Metropolitan Museum of Art Vs Museum of Modern Art
They were all there: the powerful directors of New York'south leading fine art museums, the tough tycoons and tasteful socialites who fill their boards, the blue-fleck gallery owners pretending to similar i another, the make-proper noun artists whose prices, these days, go in but one direction—upward. Information technology was the social result of the city'south frenetic fall auctions season: a big black-tie dinner jubilant Leonard Lauder's $1 billion souvenir of 81 Cubist masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. Prominent collectors from Europe (Plácido Arango, Lita Livanos) and California (Bob Tuttle and Maria Hummer-Tuttle, Beak and Maria Bong) mingled in the Met's Temple of Dendur with the likes of Barbara Walters, Princess Firyal of Hashemite kingdom of jordan, and erstwhile Earth Banking concern main James Wolfensohn. The Estée Lauder cosmetics dynasty was out in full forcefulness, including Leonard's younger brother, Ronald Lauder, honorary chairman of the Museum of Modernistic Fine art (and mostly thought to be the greatest art collector in the United States), Ronald'south wife, Jo Carole Lauder, their daughters, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer and Jane Lauder Warsh, and Leonard'southward sons, William Lauder and Gary Lauder. Also from MoMA: its director, Glenn Lowry; its chairman, real-estate magnate Jerry Speyer; its president, Marie-Josée Kravis, wife of billionaire financier Henry Kravis; and its president emerita, Agnes Gund, who told me, "I recollect information technology'south not bad that Leonard's drove is going to the Met, not that nosotros wouldn't have wanted it at the Modern."
Then there was billionaire financier Leon Black, who sits on both the Met and MoMA boards (and who is a stiff contender to succeed Speyer or Kravis at the latter). The Whitney Museum of American Art, which will open its vastly larger Renzo Pianoforte-designed new home in the Meatpacking District this spring, was represented by its director, Adam Weinberg, and the co-chairs of its lath, former Goldman Sachs vice chairman Robert Hurst and Brooke Garber Neidich, the married woman of former Goldman Sachs partner Daniel Neidich.
In tandem with its move downtown, the Whitney volition lease its Marcel Breuer building, on Madison Avenue, to the Met for at least eight years, in an arrangement initiated by the Whitney's chairman emeritus, none other than Leonard Lauder.
Might At The Museum
Met managing director Thomas Campbell and philanthropist Leonard Lauder with a few of the 81 Cubist works Lauder gave to the museum. From Contact Printing Images. Artworks: Middle, © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Gild (ARS), New York; Right, © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Non surprisingly, the 81-twelvemonth-erstwhile beauty-manufacture éminence grise, estimated past Bloomberg Billionaires Index to exist worth more than than $9 billion, was basking in the glow of what The New York Times called "a sterling act of philanthropy." In his remarks, Lauder said, "This is a gift to the people of New York." He went on to thank Thomas Campbell, the Met's director since 2009, with whom he closed the bargain; Campbell'due south predecessor, Philippe de Montebello, with whom he began discussing the idea several years earlier; and the pair of curators responsible for the exhibition of the collection unveiled that evening, Rebecca Rabinow, from the Met, and Emily Braun, Lauder'due south longtime private curator. ("Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Drove" will be on view through February xvi.) Leonard also acknowledged his married woman, Evelyn, who died 3 years agone and "always loved coming to the Met"; his sons, "for giving upwardly their inheritance"; his brother, Ronald, for his "advice nearly fine art and collecting"; and, lastly, his fiancée, Judy Glickman, a 76-year-old photographer, "for making me happy."
However beneath this glittering brandish of family and borough unity—the directors of the Guggenheim, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem were invited, too—the dinnertime chitchat was about the parallel rivalries betwixt the Met and the Modernistic and their corresponding benefactors Leonard and Ronald Lauder. In a review 2 days afterward, the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith alluded to the growing competition between the two museums: "The Lauder gift fills 1 of the biggest gaps in the Met's encyclopedic embrace. Long tentative about 20th-century art in general, the museum was all but prissy about Cubism…. Put more bluntly, the bully Cubist collection in the Museum of Modern Fine art is no longer the only show in town." Ariella Budick in the Fiscal Times posited the notion of a coming museum war: "With one magnificent gift, Leonard Lauder has vaulted New York's Metropolitan Museum from modern art weakling to global champ … [and] has given the Met a whole new area to dominate. At the very least, information technology has just challenged the ever-expanding Museum of Modernistic Fine art on its own turf."
Equally for the relationship betwixt the brothers Lauder, as a longtime family friend (and regular Estée walker in the 1980s), I can attest that it has never been meliorate. Likewise, the causeless alliances of Ronald and MoMA versus Leonard and the Met may exist less ironclad than people remember. It was interesting to notation that Jo Carole, Ronald'southward quietly influential wife, was seated to the right of Tom Campbell, with Philippe de Montebello on her other side.
"The Met's holding all the cards now," a peak auction-house executive told me. "It didn't use to be that way. Fifty-fifty the Whitney has the buzz, the glamour. Both the Met and the Whitney accept heady expansion projects. MoMA's expansion is non exciting. I don't recall MoMA is expressionless in the water, all the same." Adds Picasso biographer John Richardson, a 5.F. contributing editor, "The Met is upwardly mobile at the moment and it'southward doing everything it tin to be more than modern and more varied in what it has to offer, without vulgarizing things. And MoMA, an institution that I revere, is in a period of going slightly down in everybody's interpretation." (The Guggenheim doesn't figure into this competition, because, as one Manhattanite puts information technology, "they're expanding in Abu Dhabi.")
The ballot of Thomas P. Campbell, then 46, as manager and C.E.O. of the Metropolitan Museum of Art past its board of trustees, in September 2008, came as something of a surprise. And few could have expected that the Singapore-born, Oxford-educated tapestry specialist from the museum'southward Section of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts would and so quickly and boldly move into territory long considered the domain of MoMA (and, to a bottom caste, of the Whitney and the Guggenheim). Indeed, in passing over Montebello's presumed successor, Gary Tinterow, the flashy main curator of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary fine art, the Met's search committee (chaired past Annette de la Renta) appeared to be reaffirming the museum's commitment to its historical permanent collection and its reluctance to become more than securely enmeshed in the hyped-up souk of Koons, Hirst, and Abramović.
Throw MoMA from the Throne
Simply it before long became articulate that the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere and its seemingly unassuming director were on the march, and that MoMA, the world'southward greatest modern-art museum, and its anything-but-unassuming director had better sentinel out. Of course, that is non the style Campbell would put it. "I want to emphasize we're not trying to accept on institutions that are then strong in what they do," he told me in an interview in his function, where Warhol'southward Mona Lisa has pride of place. "The depths of MoMA's collections, the scholarship … what it brings to the 20th-century narrative is so multi-layered and nuanced. Information technology is the leading institution in the world in that field. Nosotros're not trying to compete. What we tin practise, what we want to exercise, is tell the narrative of the 20th century and contemporary fine art in the context of 5,000 years of fine art history, and our audition wants to run into that here. It's a different experience to seeing it at the MoMA or seeing it at the Whitney. Ultimately, I think that's why Leonard made his determination with his gift. He wanted to place Cubism in that longer arc—and his collection probably would have been redundant to MoMA anyway."
By the time Campbell officially started as manager, in January 2009, talks betwixt Montebello and Lauder regarding his Cubist gift had already begun, equally had their discussions near the Breuer building. What to practice about the Whitney'southward 1966 brutalist landmark was a major consequence for the museum. Heeding the calls of the museum's curators for more space to show both the permanent drove and the ever more gigantic works beingness created by gimmicky artists, the Whitney's board had conditionally committed to purchase a city-endemic site downtown, on which information technology would build a satellite museum. As Ballad Vogel reported in the Times, there were rampant rumors that the Whitney would abandon its uptown home birthday. In March 2008, all the same, Lauder, the board'south chairman, told the Times, "Like and so many architecture-lovers, I believe the Whitney and the Breuer building are 1." To brand his point clear, he gave the museum a cash gift of $131 million—with the stipulation that the Breuer would non exist sold "for the foreseeable future." Campbell negotiated the arrangements to lease the Breuer with the Whitney board and director Adam Weinberg, not Lauder, apparently to avoid the advent of a quid pro quo, along the lines of "Y'all get my Picassos and Braques, but you take to have my Breuer too." "Just the Whitney is an institution that's very dear to Leonard'southward centre," Campbell added. "And I think he was a moving spirit behind the scenes." In whatever example, the Met-Whitney agreement, concluded in May 2011, was a win-win for both institutions.
For the Whitney, the bargain allowed it to move forward with its downtown plans without having to worry about covering the operating expenses of 2 buildings. Two weeks later it bankrupt ground on its 220,000-square-foot futurity home at the foot of the Loftier Line, having raised some $500 million of the $720 million required for its construction and an endowment. Most important, Leonard Lauder was placated and his $131 one thousand thousand secured. There was a certain historic irony in the partnership: before opening her ain museum, in 1931, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offered her collection of American modern art to the Met but was turned down.
Leaving the Breuer, says the Whitney's primary curator, Donna De Salvo, "is bittersweet. I'chiliad glad the Whitney still owns it. It would be very dissimilar if it were really 'This is it.' But because in that location'southward all the same that possibility into the hereafter, information technology changes things. That was important for Leonard. And I think it's a good plan now. The Met gets to do their thing. We get to do our matter. It works."
"It seemed to me and my colleagues," says Tom Campbell, "hither was an iconic building, a performance museum infinite, keen exhibition galleries, just ix minutes' walk from the Met. Then, while it was evidently complex and there were many details to exist negotiated, information technology seemed a great opportunity for us to have a whole new space in which to explore a modernistic-and-gimmicky narrative. We take the keys in September 2015, and we're planning to kickoff programming from the outset of 2016. We've got half-dozen months to rebuild the offices on the fifth flooring and do a certain amount of retrofitting."
Eight months after the Breuer deal was sealed, Campbell announced the date of Sheena Wagstaff to the newly created position of chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. As chief curator at the Tate Modernistic, in London, for a decade, the highly regarded Wagstaff had been the right hand of the Tate's superstar director, Sir Nicholas Serota, overseeing more than 60 exhibitions on a wide range of modern artists, including Kandinsky, Miró, Brancusi, Rothko, Frida Kahlo, and Sigmar Polke. She was also securely involved in the Transforming Tate Mod Projection, collaborating with the architects Herzog & de Meuron on the museum'south new building adjacent to its renovated power station. In the same announcement, Campbell reverted 19th-century paintings to the Department of European Paintings, effectively giving Wagstaff costless rein over 20th- and 21st-century art. Or, as the Times headlined the story, MET GEARS UP TO BE A PLAYER IN CONTEMPORARY ART.
The Shock of the New
The new hires—and newsbreaks—kept coming. In November 2012, the Met appear that Wagstaff'south former colleague Nicholas Cullinan—a young curator from the Tate Modern specializing in international modern and contemporary art—would join her department in the spring. The billion-dollar Lauder gift made headlines in April 2013, with Lauder being compared to the Met's biggest previous donors, Michael Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer, and Robert Lehman. "In ane fell swoop," Campbell crowed, "this puts the Met at the forefront of early-20th-century art. Information technology is an unreproducible drove, something museum directors only dream about."
Last February, the Met announced that its lath chair, existent-estate programmer Daniel Brodsky, and his wife, Estrellita B. Brodsky, were endowing two new curatorships in Sheena Wagstaff'due south department, ane for Latin-American fine art and a second for compages and pattern (an area MoMA pioneered and in which it is exceptionally strong).
The biggest news came in May with the revelation that the museum was planning a "gut renovation" of its modern and contemporary galleries. The Lila Acheson Wallace Fly was problematic from the 24-hour interval information technology opened, in 1987. Even its architect, Kevin Roche, told the Times that information technology "never got built properly. I was never happy with what happened. There wasn't a clear programme, and it kind of just got put together in pieces." Information technology is hard to discover within the museum, the ceilings are too high on ane floor and too low on the other, and the layout of the galleries doesn't facilitate the chronological presentation of 20th-century art.
While the museum has not chosen an builder nor said how many hundreds of millions the project volition cost, Campbell told me, "It'southward going to be the most loftier-profile cultural building project in New York in the next 10 years." He anticipates having the rebuilt galleries ready in time for the Met's 150th ceremony, in 2020. "I'm hoping we will create cute spaces where collectors of modern and contemporary art volition desire to see their works as part of the bigger narrative, but as Leonard has washed."
Leonard Lauder's collection will certainly bring gravitas and prestige to the new wing, just huge gaps remain for that bigger narrative to fully encompass the movements that followed Cubism, from Dadaism and Surrealism to Popular fine art, minimalism, and beyond. In 2011, Times art critic The netherlands Cotter summed up the consensus: "The museum'south modern and contemporary collection … has never been one of its strengths. Its modern holdings rank far behind those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Its contemporary material has felt, at best, redundant in a metropolis with several institutions, big and small, focused on new art…. At its worst, the collection, with its erratic logic, has been something of an institutional embarrassment."
For a crazy moment in the late 1960s and 1970s, the staid old Met, under its populist, publicity-loving managing director, Thomas Hoving, and its first curator of contemporary arts, the plugged-in scene-maker Henry Geldzahler, all of a sudden embraced everything new and happening. Geldzahler, whose two best friends were Andy Warhol and David Hockney, staged the largest exhibition of contemporary American art ever assembled, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970," a survey of 408 works by 43 artists, earning him the sobriquet "the about powerful and controversial art curator alive." But during Philippe de Montebello's xxx-twelvemonth reign (1977–2008) the Met—founded in 1870 by a distinguished borough group led by lawyer John Jay—seemed again to disdain the new in favor of the eternal. In 1979, the modern and gimmicky area was taken over by William Lieberman, a old MoMA curator, who was focused on pre-World War II art and held that post until 2004, a twelvemonth earlier his death. The courtly Lieberman cultivated of import collectors and secured for the museum 81 School of Paris masterpieces from Jacques and Natasha Gelman, as well as more than 100 modernist works from the art dealer Pierre Matisse, the younger son of Henri Matisse.
Concluding November, Ballad Vogel reported that the Met's inaugural exhibition at the Breuer, tentatively titled "Unfinished," volition examine the fascination with unfinished "works of art in all media" from the Renaissance through the present. It will be put together by Andrea Bayer, from the Section of European Paintings, and Nicholas Cullinan and will open up on March vii, 2016. "It's contemporary through the lens of history," explains Campbell. "And it's history through the lens of gimmicky." Sheena Wagstaff notes, "We will exist opening the Breuer building exactly 50 years after Henry Geldzahler recommended to the trustees at the Met that a section of contemporary art exist formed. The Met's trustees, Tom, and, of class, I experience strongly that there is a huge potential for re-invigoration of the museum's date with the art of our time and what it reveals." Ane possible time to come testify at the Breuer: Jean Pigozzi's Contemporary African Art Drove juxtaposed with the Met's all-encompassing historical African holdings. "I think Sheena is fix to shake things upwardly," says Pigozzi, who, every bit a member of the Tate's International Council, has known her for years. "She takes chances, which the Met hasn't done much. It's sort of a crusty, snobby identify."
The outset major contemporary exhibition under Campbell, 2012'due south "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, L Years," was widely seen as thematically audio but visually lackluster. The following year'due south "Jewels by JAR," featuring the ultra-expensive creations of the Bronx-born, Paris-based jeweler Joel Arthur Rosenthal, was widely seen as a bit too lustrous. Roberta Smith chosen it "one of the most superficial shows I take always seen at this corking museum." The fact that the exhibition was organized by a modern- and contemporary-fine art curator, rather than one specializing in the decorative arts, and that Rosenthal himself was given so much sway over its pattern and lighting raised a few eyebrows. On the other paw, the museum earned the goodwill of Rosenthal'due south legion of fanatically devoted clients, including Jo Carole Lauder; Marie-Josée Kravis; Debra Black, the wife of Leon Black; and Nancy Marks, whose billionaire investor husband, Howard Marks, recently joined the Met board.
Marks had besides been wooed by MoMA and the Whitney, only every bit his interests extend from the 15th century into the 21st, he opted for the Met. And so did the hedge-fund king John Paulson (No. 35 on the Forbes Four Hundred list), who became a trustee in 2013 and whose collection includes Calder watercolors and late de Koonings. Perchance Campbell's most sought-later on board catches, because of their relative youth, accept been Colombian-American brewery heir Alejandro Santo Domingo and Samantha Boardman Rosen, the psychiatrist wife of real-estate tycoon Aby Rosen, whose contemporary collection includes multiple Warhols, Twomblys, and Basquiats. Some other smart motility: upgrading Vogue editor Anna Wintour from an honorary to a voting lath fellow member and naming its reconfigured Costume Center after her for raising some $125 million over the years.
The notorious "initiation fees" required to go onto the boards of the Met or MoMA can vary, and are treated like state secrets past museum officials. Wealthier potential trustees may exist asked for $10 1000000 or more. Most board members are also leaned on for hefty annual donations, also every bit contributions to conquering funds, museum galas, and uppercase-building campaigns. In 2004, the Times reported that for MoMA'due south last expansion 50 of MoMA's trustees coughed upwardly $5 one thousand thousand or more each.
Under Campbell, the Met's annual attendance has reached more 6 million, upwards from four.7 one thousand thousand, and nobody calls him "Tapestry Tom" anymore. There has been criticism from the political left for the naming of the new 5th Avenue plaza and fountains after the bourgeois Republican energy tycoon David H. Koch, a Met board member, in exchange for a $65 million contribution. Some see the retirement of the museum's longtime president, Emily Rafferty, every bit the loss of a tireless fund-raiser and social connector; others point out that her powers were bestowed past Montebello and after six years it was time for Campbell to accept his ain team in accuse. Some Old Guard curators and trustees are wary of Campbell'due south infatuation with the booming contemporary-fine art scene, and John Richardson detects a tendency toward micro-management. "Tom'southward a nice, bright guy," he says. "Simply he'south been pulling the reins in too tight lately."
But, past and big, Campbell seems to have won over most of the New York art world with his accessibility and charm. "I think Tom Campbell is wonderful," exclaims art journalist Linda Yablonsky. "He's everywhere I go. When was the last time you saw the director of the Met at a contemporary-design opening on the Lower E Side? Simply in that location he was with his wife, Phoebe, at Duro Olowu'due south opening. I asked him why he was at that place, and he said, 'Well, we're friends and I wanted to see his show.' "
"I'm impressed how the Met has changed its demographic, particularly with the new generation," says the tiptop auction-business firm executive. "Their foray into contemporary art really helped in that. But the strength of Tom is what's really challenging MoMA."
Modern Bug
As much equally Tom Campbell tends to generate goodwill, Glenn D. Lowry, the Museum of Modern Art's managing director of ii decades, seems to elicit criticism and controversy at every turn. And while the Met'due south expansion plans have been greeted with warm adulation both in the press and among art-world insiders, MoMA's announcement, in April 2013, that its latest extension along Due west 53rd Street would require the demolition of the adjacent American Folk Art Museum set off a firestorm of vitriol, much of information technology directed at Lowry himself. In an article in The New York Review of Books, titled "MoMA: A Needless Human action of Destruction," Martin Filler claimed that the small-scale Folk Fine art building, designed past Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and completed only 14 years agone, "has long been known to be a thorn in the side of Glenn D. Lowry." What's more, Filler wrote, fifty-fifty in his previous position as director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, "Lowry was known as a museum executive who brooked no opposition."
While most architectural critics felt the aforementioned way as Filler, in that location were those who saw the Folk Art brouhaha every bit overblown and an alibi for Lowry's enemies to revisit old feuds. "It didn't really work equally a museum," says Yablonsky. "The interior was mostly a staircase surrounded by 4 walls." Says another observer, "Everybody'due south furious, but nobody was going there."
Tellingly, Filler brought upwardly the 2001 exit of Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA'due south master curator of painting and sculpture, who was sick with cancer and would die two years after. "Lowry wasn't asked to participate in the elaborate memorial service for Varnedoe, underwritten by a grouping of MoMA trustees but held at the Metropolitan Museum," Filler reminded readers. He quoted erstwhile MoMA curator Robert Storr, who left a year after Varnedoe: "Glenn was jealous of Kirk in every way possible. Instead of letting his curators practise their task, he micro-managed and interfered in areas far outside his expertise and thereby blew any chance he always had to exist a bully manager on the order of [MoMA founding manager] Alfred Barr." Co-ordinate to Filler, the "troubling departure of two of MoMA'due south nearly admired figures … led to widespread questioning in professional art circles of Lowry'due south management manner."
Growing Pains
Lowry and his museum took some other hit early last yr when the architects for its expansion, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (their recent projects include the High Line, the redesign of Lincoln Center, and Eli Broad's nearly complete Los Angeles museum), presented their plans. "Information technology's one of the most hard jobs we've ever done," Liz Diller told me. "It's not tabula rasa—it'south surgical. It'southward like, as long as you're doing surgery on the body and you're nether anesthesia, fix everything you tin. Then, I call back the whole team, the MoMA curators and Glenn, is looking at 'How practise we make this whole organism piece of work?' " The present-day MoMA is the creation of five architects over the years: Edward Durell Stone and Philip Goodwin'south 1939 modernist box, Philip Johnson'due south 1951 annex and 1953 sculpture garden, Cesar Pelli'due south 1984 w wing (with the 53-floor Museum Tower condominium above it), and the 2004 Yoshio Taniguchi building, which opened to rave reviews just presently came nether criticism for its overwhelming atrium, its circulation issues, and its corporate atmosphere. Diller Scofidio's primary assignment is to connect the Taniguchi infinite—through the sometime Folk Art site—with the 3 floors of new galleries that MoMA will have in the 82-story Jean Nouvel Tower Verre, being built by the Hines evolution visitor of Houston.
For many, Diller Scofidio's plan, which featured a retractable drinking glass wall along 53rd Street opening onto a three-story-tall "art bay" with a blackness-box theater on summit, appeared to be radical surgery. The idea of opening the entire first flooring free of charge, including the serene garden, was particularly controversial. THE NEXT MOMA EXPANSION IS AS BIG A MESS AS THE LAST ONE, declared New York-magazine art critic Jerry Saltz on Vulture.com. More surprisingly, MoMA's former lath president Agnes Gund went public in the Times, saying, "There are a number of the states on the board who don't want to run across the museum get a mere entertainment center." One time again, Lowry took the brunt of the negative reaction. The news, the Times said, "brought to a boil many long-simmering complaints from art critics, artists, architects, and patrons not only about the museum's overall direction but too near its director." Lowry'south nemesis Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University Schoolhouse of Art since 2006, told the Times that Lowry "just does not empathise modern and contemporary art…. I fear some of the damage done is nearly irreversible."
When I asked Lowry about the criticisms, he said, "My response to that is Isa Genzken, Robert Gober, Matisse cutouts, Lygia Clark. Go down the record of exhibitions that nosotros've been doing for the final decade. It'south non about an entertainment center. It'south an absolutely cardinal commitment to artists that we believe in, exhibitions that we recollect are exciting, a programme that is varied from things that are easily considered downward-the-middle-form works to artists like Sturtevant that are difficult and non well known. Everyone is entitled to an opinion."
Jerry Speyer, Marie-Josée Kravis, and MoMA'south International Council president Sharon Percy Rockefeller have publicly defended Lowry. "I call back information technology would be a mistake for him to be influenced past a handful of people who accept personal grudges," Speyer told the Times. "Glenn could run any American company he chooses to run, whatsoever foundation … [or] whatever university." In fact, since the resignation of Sotheby'due south chairman William Ruprecht, concluding November, at that place has been speculation that Lowry might take that highly lucrative position. One of MoMA'due south about influential board members dismissed that notion. "We just made upward a new contract. We want Glenn hither until he's 65 [the semi-mandatory retirement age]." The 60-year-old Lowry earned $1.8 million in salary and benefits in 2011, and he and his married woman, Susan, a landscape architect, live hire-complimentary in a Museum Tower apartment bought in 2004 by the museum reportedly for $half-dozen million.
In a 2006 New Yorker commodity, "I Remember MoMA," Calvin Tomkins cited Lowry as "a dazzlingly constructive C.E.O., someone who could bargain firmly and decisively with the countless obstacles that confront any major building project in Manhattan," referring to the construction of the $858 million Taniguchi expansion, which almost doubled the museum's size and required information technology to close for 2 years and move to a temporary infinite in Queens. But, Tomkins wrote, "in consolidating the power he needed for the job, [Lowry] would also bring about significant changes in the highly unbusinesslike civilisation of the museum." Since Lowry became director, MoMA has nearly quadrupled its endowment, to almost $1 billion, and its mail service-1980 gimmicky-art holdings have grown enormously. "Glenn has done a fantastic job," says Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a longtime trustee and a leading collector of Latin-American modernistic art, another area to which MoMA has paid much more than attending in contempo years.
"Glenn is a good C.Due east.O.," concedes a MoMA insider. "But he's not creative. His force is organizational. He wants to be Alfred Barr, but he's not." This person doesn't remember Lowry volition leave someday presently. "He loves the power and prestige. And equally long as he'due south got David Rockefeller on his side, which he does, he'll stay." (David Rockefeller's mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., co-founded MoMA in 1929; David will turn 100 in June.)
Lowry has kept or brought onto the lath an impressive roster of super-rich collectors, including Philip Niarchos, Sid Bass, Eli Wide, Ronald Perelman, Wallis Annenberg, Thomas Lee, Michael Ovitz, Alice Tisch, and Leon Black. Like the Met, MoMA is on a youth kick (which in the museum world means anyone nether lx); among its newer board members are Highbridge Capital co-founder Glenn Dubin, existent-estate heir Lawrence Benenson, and Agnelli scion John Elkann, chairman of Fiat. (The Whitney's big arrive the youth-plus-dough sweepstakes is Lise Evans, the Norwegian wife of former Goldman Sachs vice-chairman J. Michael Evans, who recently joined Alibaba'due south board.)
MoMA's 2010 merger with P.S.1 Gimmicky Art Center, in Long Island Metropolis, rejuvenated its fading advanced aura and gave it an boosted 125,000 square anxiety in which to testify cutting-edge works. MoMA PS1 has its ain board, which is chaired by Gund and includes Diana Widmaier Picasso, a granddaughter of the artist, and Adam Kimmel, the New York shopping-mall heir married to actress Leelee Sobieski. Its 47-year-old High german-émigré manager, Klaus Biesenbach, known as Herr Zeitgeist, is also chief curator-at-large at MoMA and is seen as a possible successor to Lowry, with whom he is extremely close.
Loss of Trustee
1 trustee whom Lowry lost—along with his collection of some 100 works by Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Barnett Newman, Pollock, Gorky, and Picasso, among others—was California-winery owner Donald Bryant Jr., who saturday on the lath from 2001 to 2011. According to his married woman, Bettina Bryant, an independent curator, "Don was put on the lath" by then chairman Ronald Lauder and and then president Agnes Gund and was a peachy "abet for the curators," including Kirk Varnedoe and Rob Storr. "Don had been told he would exist put on the executive commission and gave accordingly (more than than $ten million for the last building entrada and exhibition support) and had also promised specific works by Johns and Kelly—but that never transpired. Glenn and Don could non have been more opposed on everything. Information technology really is a shame. I know Don tin exist outspoken, but he'south a really generous guy. He had said to them, 'I am thinking of giving you lot my entire collection and what yous don't desire could be sold to support underfunded departments.' But the relationship with Glenn deteriorated to the indicate where Don realized this was not the institution he wanted to marshal with." (The fate of the Bryant collection remains undecided.)
When asked to comment, Lowry responded, "Don Bryant was a generous trustee who committed a great bargain of time and energy to the Museum and was very supportive of our exhibitions and acquisitions likewise as our last upper-case letter campaign. Nosotros are especially grateful for his numerous and important promised and fractional gifts of art."
"The problem with MoMA is it'south got a very unpopular director," insists John Richardson. "And almost of Lowry's trustees were chosen for their wealth, as opposed to their knowledge of art. When ane looks dorsum at the days of Alfred Barr, the trustees were not all zillionaires. There's really but i trustee at MoMA today from the one-time days, and that is Aggie Gund, who holds out. To a lot of us, she's our heroine, for taking the stand that she's taken."
Gund's second tenure as president, from 1995 to 2002, overlapped with that of Ronald Lauder as chairman, from 1995 to 2005, and they remain the closest of friends. And while they backed the choice of Glenn Lowry for director, they were also strong supporters of Varnedoe and Storr. Since 1998, Storr has been a curatorial adviser for FAPE (Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies), which is chaired by Jo Carole Lauder and counts Gund equally a board fellow member. (I am besides on that lath.) Gund has already given or pledged most of her top-notch Abstruse Expressionist, Pop, and more than contempo artworks to MoMA. The Lauders have also been generous with gifts, going back to the late 1960s, "but they still have lots and lots and lots," equally one friend put it. Ronald'southward massive drove of medieval and Renaissance suits of armor volition almost likely go to the Met, and Tom Campbell is said to hope that is but the starting time of a relationship. "As well, the fate of the Neue Galerie is up for grabs," says the Lauder friend, referring to the museum of modern Austrian and German art co-founded past Ronald in 2001. "The Neue Galerie could go a province of the Met; information technology could become a province of MoMA. Information technology's unlikely to be in perpetuity what it is now, and information technology's a fabulous collection."
"Fourth dimension will tell" was all Ronald Lauder had to say about that when I interviewed him. He was more than expansive on the subject of MoMA and its competitors. "Nobody can rival what MoMA has put together in its permanent collection," he said. "And then, the question is: Is the Museum of Modern Art the slap-up museum of the 20th century or is information technology what information technology was meant to be in 1929—the museum of the art of today? The answer is information technology tin can exist both. It can be Matisse cutouts and Robert Gober. In fact, that's what makes it the great museum it is. We are still powerful in all the areas we accept e'er been predominant in—film, design, architecture. Even in painting nosotros're yet predominant. [MoMA curators] Ann Temkin and Anne Umland are doing a Picasso sculpture prove side by side year that I'm sure will be fabled. I think it's skillful that these other museums are doing some of these shows, besides, because information technology'due south not possible for MoMA to do all of them." Every bit for criticism that the board is dominated by real-manor developers and Wall Street financiers, Lauder said, "I think Jerry Speyer is doing a nifty job. The people who nerveless modern art early were businessmen, too—Bill Paley, Jock Whitney, the Rockefellers."
Lauder became almost wistful as he continued about MoMA'southward history, which he has been function of for nearly v decades: "Under Alfred Barr and Bill Rubin, who was my mentor, nosotros heard the words 'permanent drove' often: Which works practice you need for the permanent collection? What is missing in the permanent drove? Today you hear the words 'contemporary art.' Information technology'due south role of the process of the marketplace, and of changing times." Regarding MoMA's proposed expansion plans, Lauder said, "The garden should non be open to the public. The board feels that way."
By the time I interviewed Glenn Lowry, in November, those plans were in flux. "We heard a lot of feedback at the time we announced the potential opening of the garden to the public, from people who were genuinely concerned that that would alter its unique quality," he said. "And so nosotros're thinking it through." The entire program, he said, is "nevertheless simply in what's called the early on schematic stage. Nosotros're taking our time, because we want to become it right." Liz Diller told me that the retractable glass wall is "no longer there" and that a more developed design should be prepare later this wintertime. I too interviewed three top MoMA curators—Klaus Biesenbach, Ann Temkin, and Laura Hoptman—all of whom emphasized the museum's desperate need for more space. The expansion plan will provide 40,000 more square feet of galleries. "Nosotros speak with one vocalization," Biesenbach told me, explaining that the chief curators run across every two weeks for a half-mean solar day retreat "to call up about the architecture and to provide parameters for what we call back is needed to pay tribute to the ever growing collection. If you lot're interested in contemporary art, you take to grow. Otherwise, you accept to stop collecting."
Among painters, sculptors, and other "object-makers," and those who show, sell, and collect their work, the suspicion is that the vocalization that will be heard loudest is that of Biesenbach, the human being who brought Marina Abramović's staredowns and naked guardians to MoMA. (Not to mention Tilda Swinton's sleepovers.) That Diller Scofidio + Renfro is known for creating socially interactive spaces has only heightened these fears. This, not the Folk Art Museum teardown, may be the existent crux of the controversy over the museum's expansion plans. Biesenbach is undeterred: he has a Björk retrospective opening in March, to exist followed by a Yoko Ono show in May. "For me Björk and Kraftwerk [who showed at MoMA in 2012] are equally important as Doug Aitken and Julian Schnabel and Matthew Barney," he said. "They're groundbreaking artists of their generation, and that's the reason I'm doing these exhibitions." In Dec, MoMA opened "The Forever Now," curated by Laura Hoptman and featuring paintings past 17 artists, among them Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Kerstin Brätsch, Joe Bradley, and Marker Grotjahn. Information technology was the first survey exhibition of contemporary painting mounted at MoMA in several decades.
Art and Soul
The new Whitney will open on May i with the largest display ever of its permanent collection, filling more than sixty,000 foursquare feet of indoor and outdoor space with everything from Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper to Cindy Sherman and Vik Muniz. Adam Weinberg says of the new building, "I desire people to say it feels similar the Whitney, whatever that ways … that information technology feels right for the site. That information technology has a sense of adventurousness and openness, but is non just a total fantasy space. Information technology has Renzo's sense of refinement and intendance. But we didn't want slick, sleek, cold, or anything like that." When asked well-nigh the heightened competition among the iii New York museums that are aggressively expanding their contemporary-art collections and the existent estate to business firm them, Weinberg is suitably modest. "It'southward a peachy moment for all of the museums in New York and for the arts community. We're all in a much larger cultural project here—to support artists and fine art. That's the bottom line."
Lowry takes the high road, too: "I call back having both the Met and MoMA often interested in similar artists, if not the same artists, offers a unique opportunity to encounter those artists either as function of a long historical continuum, which is what the Met can bring to the game, or through the filter of the present, which is what we can bring to the game. That's a huge win for New Yorkers."
"It will be cast equally a rivalry," says Campbell. "Inevitably, sometimes nosotros're frenemies, because we're working on mutual ground. We have donors and supporters in common, but I recollect nosotros've got very complementary goals. I'm a great laic in the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats."
Possibly I should exit the concluding word to the Über-dealer Larry Gagosian: "I love expansion!"
Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/02/met-moma-museum-war
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