Museum without a soul

Roger Kimball on how Yoshio Taniguchi has transformed New York’s Museum of Modern Art

We are told that our individualist art has touched its limit, and its expression can go no further. That’s often been said; but if it cannot go further, it may still go elsewhere.
André Malraux, The Voices of Silence

‘An institution,’ said Emerson, ‘is the lengthened shadow of one man.’ In the case of the Museum of Modern Art, the man in question is Alfred H. Barr (1902–81). Barr founded MOMA (the acronym by which the museum is universally known) in 1929. From then until Barr’s retirement in 1967, MOMA was to an extraordinary extent the incarnation of the modernist vision that Barr — along with a handful of collaborators — had formulated in the Twenties and early Thirties.

Barr’s idea of Modernism — his idea of how the visual arts might be most vitally integrated into modern life — was complex and multi-faceted. But at its core were two radical (as they seemed then) ideas. One involved rearranging the constellation of the arts so that design, architecture, and photography had (at least in theory) a claim on our attention equal to that exerted by painting and sculpture. Barr’s second conviction had to do with formal aesthetic values.

Just as Barr’s vision of Modernism granted a certain parity among the arts, so he assumed that the expressive novelties of the early 20th-century avant-garde had forged a place in the universe of aesthetic achievement that was equal to the artistic achievements of the past.

It sounds tame now. But at the time it was a seductively revolutionary idea. Barr came of age at a moment when aesthetic passion seemed to offer a vital response to the diminishments of modernity. ‘All art,’ Malraux wrote in the 1940s, ‘is a revolt against man’s fate.’