The New MoMA Is All About Surprise
A $450 million renovation and expansion adds room for visitors to breathe and to see more treasures from the permanent collection. Bigger, in this case, is mostly better.
Walking through near-empty galleries of the expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York on its first day of press previews, I experienced serendipity at the MoMA for the first time ever. I turned a corner and stumbled across a vitrine with Meret Oppenheim’s fur cup from 1936 in front of Frida Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Cropped Hair from 1940; I walked to the left and was suddenly in front of Henri Matisse’s superstar work, Dance (I), from 1909.
It’s a combination of paintings, sculptures, and time periods that could never have existed in the old MoMA, where chronology and media were rigidly enforced. Visitors would walk from one gallery to the next as the museum’s slow, steady interpretation of modernist art history chugged onward.