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A Great Opportunity for Twentieth-Century Art
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12901 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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5 / 1987 |
1,336 Words |
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James F. Cooper
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For the moment, the primary significance of the magnificently constructed Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for 20th Century Art, which was inaugurated this January at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, lies in its symbolic gesture rather than in any new insights it might now provide on the art of this century.
The wing's potential as a future arbiter on twentieth-century art, however, appears virtually limitless based upon the vastness of the twenty-two handsome new galleries containing some 110,000 square feet. Designed by the architectural firm Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates, the Wallace Wing is a museum-within-a-museum second in size only to the Museum of Modern Art. Some of its more impressive features include an indoor sculpture garden exhibition area that measures some 135 feet in length and has a roof with a thirty-foot-high skylight.
For the present, however, its collection of 1,178 paintings and 373 sculptures is dwarfed by the collection of modern art at the neighboring Guggenheim Museum, which is barely one-third the physical size of the new Met wing.
The new wing is named appropriately for Mrs. Wallace, a cofounder of Reader's Digest, who contributed $11 million toward its $26 million cost. Mrs. Wallace, who died in 1984, had been involved with Metropolitan Museum projects since 1948, when she was elected a life member by the Board of Trustees.
The galleries are deployed over three floors and can be approached on the ground level through the Michael Rockefeller Wing of Primitive Art, and on the third level through the adjoining Andre Meyer nineteenth-century European Galleries, both of which contain the type of art that contributed so profoundly to the development of Modernism.
For a more complete understanding of the forces that shaped the modern art of the twentieth century, it might be helpful to first pass through the nineteenth-century galleries, which present work of the post-Impressionists, Fauvists, and the Impressionists juxtaposed in a well-documented ideological confrontation with the nineteenth-century art of the Academicians and neo-Classicists.
Gaping Omissions
As organized by the department's recently appointed chairman, William S. Lieberman, the new wing offers a chronological synopsis of modern art that begins in the first floor Sharp Gallery with a survey of the work of Emile Bonnard and the Impressionists, and concludes on the third floor with the controversial art of Julian Schnabel and the neo-Expressionists. In between stretch the large, well-lit galleries that contain the heart of the American collection, which almost everyone connected with the exhibition concedes contains large, gaping omissions in almost every important category.
Several galleries are organized as a survey of American painting between the years 1905 and 1940 beginning with Bellows, Prendergast, and Glackens, and concludes with an introduction to the early works of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. Despite additional selections from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, donated to the museum in 1949 by his painter wife Georgia O'Keefe, the Americans seem completely outclassed by the Europeans even though this
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