Henri Matiesse, The Red Studio (1911) and Alma Thomas, Fiery Sunset (1973). Image: Ben Davis.
The other thing that is interesting, of course, is that everyone who comes to MoMA to see the great Demoiselles d’Avignon, arguably the most essential textbook example of modernism, will also perforce, and in an arresting manner, encounter this 89-year-old African American artist who lives just a mile or so north of the museum, in Harlem. That’s a powerful way to flex the museum’s muscles in terms of directing viewer’s attention and educating an audience.
Although I think the more radical move is actually in the previous gallery, where we introduce film and photography as utterly foundational to any reading of the 20th century. Before, the museum had this march from Post-Impressionism to Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to Pop art to so on. It felt like it was an inevitable march of progress, and it was all about painting and sculpture. With the introduction of film and photography, which are the radical media of the 20th century, it changes the whole narrative at the museum.
So, in a way, Ringgold is a painter, and she’s fighting with all the demons and ghosts of other painters. But, in fact, early 20th-century artists were fascinated by photography. They were fighting with that, but they were using it. You know, the great Cèzanne Bather, which is often considered one of the iconic, foundational paintings of the Museum of Modern Art, wasn’t painted from a live subject—it was painted from a studio photograph. So right at the outset, even at the end of the 19th century, photography is being deployed for many different uses, including by artists.
Paul Cézanne, Château Noir (1903-04) , and Paul Cézanne, The Bather (ca. 1885). Image: Ben Davis.
Since you embarked on this project in the middle of 2013, our world has undergone some extraordinary changes: Trump and the rise of populist nationalism, the #MeToo movement, a piercing awareness of climate change, a powerful rejection of colonialism’s trappings, and ever more digitization. How have these pressures shaped the new museum?
They certainly were present in the way we were thinking. Like artists, like everyone, we live in the real world. We’re surrounded by the debates and controversies and critical issues of the moment. I think there was a real effort on the part of the curatorial teams that worked on these installations to be attentive to issues around gender, around race, around climate change, around immigration, and, for sure, the fraught politics not just of the current moment, but of the last century.
The 20th century was a very brutal century, rolling back to the First World War, followed by the Second World War, followed by the Korean War and the Vietnam War, followed by the events of 1989. We’ve lived in turbulent and difficult times, and that’s reflected in many of the works of art that are on display. This is to say, all of these forces are present to a lesser or greater degree, depending on the works of art we had in our collection that could make those issues manifest.
More recently, there’s been this phenomenon where people are not just grappling with the issues themselves—of race, of gender, et cetera—but also paying close attention to how others are grappling with them, and judging them as a result. In reopening the museum, was there any trepidation in terms of, “Are we leaving anyone out? Is there somebody who might see this as problematic?”
Well, I’m not quite sure how to respond to that beyond saying that anytime you do an exhibition—and it doesn’t matter what scale it is, whether it’s a single gallery or a whole museum—you recognize that it’s only a partial view of something. You can never be comprehensive in some absolute way. So, in a way, we’ve gone in the opposite direction and decided we’re not even going to attempt to do that. Instead, we are going to engage again and again and again.
The way we are looking at it is that, rather than thinking of this display—which sprawls across almost 170,000 square feet and consists of almost 2,500 works of art—as somehow permanent or even quasi-permanent, we think of it as a point in time that over a two-to-three-year period will virtually entirely change again. Critical works that people travel long distances to see, like Matisse’s Dance, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the Demoiselles d’Avignon, Monet’s Water Lilies—we’re not going to change those. But we might change where they’re located, and we certainly will change their neighbors.
The “New Expressionism in Germany and Austria” galleries. Image: Ben Davis.
The gallery that you mentioned with Faith Ringgold? In just over a year, it will be a completely different installation. And we want to do that for multiple reasons. One, we have all of these extraordinary works of art in our collection and we want to bring them out, to put them in conversation. And even more importantly, we know that there are dozens of issues that were left on the table when we made hard decisions about what to show in the museum. We want to come back to those issues.
We did literally hundreds of storyboards about potential installations, because the other thing we’ve done is move away from thinking that our galleries are purely sequential. Now, each gallery is a self-contained unit linked only by broad chronology, so you can pull one of those units out and put another unit in and it’s like substituting one chapter with a different chapter.
