The New MoMA

The fabulously renovated Museum of Modern Art reopened almost a year ago, but yesterday was my first chance to see it. I went at opening time, 10:30 a.m., and stood in line for about 25 minutes until I got inside and bought a ticket ($20). This was especially disappointing because I'm here at a conference, so I knew I had to leave the museum by about 1:15 p.m. to get to a session I really wanted to attend. In other words, I was playing hooky for the morning.

I went straight up to the fifth floor because the map makes it clear that most of the paintings are on the fourth and fifth floors. I have missed those paintings very much. The friends of my youth, MoMA's paintings gave me my education in modern art in my teens and 20s. I have spent hours standing in front of the same Picassos, Pollocks, Klees and Miros.

Now everything is different -- in New York as well as MoMA. Yet the paintings are the same. I couldn't help but think of Walter Benjamin again and again as I turned a corner and saw Van Gogh's Starry Night, or Leger's Three Women, or Chagall's I and the Village. Even the ones I don't like very much -- such as Monet's huge Water Lilies and Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950 -- gave me a feeling of homecoming, or unexpectedly meeting an old friend on the street.

Walking in the new MoMA building felt almost as delightful as seeing the paintings again, but it was the delight of discovery, of surprise, instead of the delight of familiarity and recognition. There are openings and windows and bridge-passages everywhere in the new building, and these have the effect of a sudden fresh breeze, or a little dip in the road when driving that makes your stomach leap.

One thing is missing, of course -- Picasso's Guernica. I got to visit that unforgettable painting again in June 2004 in Madrid, in another wonderful museum (Museo Reina Sofia) -- but its absence in MoMA does still seem to leave a hole in the collection. Not that the painting does not belong in Spain -- surely it does. But in my memory, it has pride of place in MoMA, the first place I ever saw it.

I only had enough time to see the fourth and fifth floors (all my favorite paintings are on the fifth floor), with a quick cruise of the second-floor bookstore at the very end. Next time, the photography -- always a wonderful part of a visit to MoMA. I'm so glad the renovation turned out to be so beautiful.