MOMA

I gave the much-maligned Museum of Modern Art the benefit of my doubt by signing up for a discounted “senior New York in May” membership en route to a quick tour of the current exhibitions. Taking the elevator to the sixth floor I entered the lobby area of temporary shows, where a mass of seated individuals formed an assemblage that could be titled, “Museum Fatigue.” I, however, was fresh and started with Degas pastels.

This was an interesting show, as it eschewed crowd-pleasing masterworks and gave us, instead, a view of the artist’s mind and working methods. Although there were interspersed occasional oils and etchings, the bulk was monotypes by Degas, which he worked on during two periods of his career. Most would normally be classified as experiments: monotype was a one-off technique in which the finished product could not be seen beforehand. Unlike an oil, the artist couldn’t keep tinkering until he was satisfied with the result; in the monotype the artist would try something and see how it worked. Moreover, Degas frequently made more than one attempt, so you would see a naked woman twisted first this way, then slightly that. That Degas was constantly breaking ground with his art, depicting subjects or the human body in ways not done before was never more evident.

That said, you missed seeing the kind of finished work we have come to admire in Degas’s oeuvre. If there were 100 works in the show (probably more), there were not more than 10 I would want my museum to collect, and none, except maybe the famous self-portrait, that I would want to hang in my apartment. That so many of the exhibited works came from major collections is testament both to the power of Degas’s name and the fact that having one or two of these is instructive of his working method. One room of dark brothel scenes was relatively unpleasant, both in the awkwardness of the bodies portrayed and their voyeuristic nature. Across a hall the counterpart gallery of abstract-tending landscapes was both cheerier and more interesting. Mia’s Degas from Bruce Dayton would have fit in this category, although it was missing from the show.

Sharing the top floor was a retrospective of Marcel Broodthaers, which told me everything I need to know, or will ever know, about the Belgian “non-artist.” Some of his found artworks, like his tondo of mussel shells, were quite beautiful even as they made you smile. Broodthaers went from idea to idea; some hit, some missed, but in general there was more going on than the casual visitor had the time or inclination to spend. I felt his art was akin to that of Gabriel Orozco, the Mexican contemporary whose work we had seen in slides earlier in the week at a PEN Festival dialogue with Colm Toibin.

Floor Five was the usual display of the Modern Canon, starting with Gauguin, Seurat, Cezanne, van Gogh – a nonpareil display that never tires. On my previous visit I had found the later works on the Fourth Floor to be a major letdown. This time, instead of continuing the canonical chronology, MoMA curators had put together a year-by-year survey of the Sixties, with one gallery devoted to representative works from 1960, then 1961, etc. This allowed a freedom to experiment and bring new works out of storage – not that these were the best by the best artists, but in an effort to show how the art scene changed as the years progressed. 1968, for example, featured a lot of hippie art – album covers, Peter Max, a tour bus poster.

The early years of the decade were almost a transition from the Fifth Floor march of masters – Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Oldenburg, Bontecou, big names all. As the survey moved to the mid-60s, however, the level of art dropped precipitously. You felt that the rise of the Vietnam War obstructed serious art-making – or maybe it was that art had to be too serious – e.g., political – to matter. By the end of the decade, the art wasn’t getting better, it was just getting bigger. Maybe MOMA wasn’t collecting in these years, but for whatever the reason, one felt this period is much better represented at the Whitney.

With my membership, I am looking forward to checking in more often in the coming year to see how MOMA continues to shake things up.