be called 'museum perception': first, the temporal relation between the viewer and object in the sense of the viewer's perception of the time of the object, i.e. where the object stands in relation to the viewer's present; and, second, the related issue of MOMA's representation of itself, in particular the way the Museum building has evolved or 'mutated' as a signifier of the modern.

Utopia MOMA's history can be divided into three periods. The first, beginning with the Museum's opening in 1929 and petering out in the late 1950s, might be called its Utopian moment. During this period MOMA constituted its history of modernism.

Journal of Designl History Vol. 5 No. 3 ? 1992 The Design History Society 207

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Drawing upon then current aesthetic discourses, it subjected a heterogeneous set of materials (paintings by El Lissitzky and Matisse, films by Dziga Vertov and the Marx Brothers, etc.) to the systematizing and taxonomical procedures that characterize the museum as a cultural institution. This involved the division and classification of materials according to media (painting, sculpture, photography, film, etc.) and their further classification by styles through the application of aesthetic criteria. At the beginning these criteria were not altogether fixed. A study of MOMA during the 1930o would reveal a process of experimentation, of trial and error out of which there emerged a complex modernist aesthetic construct based on Bauhaus architecture and design, fauvism (with an emphasis on Matisse), cubism (Picasso and Braque), and surrealism. In the process MOMA produced a history of modernism that justified this aesthetic, made it seem historically inevitable [l].

Writing on the cultural logic of late capitalism,

180 JAPANESE PRINT d 1903 I"

f.t J 1n0e SYNTHETfSM G1`6 1,.851 l M-B ̂ G*._'hP NEO.IMPRESSIONISM

1895 1 95

d 1910

1A \ AUVI

SM NEGRO

SC9PT05

CUBISM 1910 A FTRISM MACHINE ESTHETIC

" ESi i FUTURISIM 191C EXPRESSIONISM ORPHSM SUPRMATSM / 1 SUPREMATISM

^ / / rni CON STR UCTIVtSM 1915 D94 MMS 1915

AES.S RACT)

^ DAISM /ELAST1R

S 191- NO PURISM STICISM

BAUHAUS AlBSIaACT) 1 4' J^ \ *<"? ^"'*

12 SUfREALISM I MODERN| 195 | h- ARCHI-TECTURE

135 NON-GEOMETRCAL ABSTRACT ART GEOMETRICAL ABSTRACT ART 13

The DEHELOPIENT of ABSTACT ART .,A ... ... . .. . .. ... ... .

1 Alfred Barr, cover design for exhibition catalogue, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936

Frederic Jameson has argued that an artist's resist- ance to one manifestation of capital can lead to an art of compensation. Through a Utopian gesture, the artist, in Jameson's words, 'ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses.'" Yet this Utopian move, while it represents an imaginative escape from the oppressive conditions of the present, is also unavoidably grounded in those same conditions. What appears as an escape from a particular stage of capital often anticipates a later, more advanced stage. This Utopian reflex may also apply to aesthetic constructs. It takes no special insight to see the MOMA of the 1930S projecting a (modernist) resolution to the contradictions of its particular historical moment, and this resolution being cast precisely in terms of capitalism's next stage of development-the unprecedented corporate expansion and modernization, through the applica- tion of advanced technology, of post-Second World War America. Of course MOMA was far from alone in its anticipation of corporate modernization. The New York World's Fair of 1939, for example, represented a popular version of a similar Utopian projection.

Probably the most revealing feature of MOMA's Utopianism was the new museum building itself [2]. Designed by Philip Goodwin in collaboration with Edward Durrell Stone and opened in the spring of 1939, the building functioned, first of all, as a unifying element, one that diminished or obscured the hetero- geneity of the collections and the diversity of experi- ences on offer. The building also proved to be MOMA's most representative artefact, not something it had collected but something it had deliberately created, the most potent signifier of its Utopian aspirations. The building, with its clear, simple lines and polished surfaces (the fa:ade's Thermolux windows contributed a great deal to its industrial or machine-made look), directly contrasted with adja- cent brownstones and other nineteenth-century structures on West 53rd Street.' This type of contrast was crucial to MOMA's developing aesthetic. The building set up an opposition between a present still haunted by a backward, Victorian past and a future of clarity, rationality, efficiency, and functionality: an opposition that was obvious even to the most untutored observer, as I can vouch from my own experience. When I was four my father took me to the Museum for the first time and later the same day we

208 Alan Wallach

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

.-T

. . .ii..

marched in the 1947 May Day Parade, which, as I recall, had as its slogan 'Two, Four, Six, Eight, Henry

, :.. .

Wallace '48'. MOMA became inextricably bound up in my mind with other emblems of modernity I was

??--

lnacl~d i th 197 ay ay 'ard wic, ,,,--"

recal, hadas it slogn 'Tw, .:u,--. S , ...t Hnr Wallace '48'~~"<m~ ::M beam Jiltiaby bun pi my mnd ith the embemsof mderity wI

aware of at the time: warplanes at Floyd Bennet Field; the Empire State Building; the streamlined IND subway train that brought us to Manhattan that day, so different from the First World War vintage trains we usually rode. I was thus made aware of the contrast between my Brooklyn neighbourhood of shabby brownstones and rundown tenements rapidly becom- ing slums, the 'fallen city fabric'" of the present, and these glimpses of a promised future, which I then indiscriminately associated with 'progressive' politics and the 1947 May Day parade-a last gasp, as it turned out, of the Popular Front of the 1930s.

The crucial point is this: the Goodwin-Stone building represented a decisive break with conven- tional museum design." It therefore implied a massive restructuring of the viewing subject. If the building's facade proclaimed a repudiation of the past and an exaltation of a technological future, the interior demonstrated the means by which such a future might be achieved. The Museum interior was turned into antiseptic, laboratory-like spaces- enclosed, isolated, artificially illuminated, and apparently neutral environments in which viewers could study works of art displayed as so many isolated specimens [31. Much has been made of the 'intimacy' of these gallery spaces.'2 Yet this 'inti- macy' also produced its own sense of distance. The museum space-the white cube which MOMA became famous for pioneering-contributed to a new aesthetic of reification, an aesthetic that redefined both the work of art and the viewer who was

3 Interior, Museum of Modern Art, 1939

** *** *** *"****** ~~~~- - -**** -" - '"' :: *' ^-------- .. ..:::; . . . . . . : :

.::.

.. .... . -

:..:::.; : : : :i :.; ..........

. .......: : . :.. :

The Museum of Modern Art: The Past's Future 209

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

prompted to gaze upon the work with something approaching scientific detachment. In this tech- nologized space, the work acquired its Utopian aura.

Nostalgia The 195os, the beginning of the second phase of MOMA's history, was the Museum's moment of vindication. Bauhaus-style architecture, which the Museum assiduously promoted, became a ubiqui- tous signifier of corporate modernity. The decade also witnessed the international 'triumph of Ameri- can painting', a 'triumph' which MOMA did much to engineer. In a sense, it was possible to say that the future MOMA projected during the 193os and 1940s had come to pass-a future, as it turned out, that coincided with unprecedented economic expansion and the beginning of the 'American century'. Yet this future proved to be no Utopia. Bauhaus modernism became Bauhaus monotony, standing for an imper- sonal corporate rationalism and the commodification of architectural form. The 'new American painting', as it was frequently called, was transformed almost overnight into a modernist academy. We might at this point begin to conceive of MOMA as an undertaking of a powerful corporate 6lite-an elite that, as part of its claims to dominance, successfully projected its own aesthetic regime of modernity. Yet what is perhaps most remarkable about this history is the failure of vision that quickly followed. There were no convincing post-war Utopias. The 195os marked MOMA's highpoint as an institution and the beginning of its transformation. For at this point, in accord with the cultural logic I have been tracing, MOMA began to look increasingly to itself and its past. Utopian projection was replaced by nostalgia for an outmoded Utopia-or rather, for the time when belief in a Utopian future was still credible. This longing for the past's Utopia came to dominate MOMA's practice as an institution. For a while the Museum attempted to maintain its influence on contemporary art-the Op Art Exhibition of 1967 was, arguably, a last pathetic gesture in that direction. Yet without a credible historical-aesthetic construct extending from past to future MOMA's influence was bound to dwindle. Today MOMA has little direct impact on artistic practice.'3 Instead, the Museum's activities are generally split between reporting recent art-world developments and main-

taining its permanent collection with the latter involving, among other things, blockbuster exhibi- tions (Picasso, Primitivism, Cubism, 'Matisse in Morocco', 'High and Low') focused on one or another aspect of the canonical history of modernism that the Museum promulgated more than half a century ago.

The history of the permanent collection under- scores the retrospective mood that, during the 1950s, began to take hold. MOMA's founders initially conceived of the Museum as a Kunsthalle, an institution primarily devoted to special exhibitions. Although the Museum began to build a collection during its early years, its collecting policy was deliberately limited. In effect, the museum attempted to overcome the contradiction inherent in the idea of a Imuseuml of modern art by de-accessioning or selling to other museums works in its collection that were more than fifty years old. Indeed, as late as 1947 MOMA sold twenty-six paintings to the Metropolitan Museum, works that, in Alfred Barr's words, 'the two museums agree[d had] passed from the category of modern to that of "classic".' Among these 'classics' were Cezanne's Mal ill a Blue Cap and Picasso's Womiaii in White.'4 Symptomatically, in the 1950s MOMA abandoned its original policy and focused more of its efforts on building and exhibiting a permanent collection. In 1953 it did away with the fifty-year rule; three years later it officially declared its intention of exhibiting a 'permanent collection of masterworks'. This decision led directly to the expansion of the Goodwin-Stone building which was carried out between 1962 and 1964 under the direction of architect-trustee Philip Johnson [4]. The Johnson expansion in effect enshrined the perma- nent collection.'5 During the 1950s, MOMA had at most devoted 11,000 square feet to exhibiting its collection of painting and sculpture. This space was now expanded to 19,000 square feet. The Museum also added a total of 6,700 square feet to house the prints and drawings, architecture and design, and photography collections. (The curators of these collections usually divided their gallery spaces between permanent and temporary displays.) The Johnson expansion thus more than doubled the amount of space available for the permanent collec- tion.16

Johnson's handling of the expansion provides further evidence of MOMA's growing attachment to

210 Alan Wallach

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

4 Facade, Museum of Modern Art, c.1964

its own past. Planning had begun in the early i96os, only a little more than twenty years after the completion of the Goodwin-Stone building. Yet in those two decades the building, and especially the facade, had acquired canonical status. The facade was now in effect MOMA's logo, an architectural emblem signalling the Museum's nostalgic attachment to the corporate Utopianism of the 1930s. Although in the course of the renovation Johnson slightly modified the original building, moving the entrance to the left and eliminating the few art-deco curves Goodwin and Stone had allowed themselves, he deliberately main- tained through contrasts of colour and structure a clear distinction between the 1939 facade and his two Bauhaus-style wings. 1 Yet if Johnson strove to pre- serve something of the visual contrast between the Goodwin-Stone building and adjacent structures, the resulting historical contrast reversed the original temporal sequence. The 1939 facade now signified MOMA's past-a past made evident through its opposition to Johnson's representation of the Museum's present. This contrast was not without its ironies. MOMA's Utopianism now appeared as a

historical relic, as so much failed prophecy in the face of Johnson's no-nonsense steel and glass designs and dozens of similar designs in the vicinity of the Museum: in effect the futuristic hopes of the 1930s overwhelmed by the sleek, banal reality of post-war corporate capitalism. Johnson's tripartite design thus produced a set of meanings about MOMA's historical situation and the significance of its collections that quite precisely anticipated-but also helped to determine-all that viewers would encounter in the Museum itself.

Forever Modem

MOMA's choice of Cesar Pelli to carry out the 1980-4 renovation was far from fortuitous. In an interview given in 1981, just as work was getting under way, Pelli acknowledged that his role was above all that of custodian of MOMA's architectural heritage: when you are working on a building designed by Goodwin and Stone, that has already been changed and added to by Philip Johnson, the issue is very different; thle functions, the ideas, the beliefs that shaped these buildings are still present today. Transformation is not possible."' Like Johnson, Pelli insisted upon the inviolability of the Goodwin-Stone facade: The primary reading of the new west wing will be a shiny dark wall, in the same relation to and contrast with the Goodwin-Stone facade as Johnson's east wing. The Goodwin-Stone building will continue being the symbol and entrance of the Museum of Modern Art and will maintain its now-historical relationship with the rest of the block as a white medallion on a dark ground."' Yet contrary to Pelli's assertion, transformation was not only possible, it was inevitable. By now the Goodwin-Stone facade had been dwarfed by its neighbours on 53rd Street [5]. It made a certain sense to preserve the facade or to create something on the same scale (it is about the largest rectangular shape that can be readily taken in by a viewer looking at the Museum from the opposite side of the street). Still, the issue was not purely visual-how could it be?- but visual-ideological. The surrounding office build- ings and especially the condominium tower, itself part of the Museuml's fabric, intensified the contrast between past and present, between Utopian hopes frozen in the past, and the unfocused dynamism of the late-capitalist present. Pelli was quite right to

The Museum of Modern Art: The Past's Future 211

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

r...: : . . ..

emphlasize that 'the functions, the ideas, the beliefs that shaped these buildings are still present today.' What he failed to add, however, is that they are present in a form that puts them just beyond the \iewer's grasp.

Johnson's 1964 renovation left the original lobby areas and the galleries on the second and third floors pretty much intact. Visitors still reached the second and third floors via Goodwin-Stone's modest stair- case located in a corner of the lobby. Pelli demol- ished most of the staircase,211 enlarged the lobby, and added his glassed-in atrium or garden hall, an entirely new structure placed against the main body of the building. Gaining access to the galleries is now a memorable experience. Visitors to the post-Pelli MOMA pass from the street into the lobby and after paying admission proceed to the garden hall. In other words, having first entered the old Museum (the facade) they then enter the Museum a second

time, but this time it is in effect the new Museum they enter. Their progress through the building repeats this alternation between old and new, between the space of the present and the (nostalgic) space of MOMA's past. In other words, the experi- ence of the building is now (literally) structured around a spatial dichotomy between the new Museumi of the atrium and the old Museuml of the galleries housing the permanent collection and temporary displays.

MOMA's garden hall or atrium 16] is representa- tive of an increasingly familiar form of public space, a space that is at once grandiose and overwhelming and yet barely legible. It is a space that tends to suppress older forms of subjectivity to produce, in their place, an experience that is at once impersonal and fragmented, and yet tinged with a sense of euphoria.2' Critics complained that MOMA's atrium, with its banks of elevators, polished marble floors and all-consuming light, is unsuited to the exhibition of works of art. For example, Hilton Kramer, in his grlumpy, moralizing fashion, observed that the atrium 'is sheer spectacle and gives the visitor a lot to look at when he [sic] doesn't want to look at art. 22 But isn't this precisely the function of such a space-a space that has been deliberately spectacu- larized (more or less in the manner of a thousand 'post-modern' shopping malls), a space that radiates a sort of free-floating intensity destined to over- whelm any object placed within it?

The Museum's exhibition spaces might be read as so many 'insides' to the atrium's 'outside'. Yet 'inside' and 'outside' do not entirely fit the situation: to cross the boundary from one to the other, to go, for example, from the atrium to the 'intimate' spaces of the galleries housing MOMA's permalent collec- tion of painting and sculpture is to experience a profounld disjunction [71. In effect, Pelli's design fur- ther distances MOMA's past-a past that thus acquires an aura of unreality, a sense of being sealed off as in a time capsule, since it is now experienced through the medium of the atrium's present.

Brief Conclusion

MOMA's inability seriously to come to grips with contemporary art has long been a matter of debate. Some critics have urged that a change of policy or a change of curators might remedy the problem.

212 Alan Wallach

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

........... .. il:il i,. \. ,

: '-.. --.. -,. \ .6 Garden Hall interior, Museum of Modern .: :::. '.::. Art, 1991

i i i

.. i " . .... . .

S... .

..... . .. . ....... . .*? .. ... ........ ; ....ii ,:

.... . .....

A.,l

J{

'"; t' '::~ 111 "

...........................................7 Entrance to the permanent collection, Museum of Modern Art, 1991

Ii.i.'. . . ,. ...

. . .... .. ..

....~ f; ..

i: Entane t te ermnet ollcton

-.::

-w . :.;.?:

' i

I B

The Museumi of Modern Art: The Past's Future 213

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Others, for example Hilton Kramer, have maintained that MOMA's adherence to a 'false orthodoxy', its attachment to a formalist art history, is the cause for its dilemma.23 If I have been in any way successful in this paper, such arguments will immediately ring false. The history of MOMA, as I have tried to show, is not simply a history of policies and persons but also a history of 'mutation', a process of evolution and institutional change that inscribes itself on the body of the Museum and on the works of art it displays. Such a history cannot be undone-and any effort, at this late date, to mitigate its impact has, in all probability, not the slightest chance of success.

ALAN WALLACH

The College of William and Mary Willialllsburg, Virginia

Notes In 1978 Carol Duncan and I published an article in which we studied MOMA using concepts derived from anthro- pology (especially the work of Victor Turner), Panofskyan iconography and Marxist theory. (See 'The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis', Marxist Perspectives, vol. i, no. 4, Winter 1978, pp. 28-51.) The 1978 article was the first to attempt a critical analysis of MOMA and it intervened in what had been up to that point pretty much a celebratory discourse. Thirteen years later, however, the article's faults are glaringly apparent. There is probably no reason to mount a full-scale critique here but I would point out that Duncan and I undermined our analysis by resorting to an ahistorical terminology of labyrinths, great mothers, nature goddesses, gorgons, etc., in effect mythologizing our materials; by treating the Museum as a latter-day equivalent of such traditional religious monuments as Chartres and the Parthenon and thus neglecting what is fundamental to MOMA as a modern institution; and by privileging MOMA as a unique ideological apparatus, which surely it is not. Consequently, despite its title the article failed to capture what is culturally and historically distinctive about MOMA as an institution of late-capitalist society.

The present article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Association of Art Historians' annual conference in London in April 1991. My thanks to Christo- pher Bailey for asking me to turn a lecture into an article; to my research assistant Alexandra Michos for bibliographi- cal help; to Liza Broudy, Paul Mattick, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Juliet Steyn for their critical response to the manu- script; and to Clive Phillpot for invaluable aid in securing information about MOMA's history.

The story of MOMA's tower deal is a fable of its time. In this tale of megabuck real estate speculation and high-powered political manipulation, art, or rather the glamour and prestige associated with art, functions as a catalyst. In a three-way agreement between MOMA, the City of New York and a real estate developer, the Museum sold its air rights to the Museum Tower Corporation for $17,000,000 with the proviso that tax income from the Tower would go to the Museum via a specially created New York City Trust for Cultural Resources. In addition to funnelling tax money to the Museum the Trust was responsible for the $40,000,000 bond issue that financed MOMA's expansion. (The Museum's endowment and the $17 million payment for air rights were used as collateral.) For brief and curiously deadpan accounts of these matters, see 'MOMA', Architectural Record, vol. 169, no. 4, March 1981, p. 94; Lee Rosenbaum, 'A new foundation for MOMA's tower', Art News, vol. 79, February 1980, pp. 64-9.

2 'Marvelous MOMA', New York Times, 13 May 1984, section 4, p. 22.

3 Timie Magazine, 14 May 1984, p. 80. 4 See Hilton Kramer, 'MOMA reopened: the Museum of

Modern Art in the postmodern era', The New Criterion, vol. 2 (special issue), Summer 1984, pp. 1-44.

5 Kramer, op. cit., p. 12. 6 Jo-Anne Berelowitz, 'From the body of the prince to

Mickey Mouse', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 1990, p. 82.

7 See Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism', New Left Review, no. 146, July/ August 1984, pp. 53-93; see also Rosalind Krauss, 'The cultural logic of the late capitalist museum', October, vol. 54, 1990, pp. 3-17.

8 Jameson, op. cit., p. 59. 9 For the history of the building campaign and a

discussion of the' decisions affecting the choice of architects see Dominic Ricciotti, 'The 1939 building of the Museum of Modern Art: the Goodwin-Stone collaboration', The Aimericali Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 3, Summer 1985, pp. 50-76; and Rona Roob, '1936: the Museum selects an architect, excerpts from the Barr Papers of the Museum of Modern Art', Archives of Americani Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 1983, pp. 22-30.

10 The phrase is from Krauss, op. cit., p. 11. ii In saying this, I do not in any way mean to endorse the

sort of ecstatic self-congratulation engaged in by MOMA and its publicists, who market MOMA in a debased language of 'revolution', 'miracles', and 'revelations'.

12 The Museum's director, Richard Oldenberg, wrote that Pelli's design would preserve 'the special qualities for

214 Alan Wallach

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

which the museum had been appreciated in the past: ... a sense of intimacy with works on view because its galleries have been neither daunting in scale nor exhausting in number.' See Richard Oldenberg, 'Director's Statement', in Helen Searing, New American Art Museumiis, New York, 1982, pp. 8o-1. 'Intimacy' has been a frequent refrain in commentaries on the Museum. For example, the New York Timies observed the following in an editorial marking MOMA's reopening in 1984: 'There was always a curious intimacy about MOMA. For all that its collections were formidable, its ambience was almost familial, and that intimacy remains.' See 'Marvelous MOMA', New York Titeics, 13 May 1984, section 4, p. 22. William Rubin, director of the Museum's department of painting and sculpture from 1967 to 1988, has made 'intimacy' an axiom of modern museum architecture. See his 'When museums overpower their own art', New York Tillces, 12 April 1987, section 2, pp. 31ff.

13 Photography seems to be the one field where the Museum still exerts some authority. See Christopher Phillips, 'The judgment seat of photography', October, vol. 22, Fall 1982, pp. 27-63; and Abigail Solomon- Godeau, 'Canon fodder: authoring Eugene Atget', Pliotographiy at the Dock, Minneapolis, 1991 (article originally published 1986), pp. 28-51.

14 Alfred Barr, 'Chronicle of. the collection', Paiiiting anid Sculpture iil the Miuseuili of Modermi Art, 1929-1967, New York, 1967, p. 635.

15 In 1973 William Rubin, who had succeeded Barr as chief curator of painting and sculpture, rehung the permanent collection. This has been described as the first rehanging in fifteen years, which would mean that the arrangement of the permanent collection after the Johnson renovation in 1964 remained pretty much as it had been earlier. It should also be noted, however, that the 1973 rehanging did not substantially change the arrangement of the permanent collection. (Information from Russell Lynes, 'Museum maker-Alfred H. Barr,

Jr.', Vogue, vol. i61, no. 5, May 1973, pp. 144-6, 196; and comparison of ground plans from Barr, op. cit., pp. 646ff., and a 1978 museum handout in the author's possession.)

16 For the information given here, see Barr, op. cit., pp. 637ff., 641, 644; Gerald Marzaroti, 'Is a bigger MOMA a better MOMA?', Art News, October 1987, pp. 64ff. It should be noted that well into the 1950s the curators frequently cleared the entire Museum to allow space for special exhibitions. Thus in the two years after the Goodwin-Stone building opened, the perma- nent collection was on view for only eighteen weeks. (See Barr, p. 633.) I would also note that as early as 1941 an Advisory Committee was complaining about the lack of space for the collection (Barr, pp. 633ff.). It is significant, however, that the Museum only began to take action on this problem during the 1950s.

17 The west wing pre-dated the east wing by fourteen years. In 1950 the Museum commissioned Johnson to design an annexe to house offices. Johnson complied by furnishing an orthodox Bauhaus design; Johnson's Museum's east wing facade was simply a refined version of the west wing. Thus from 1964 to 1980 visitors confronted two almost identical wings flanking or framing the original facade.

i8 Interview with Cesar Pelli, 'The Museum of Modern Art project', Perspecta: The Yale Arciitectural Journal, vol. 16, 1981, p. 107.

19 Ibid. 20 A portion survives as an internal link between the

second and third floor galleries; it is in effect preserved (like the facade) as a relic of the original Goodwin- Stone design.

21 1 follow here Jameson and Krauss's discussions of 'hyperspace': see especially Jameson, op. cit., p. 61; Krauss, op. cit., pp. 12ff.

22 Kramer, op. cit., p. 5. 23 Kramer, op. cit., p. 2.

The Museuml of Modern Art: The Past's Future 215

This content downloaded from 149.31.21.88 on Sun, 3 Nov 2013 12:30:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions