The Shock of the Modern

The scene outside 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue was chaos. At noon on Nov. 20, the day of the Museum of Modern Art's grand reopening, metal barricades penned in five serpentine rows of expectant MoMA visitors, all waiting in the rain for their opportunity to see the new building. Police officers and MoMA employees together tried to direct pedestrian traffic, but still anyone not waiting on the MoMA line was forced out into the street, left to their own devices to avoid interference with the Falun Gong protest parading up Fifth Avenue. Earlier that morning, the line had stretched from 53rd up Fifth Avenue, across to Sixth on 54th, and back down to 53rd. It both began and terminated in front of the MoMA building, stretching around a full city block.

But inside the MoMA, all was calm. The expansive lobby, though certainly bustling, belied the mayhem outside, where people were waiting on average an hour and a half for opening day's special free entrance. (The next day, ticket prices would leap to $20.) Surveying the scene from the ground floor – a level devoted to the shedding of coats, the formulating of plans of attack for the oversized collection, relaxing, and viewing the MoMA's original sculpture garden – Director of Security Ron Simoncini nodded, hands on hips. With a breath of relief, he declared, "the building really, really works."

And so it does: Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, in his six-story renovation of the MoMA building, has created an elegant, cohesive, and understated space. Housed in this location since 1932, and renovated a number of times by various architects, the MoMA has been closed for renovation since May 2002. While monumental and impressive, the MoMA's new building is nonetheless impossible to fetishize. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has managed to avoid overshadowing the MoMA's art collection with the building that houses it. Although Taniguchi's MoMA has been created in an era marked by lavish and expensive museum construction, its expansion seems more a matter of necessity than a matter of spectacle. According to Museum Director Glenn Lowry, the MoMA has about 100,000 works in its collection. A couple thousand, he said, are currently on display. The MoMA's collection needs this massive home, but it is not for Taniguchi's structure that art lovers will pilgrimage here – and that is a mark of his success.

Taniguchi presents modern art from the end to the beginning – top to bottom – in his new design. The sixth floor of the gallery is devoted to special exhibitions, leaving the MOMA's famous tale of modernism to begin one floor below. Two floor-wide permanent installations, "Painting and Sculpture I and II," wind their way from top to bottom, fifth to fourth. "Painting and Sculpture II" closes the curtain on the Modern's choice holdings up through Minimalism, the disputed end of the modern – or beginning of the contemporary – in art. While certainly larger than their predecessors, the fifth and fourth floor galleries in the MoMA maintain a tight warmth foreign to the large exhibition halls of some other new museum projects. The rooms in "Painting and Sculpture I and II" seem much more enclosed and traditional than many other new museum exhibition spaces.

Next, the third floor sweeps up and collects the messy outlanders of every art museum's collection: design, architecture, photography, and works on paper – art's beautiful orphans – are all housed in galleries on this floor.

And then we break.

After the intimate galleries of the fourth and fifth floors, the second-floor rooms are expansive, refreshing, airy. The floors are stone instead of wood. Much of the area is visible both from overlooks above and from the floor below. We have entered a different type of exhibition space, and a different type of art – the contemporary.