MoMA’s Revisionism IsPiecemeal and Problem-Filled: Feminist Art HistorianMaura Reilly on theMuseum’s RehangMaura Reilly

Installation view of “Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape” atMoMA.

HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

During the 1990s, while pursuing my graduate art historydegree at New York University, I worked in the EducationDepartment of the Museum of Modern Art, where I led

ArtNews, 10/31/19

gallery tours of the museum’s permanent collection for thegeneral public and occasionally VIPs. At that time, thepermanent exhibition galleries, representing art producedfrom 1880 to the mid-1960s, were arranged to tell the“story” of modern art as conceived by founding directorAlfred H. Barr, Jr., beginning with Monet and Cézanne, andthen leading into Picasso, Futurism, Surrealism, andJackson Pollock. According to Barr, “modern art” was asynchronic, linear progression of “isms” in which one(heterosexual, white) male “genius” from Europe or the U.S.influenced another who inevitably trumped or subverted hisprevious master, thereby producing an avant-gardeprogression. Barr’s story was so ingrained in the institutionthat it was never questioned as problematic. The fact thatvery few women, artists of color, and those not from Europeor North America—in other words, all “Other” artists—werenot on display was not up for discussion. Indeed, I wasdissuaded by my boss from cheekily offering a tour of“women artists in the collection” at a time when there wereonly eight on view.

By the turn of the 21st century, the relevance of mainstreammodernism was being challenged and anti-chronologybecame all the rage. The Brooklyn Museum, the HighMuseum of Art, and the Denver Art Museum all rehung theircollections according to subject instead of chronology, anda much-anticipated inaugural exhibition at Tate Modern

presented the story of modern art through a thematic,genre-based presentation organized into categories (stilllife, landscape, nude, and history painting). Their displaywas non-hierarchical, non-centralizing, and inclusive,allowing for jarring juxtapositions like Henri Matisse hangingbeside Marlene Dumas.

For its part, in 2000, MoMA organized three exhibitions withthe goal of reinventing itself for a newly expanded buildingand positioning its collection as a sort of laboratory. Soundfamiliar? The three “MoMA2000” exhibitions were thematic,non-chronological, pluralistic, open-ended, and, at times,playful. As John Elderfield, then-chief curator at large, putit: ”We’re not replacing one orthodoxy with another. Wewant to show that what was happening until now was anorthodoxy.”

But these postmodern modernist endeavors proved to befailed experiments when the rehangs at Tate and MoMAwere almost universally criticized for their anti-chronologicalapproach, which Hal Foster referred to as “a post-historicalhodgepodge of disparate works placed together in lookalikegroupings.” In response, the Tate re-installed its collectionin a series of “hubs” and centralized works around four art-historical moments. MoMA also reverted to the mainstreammodernist paradigm: In 2004, a newly expanded museumre-opened with a return to strict art historical “isms,” with

the collection galleries installed almost exactly as they hadbeen before “MoMA2000.” Only four percent of the workson display were by women, and even fewer were by non-white artists.

Fast forward to 2019. With great fanfare, MoMA hasreopened after yet another major building expansion andhas yet again declared intentions to tell a different, moreinclusive, and less definitive story. While it purports to benon-chronological, the traditional narrative of modernism isleft intact (unlike in 2000), and the ghost of the mainstreammodernist timeline remains on the three floors, tracing arthistory from the 1880s to the present. The museum hasdone away with “isms” in favor of quirky oftentimesnonsensical themes and dumbed-down gallery headings,such as “Stamp, Scavenge, Crush” and “Inner and OuterSpace.”

While it might appear that history is repeating itself, themost exciting aspect of the new MoMA is the rise in thenumber of women, non-white, and non-Western artists onview. But while the collection reflects greater diversity, it stillneeds much improvement. Of the 1,443 works on display,only 336 are by women artists—making for 23 percent.(This does not include the Amy Sillman’s “Artist’s Choice”installation, for reasons outlined below.)

Installation view of “Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape” atMoMA.

HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

While some critics have found the new collection installationworthy of great praise and full of exciting juxtapositions, Itend to disagree, especially as pertains to the variousinterventions. For instance, in a room functioning as a virtualshrine to Pablo Picasso, with 13 early paintings andsculptures by the modern “master,” MoMA’s curators haveplaced a monumental work by African-American artist FaithRinggold. The painting from 1967, titled American PeopleSeries No. 20: Die, depicts a race riot in progress, withbloodied and contorted interracial bodies strewn across thecanvas.

I am thrilled that Ringgold is being given long-overdueprominence in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries. Shecertainly deserves it. However, I am disappointed in herplacement. Why is she integrated into a room dedicated to awhite male master? MoMA justifies the placement like so:“Ringgold based her composition on Picasso’s Guernica(1937)—the artist’s response to the atrocities of theSpanish Civil War—which she regularly visited when themonumental canvas was on display at The Museum ofModern Art.”

Positioned as she is, Ringgold is presented as a derivative ofPicasso, or as a supporting character. The irony is thatPicasso himself, in his desire to reinvent painting, borrowedmotifs from the tribal art he saw in 1907 at the Muséed’Ethnographie du Tocadéro. His Cubism was derived fromAfrican art. Is the placement of the single Ringgold in thisroom, then, MoMA’s attempt to acknowledge Picasso’sAfrican influences by way of an African-American artist?

The fact that MoMA chose to present such an interventionin light of the never-ending criticism of its own much-maligned 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art:Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” is all the moreinteresting. That show exhibited tribal objects from Africa,Oceania, and North America without labels or explanatorywall text alongside works by Gauguin, Picasso, and

Constantin Brâncuși, in order to show their influence uponmodernism as a movement. The exhibition’s curator, WilliamRubin, expressed publicly that he was not interested in thetribal works in themselves, but only in the way they acted asinspiration for the Western avant-garde. The exhibition metwith an outcry of criticism spearheaded by ThomasMcEvilley, who argued that the museum was really co-opting non-Western cultures and using them to consolidateWestern notions of quality and feelings of superiority.

Faith Ringgold, American People Series #20: Die, 1967.

COURTESY THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Regardless of whether you think Picasso stole from AfricanArt, with the Ringgold intervention MoMA appears obliviousto continued controversies that such appropriation stokes. IfRinggold based her composition on Picasso, who had basedhis composition on African art, is MoMA now attempting to

make reparations for him? Does Ringgold need to be linkedwith Picasso to validate her genius?

Given that Ringgold’s work of the ’60s was not influencedby Picasso alone—she was also fueled by her admiration forthe writings of James Baldwin, the paintings of JacobLawrence, and the decorative work of the Kuba peoples inZaire, to name just a few examples—it might have beenmore interesting to include her work in relation toLawrence’s Migrant Series, also on view in the museum. Or,more radically, why didn’t MoMA present an entire roomdedicated to Ringgold, with multiple paintings andsculptures, and then place a single Picasso work therein?

What Holland Cotter in the New York Times called “a strokeof curatorial genius,” I call tokenism. This was also the casewith the placement of a single Alma Thomas painting in anall-Matisse room. Is MoMA trying to make amends forwrongs of the past, which have celebrated an almostexclusive parade of white male superstars—and especiallyMatisse and Picasso—by showing an African-Americanwoman holding her own as an abstract painter? As AndrewRusseth asked in ARTnews, “Why just one? It reads astentative. Why not go half-Thomas and half-Matisse, andsee what kind of fireworks these two great colorists shootoff?”

Perhaps the best example of problematic curating is the

room dedicated to “Florene Stettheimer and Company.” Inthis small space—let’s call it “The Ladies Room”—one finds21 works, with 18 by women artists and three by men (twoof them by Marcel Duchamp), which is not to say thatStettheimer had only women friends but rather that thecurators decided to bunch together a random group ofworks by old and new artists who happen to be women intoone gallery. Stettheimer herself would likely not haveapproved, as most of the contemporary artists on display(Cosima von Bonin, Sylvie Fleury, Louise Lawler, RachelWhiteread, Frances Stark, Jutta Koether) have little incommon with her other than their female sex. Similarly, thehistoric works presented—by Sophie Taeuber-Arp,Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Hannah Hoch, andSonia Delaunay-Terk—make no sense within this contexteither. While these latter women may have shared the samehistorical moment, none of them knew Stettheimerpersonally. Why were they exhibited here?

The confusion is thrown into higher relief when oneconsiders who actually was in Stettheimer’s artistic circle,many of whom have major works in MoMA’s collection: ElieNadelman, Albert Gleizes, Alfred Stieglitz, Gaston Lachaise,William Zorach, Edward Steichen, and Kenyon Cox, amongothers. Why not a room showing works by these artists tocontextualize Stettheimer’s genius as a major avant-gardefigure of the early 20th century?

If there is one reason to visit the new MoMA, it is toexperience New York painter Amy Sillman’s curatedexhibition “The Shape of Shape,” the latest iteration of themuseum’s “Artist’s Choice” series. The large room presents71 objects from the collection arranged in super-closeproximity and at angles rarely encountered in a museum.Many are by overlooked artists who are no less brilliant thanthose who have been canonized, while others are unfamiliarworks by canonical artists. Like a cabinet of curiosities, thepresentation is ahistorical, non-chronological, andorganized according to visual or formal affinities—in thiscase, shapes and shape-makers. As Sillman explains in herwall text, “I wonder if, in fact, shape got left behind whenmodern art turned to systems, series, grids, and all thingscalculable in the twentieth century. Was shape too personal,too subjective, to be considered rigorously modern? Or is itjust too indefinite, too big, to systematize?”

Installation view of “Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape” atMoMA.

HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Organized as they are, a sculpture from the 1950s byRomanian-born Cuban artist Sandu Darie interacts visuallywith a Fernand Léger’s Purist painting The Mirror from 1925on one side, and on the other by a small 1962 paintingZimbabwean artist Thomas Mukarobgwa. In anotherdialogue, a small painting by Ulrike Müller from 2017 and atiny Marcel Duchamp sculpture are juxtaposed with amammoth, cavernous Lee Bontecou from 1959. In anothercurious instance, a Forrest Bess painting from 1949 hangsunexpectedly beside a Senga Nengudi photograph of aperformance from 1977. Many such intriguing, intercultural,

and intergenerational visual exchanges abound. Sillman’s isalso the most diverse of all of the new collection displays interms of gender, with 38 percent of the works produced bywomen artists.

Sillman has organized the works in a personalized manner,outside the confines of traditional art history. The objectsare presented context-free, with no wall labels. One isencouraged to walk through the installation with (orwithout) a hand-out with full captions. Doing so frees theviewer’s mind and eye to appreciate the multitude of shapesthat Sillman has organized for our visual pleasure. Ascurator Jean Hubert-Martin argued in my book CuratorialActivism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (2018): “You don’tneed cultural references to enjoy a work of art.” Our sensescan do the work for us. In recognizing that, Sillman’sinstallation has broken down the once-traditional approachto and viewing of art, transcending the borders of genres,eras, and distinct cultures. In her configuration, time is notlinear or long but wide and kaleidoscopic. Hers is anahistorical presentation, with no hierarchical implicationsand no consideration of borders, races, genders, or periodiccategories.

Sound familiar, again? Sillman’s display brings us full-circleto that moment in 2000 when MoMA was first attempting toredefine itself and installed their first collection iterationnon-hierarchically and ahistorically as “Modern Starts:People, Places, and Things.” Instead, the 2019 collectiondisplay is revisionist in nature. In what seems like an effortto address the sins and errors of the past, MoMA isattempting an integrative approach, inserting artists back

into the mainstream canon within which they had eitherbeen marginalized or made invisible. MoMA’s principle aimhere, it seems, is to revise the canon, to rewrite it—in short,to expand it to include what it had hitherto refused,forgotten, or hidden: women, for instance, and minoritycultures. While revisionism is an important curatorialstrategy, it also assumes the white, masculinist, Westerncanon as its “center” and accepts its hierarchy as a naturalgiven.

The Ringgold intervention is an excellent example. Theproblem is that with a revisionist strategy there is still abinary opposition in place. In other words, we must be waryof revisionism that becomes a kind of homage. Revising thecanon to address the neglect of women and/or minorityartists is fundamentally an impossible project because suchrevision does not grapple with the terms that created thatneglect in the first place.

In the end, it would have been more interesting for MoMA tohave opted for total transparency, admitting its sins andomissions publicly by presenting what one might call aseparatist agenda: an all-woman show across three floors(as the Pompidou Center in Paris did in 2009–11), or anexhibition consisting entirely of non-white artists. MoMAhas the collection to implement either of these scenariosand, if critical pieces were missing, it certainly has the

money for acquisitions. Even more radically, perhaps, MoMAcould have invited Amy Sillman to re-install the entirecollection. Any of those scenarios would have made for a farmore ingenious new beginning for the museum.