Museum of Modern Art gains new space, style

By Stevenson Swanson
Chicago Tribune

ZACK SECKLER / AP A woman walks past Richard Serra's "Cutting Device: Base Plate-Measure" at the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York. It reopens to the public Saturday after a two-year renovation during which its collection was housed in a former factory in Queens.

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NEW YORK — Returning from two years of self-imposed exile in Queens, the Museum of Modern Art unveiled its new midtown Manhattan quarters yesterday, a $425 million glass-and-granite temple to house the most-famous collection of modern art in the world.

With a stunning six-story atrium and floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the interior with light, the new MoMA, as the museum is known to art lovers, is a far cry from the crowded and sometimes confusing museum it replaces.

The new building, with 66 percent more space, gives MoMA the ability to spread out its priceless collection on vast white walls spread over six stories, including galleries for special exhibitions.

In a towering second-floor lobby, one of Claude Monet's Impressionist paintings of water lilies stretches for 50 feet, while an even longer painting — James Rosenquist's 1965 painting of an F-111 fighter jet — dominates a sixth-floor wall. It was too big to fit in the old MoMA, museum director Glenn Lowry said.

The museum, which opens to the public on Saturday, relocated much of its permanent collection in 2002 to a former stapler factory in Queens while the renovation and expansion project was under way. MoMA will now use that facility for storage and to house research materials.

In designing MoMA's new quarters, Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi faced the formidable challenge of renovating the museum's famous 1939 facade on West 53rd Street, incorporating a 1984 addition and adding substantial new space on the site of an old hotel that the museum purchased and demolished.

Unlike other recent museum projects, most notably Frank Gehry's flamboyant Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the new MoMA is an exercise in architectural restraint.

"Architecture should not compete with the work of art," Taniguchi said. "The architecture should disappear."

Total cost of the new construction, renovation of old space, converting the Queens factory and other building projects came to $858 million, of which the museum has raised $725 million.

Previously, the museum's collection of works by Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and a host of American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns was laid out in a series of galleries that left visitors little option for the order in which they saw the art.
 
Modern art, the museum's curators seemed to be saying, was an inevitable outgrowth of the Impressionism and Post-impressionism of late-19th-century art, and its development followed a path as logical as a mathematical formula.

MoMA's collections are now arranged in galleries that open in more than one direction, allowing visitors to wander freely.

But the new MoMA comes at a price. Admission has increased from $12 to $20, one of the highest museum entry fees in the nation. Although Saturday's opening will be free of charge and the museum will have four hours of free admission every Friday evening, artist Orly Cogan stood outside the museum yesterday, handing out fliers calling on the museum to increase the number of free hours.

"It's going to become this inaccessible thing," said Cogan, 33, who described her work as figurative embroidery. "People are going to forgo it."