In the inaugural displays that they have recently announced for their new digs, the Whitney and Metropolitan museums seem to be sending contrasting messages, bucking their respective images as provocatively experimental and conservatively sedate.
Photo by Tim Schenck
With its 50,000-square-foot Renzo Piano-designed indoor gallery space to be devoted to some 650 works from its permanent collection (May 1-Sept. 27) and with a Frank Stella retrospective in the offing (Oct. 30-Feb. 7), the Whitney’s initial displays seem designed to reassure us that older American art won’t be slighted in a building whose contemporary, monumental spaces (which I’ve seen only unfinished) seem less suited to easel-sized intimacy than to expansive, cutting-edge productions (as suggested in Kelly Crow‘s characterization of the facility as “an artists’ playground,” in today’s Wall Street Journal).
There may also be a practical reason for this permanent-collection kickoff: As I learned when I reviewed Renzo Piano‘s new Kimbell Art Museum pavilion, loan shows in a new building can’t get federal indemnity insurance, and lenders often prefer to wait until after a settling-in period, to be reasonably sure that there are no art-endangering flaws in the new construction.
The Met, with its eight-year lease on the Whitney’s venerable uptown building, seems to be coming out of the gate determined to prove that the Met Breuer, as it’s now being called, is nothing like the Met Roche (as in Kevin Roche, architect for modern additions to the museum, including its 1987 soon-to-be revamped wing for modern and contemporary art).
Breaking with its conventional practice of organizing shows that focus on particular artists, styles, geographical locations and/or time periods, the Met Breuer will open next year with an interestingly offbeat concept-show, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (Mar. 10-Sept. 4), which will explore “the question of when a work of art is finished.”
Among those on the eclectic roster for the show’s 140 works (Renaissance to the present) are: Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, Cézanne, Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Luc Tuymans. Mostly drawn from the Met’s own collection, the exhibition will also highlight “major national and international loans.”
Opening simultaneously with “Unfinished” is a retrospective of more than 130 paintings, drawings, and photographs by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–90), a modernist from India whom, in the Met’s words, “created a body of work vital to the evolution of international modernism and abstraction.” That said, her work is not widely known in the U.S.
According to her list of exhibitions on the website of Talwar Gallery (the New York and New Delhi gallery that represents her estate), Mohamedi’s most recent one-person show in the U.S. was that gallery’s Becoming One, which closed in January 2014. In his NY Times review of that show, Holland Cotter noted that “her recognition in New York has been slow but steady….I can’t imagine seeing a more beautiful and tender gallery solo show this winter.” Mohamedi also had a solo show, Lines among Lines, at the Drawing Center, New York, in 2005.
The Met Breuer also has announced an unMet-like line-up of experimental music and performances.
It appears, then, that while the new Whitney will kick off with the tried and true (enlivened with some newly commissioned works and artists’ performances), the Met Breuer will venture into less familiar, intriguing territory.