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MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art: poor choices

This is a long, dreary, shapeless exhib­ition that marches doggedly through almost every style and ends nowhere­.

Edward Hopper’s Gas, 1940. All images from MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria.
Edward Hopper’s Gas, 1940. All images from MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria.

There have been some very good exhib­itions in the Melbourne Winter Master­pieces series at the National Gallery of Victoria. The benchmark for excellence was set two years ago with a remarkable survey of the work of Edgar Degas: for once a presentation of an outstanding figure in the history of modern art for which we didn’t have to make excuses, for once a show that included all the works you might want to put into a lecture to give a proper­ly rounded view of the artist in question.

Last year it was back to the excuses with a rather lacklustre van Gogh exhibition, overfilled with early and minor pictures and confusingly laid out, partly to mask the paucity of work from the very short period of his artistic maturity­. Nonetheless, such is the power of names that this mediocre exhibition sold more tickets than any other in the gallery’s history.

In 2015 it was Masterpieces from the Hermitage, a mixed collection that included some good work and with the added interest of a focus on Catherine the Great; in 2014, the Prado exhibition was outstanding, far better in quality than the Prado show in Brisbane in 2012; 2011 was Vienna: Art and Design; 2010 was European masters from the Staedel, and so on.

This year, it’s once again a selection of work from an institution that has closed part of its ­exhibition space for renovations. But for all the hype, this show is oddly dis­appointing. In contrast, some years ago New York’s Museum­ of Modern Art presented two well-curated­ shows at the Art Gallery of Western Australia: Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters (2012) and van Gogh, Dali and Beyond (2013).

One would have expected a MoMA blockbuster designed for the NGV to surpass these smaller shows in Perth. But it falls far short: it is a long, dreary and shapeless exhib­ition that starts arbitrarily at the neo-impressionists and post-impressionists, marches doggedly through almost every style of the 20th century and ends nowhere­ in particular. It is too big, too superficial, too mediocre in quality and presents a far less engaging survey of modernism than the NGV’s own permanent collection upstairs.

One problem is the insistence on including everything: thus there are lot of minor individuals not strong enough to stand up for themselves in the museological equivalent of a peak-hour crowd rushing to catch the train home.

Most artists are represented by single works, as though the ordinary visitor could make any sense of one Gauguin picture by itself, or perhaps­ even worse, next to a Cezanne, a van Gogh and a Seurat. These four artists occupy the first wall as we enter, but how the ordinary viewer is to make any link between them, or understand what motivates their entirely different styles, is a mystery. What complicates matter­s is that while the Cezanne is a good one, the Gauguin and the van Gogh are far from their best work, and the Seurat, though beautiful, is not a good example to use in explaining the meaning of his style to a novice.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge (1891-92).
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge (1891-92).

Inside, there are some fine works, among the first of which is Toulouse-Lautrec’s unforgettable image of La Goulue arriving at the Moulin­ Rouge, a thin and plain woman, dissolute, half-defiant and half-absent, and yet who will soon be seducing the audience with the dancing that Lautrec also immortalised on a famous poster. Nearby is a Matisse figure study that would be interesting to include in a larger selection of his work, but serves next to no useful purpose here. Does it give any sense of the colours­ of fauvism? Or of Matisse’s love of rhythm and movement?

The next room contains another of the few outstanding pieces, a small oval composition by Picasso, The Architect’s Table (1912): his cubist pictures of this period explore and deconstruct pictorial space, but this one, perhaps because­ of the architectural allusion, seems to go a little further, suggesting a flattened and compacted version of one of Piranesi’s imaginary prisons.

Next to it is a very weak piece by Braque and on the opposite wall, beside his model of the Villa Savoye (1928-31), is a charcoal drawing by Le Corbusier in which he has sketched and then crossed out the classical orders and pediments, scrawling below in French, “this is not architecture, these are styles; living and magnificent in their origin, they are no more than corpses”.

Other highlights include Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a film consumed by a passion to record the whole of life as it rushes by, evoked by ceaseless clatter of the wheels of trains and other machines, corresponding to the spool of the camera’s own film in a self-referentiality evoked by images of Vertov and his crew.

From the same period but far quieter are two drawings by Malevich: one a circle inside a square, the other of two squares. What is most absorbin­g is not their design so much as the painstaking, almost obsessive realisation in the pencil, the marks of which are still discernible.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931).
Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931).

The most famous picture in the exhibition is Dali’s tiny but memorable The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its melting watches and pathetically­ deflated self-portrait lying on the beach. In the next room is a relatively minor but interesting Magritte: a table set for lunch, with a bottle of wine and a tumbler, and on the plate a slice of ham with an eye staring at us.

Rene Magritte, The Portrait (1935).
Rene Magritte, The Portrait (1935).

The work, The Portrait (1935), is evidently based on a pun: oeufs sur le plat is French for fried eggs, and the work presents us with an eye on a plate, an oeil sur le plat; the play on words reminds of ­Bunuel’s film Un Chien Andalo­u (1929), with its horrifying image of an eyeball cut with a razor, or Georges Bataill­e’s l’Histoire de l’oeil (1928).

A lot of these works seem poor choices if the aim is to convey a powerful idea of the vision of significant modern artists to non-specialist members of the public. Hopper’s Gas (1940) is a later picture that adds a dimension to the artist for those who know his more typical interiors, but does not represent what is at the core of his inspiration to those who are not familiar with his work. Giorgio de Chirico’s Gare Montparnasse (1914), though an impressive composition, has little of the disquieting and poetic use of open space for which he is best known.

In fact, if MoMA had merely reproduced the exhibition sent to Perth in 2012, the result would have been far better. Artists as different as Mondrian and Warhol were much better repre­sented then. But the problem is deeper than a combination of poor curatorial choices, setting quantity before quality and blockbuster scale before intelligibility. It goes to the heart of what MoMA itself represents. Since the time of its founding director, Alfred E. Barr, MoMA has played a central role in determ­ining the canon of modernism. In that perspective, the insistence on covering more than a century of art in this exhibition seems like an implicit claim that the museum is continuin­g to act as the certifying authority for authentic modern art-making.

The problem is that, apart from the weakness and incoherence of the early parts of the show, where we should have a sense of the inherent logic of modernism but are faced with a jumble of disconnected styles, and the complete shapelessness at the end of the exhibition, there is a more serious problem of credibility in the middle of the story. A crucial part of the received narrative of modernism is that its epicentre moved across the Atlantic after the war and that the word was made flesh anew in New York.

But the American abstraction that dominated the art world in the post-war years has been looking increasingly tired since the turn of the century, in much the way the authority of the late-19th-century academics waned in the early years of the 20th. The room devoted to that period is one of the weakest. It used to be a commonplace to speak of Mark Rothko’s abstract­ paintings as radiating a spiritual presence: this one is an inert composition of bands of colour that lack even the most elementary of optical effects. The Pollock looks mannered and completely lacks the conviction of the National­ Gallery of Australia’s Blue Poles. As for Barnett Newman, do we still believe a vertical monochrome bisected by a stripe or “zip” really conveys something of deep philosophical import?

Jasper Johns, Map (1961).
Jasper Johns, Map (1961).

The problem with this work is that once the belief is gone, there is not much left. We can still respond to the art of Christianity or Buddhism without subscribing to the doctrines that underlie them; but when faith in the great eschatological myth of modernism has been shattered, we are left with ashes. What about Jasper Johns? This painter, who has broken so many auction records, is represented here by a map of America daubed in gratuitous colours. The MoMA website informs us: “Johns’s energetic applic­ation of paint subverts the conventions of carto­graphy. Map invites close inspection because its content is both familiar and imaginary.”

And what do you discover when you accept the invitation to inspect this work closely? The vacuity at the heart of the modernist canon becomes­ apparent, and the cynicism that allows one such as Johns, with virtually nothing to say as an artist, to churn out large, superficially edgy but ultimately decorative pieces such as this.

MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art

National Gallery of Victoria

Until October 7

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen has been The Australian's national art critic since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/moma-at-ngv-130-years-of-modern-and-contemporary-art-poor-choices/news-story/1ebd235706c7eabcecca3ea4d2c46243