The Museum of Modern Art opened its $450m expansion to the press for a preview on Thursday with a completely rethought installation of its collection, jettisoning the traditional idea of the Modernist canon for a more geographically encompassing, multi-disciplinary approach. While the permanent collection galleries are organised chronologically—starting with the late 19th century on the fifth floor on through contemporary art on the second—works from different movements and continents now jostle in the same space, with some time travellers thrown in. Before the museum opens to the public on 21 October, we bring you some highlights from the rehang.
Visitors entering the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art from 53rd Street will be greeted by a more open ground floor lobby designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that unites the Taniguchi building with the Jean Nouvel tower © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
Entering from 54th Street, visitors get a glimpse of the Atrium and a new commission by Philippe Parreno, Echo (Danny the Street), which the artist describes as a “sensible and sentient automaton that perceives and reflects” © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The public will be able to access the new ground-floor galleries, including the design exhibition Energy, free of charge © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The special project space on the ground floor, which is also free to enter, features paintings by the Kenyan artist Michael Armitage © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The fifth-floor gallery Around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon juxtaposes Picasso’s groundbreaking 1907 painting with Faith Ringgold’s large-scale painting American People Series #20: Die (1967), which was inspired by another Picasso work, Guernica (1937) © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The rehang does not mean that visitors will miss their old favourites, however, like Henri Matisse’s Dance (I) (1909), found in a whole gallery dedicated to the artist on the fifth floor © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
Monet’s three-panel Water Lilies (1914-26) and related works also get their own specially designed space on the fifth floor © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
Newly restored footage shot from a New York subway car in 1905 by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. As curators from different disciplines teamed up to exhibit an assortment of mediums in the remixed permanent collection galleries, “every department asked for a film installation,” says Rajendra Roy, MoMA's chief curator of film. “It was a shift way from the idea that everyone has to stay in their silos. To me, that's probably the biggest triumph.” © 2019 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
A fifth-floor gallery titled Responding to War has some of the most powerful artistic comparisons, like Rufino Tamayo’s Animals (1941) and Francis Bacon’s Painting (1946) © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
A fifth-floor gallery about Design for Modern Life includes Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen (1926-27), which she designed to reduce the burden of women’s labour in the home © Photo: Helen Stoilas and Victoria Stapley-Brown, The Art Newspaper
The artist Amy Sillman has chosen 75 works from MoMA’s collection centred on the idea of "shape" in the most densely installed gallery on the fifth floor © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The new Kravis Studio space on the fourth floor features the immersive sound installation, Rainforest V (Variation 1) and the electronic music performance Forest Speech by David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics © Photo: Nancy Kenney, The Art Newspaper
Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), one of the perennial favorites that museumgoers seek out, is on view with other works from the 1960s © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
Joan Jonas’s six-video installation Mirage (1976/1994/2005), created around the concept of transformation, is given a gallery to itself on the fourth floor © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
In a fourth-floor gallery exploring Architecture Systems, the portion of the façade from the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York frames a frenetic film by Jacques Tati, Playtime (1967) © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
Wifredo Lam’s painting The Jungle (La Jungla) (1943) hangs next to Maya Deren’s film A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) in the gallery Out of War, filled with 20th-century works by artists displaced by war © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
Visceral sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois are installed in the New Monuments gallery © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s installation Handles, which includes sculptures, wall pieces and the sound of birdsong recorded in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, fills the second-floor Atrium © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The very timely gallery on the second floor Before and After Tiananmen includes works by Chinese artists made around the 1989 student protests in Beijing, such as Song Dong’s Breathing (1996) © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The internet artist collective JODI’s four-channel video work My%Desktop (2002) is a “chaotic, arrythmic” look at “four different [computer] desktops absolutely running amok”, says MoMA’s Curatorial Assistant, Media & Performance, Giampaolo Bianconi © Photo: Victoria Stapley-Brown, The Art Newspaper
A second-floor gallery focussing on Downtown New York focuses on artists working in the “vibrant and affordable” neighbourhood below 14th Street during the 1980s, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Scott Burton and Keith Haring © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The second-floor gallery Worlds To Come includes works from the past ten years that “address historical traumas and their present-day echoes, while others imagine a more hopeful future rooted in multiplicity and diversity” the museum says. From left: Michaela Eichwald’s painting Duns Scotus (2015), Nairy Baghramian’s sculpture Maintainers A (2018), and Kara Walker’s large-scale work on paper Christ’s Entry into Journalism (2017) © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
The second-floor gallery Hardware/Software includes works that explore the representation of the human body through the lens of feminism, gay rights and civil rights. From left: Joan Semmel’s painting Night Light (1978), Maren Hassinger’s floor installation Leaning (1980) and Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. I (1977/2003) © Photo: Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper
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In pictures: inside the new MoMA
Before the public opening, we sought out some highlights from the rehang
11 October 2019
Visitors entering the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art from 53rd Street will be greeted by a more open ground floor lobby designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that unites the Taniguchi building with the Jean Nouvel tower Helen Stoilas, The Art Newspaper