While at the groundbreaking for the downtown Whitney Museum last week, I got to thinking about the uptown building. As with most change, there are risks associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent deal to occupy the Whitney Museum’s Madison Avenue Breuer building when it decamps for Tribeca.
But there is a huge opportunity too. So forget about the knee-jerk reactions others have expressed about how putting contemporary art into the Whitney “outpost” turns it into a stepchild, or how Met will lower its quality standards to fill those galleries.
Or even, from another point of view, how it will divide the Met’s audience — the cool kids will go to the contemporary galleries and the fuddy-duddies will go to the Fifth Avenue Met.
I have aspirations for the Met-Whitney, which are related to the third.
It isn’t always easy for museum-goers to see or understand links between old art and new art, yet many contemporary artists are inspired by pre-WW II art. I would like to see the Met organize exhibitions in the Breuer building that helps people learn about those relationships.
I am thinking out loud here, so no “ideal” model is coming to mind. But I know of two recent examples that address this issue. Both are/were overseas, however, so I haven’t seen them. I mention them for their concepts.
One is on view now through July 4 at the Rijksmuseum: Kiefer & Rembrandt. For it, Anselm Kiefer was invited to create a work inspired by The Night Watch. He did it in a roundabout way, making La Berceuse (for Van Gogh), as van Gogh greatly admired Rembrandt, and Kiefer admires them both. As described recently in a New York Times blog post,
Mr. Kiefer…reinterprets “The Night Watch” as a three-dimensional triptych, each piece approximately 5 feet wide and 13 feet tall. The center element displays a worn antique garden chair, seemingly floating in space. The two side sections showcase inverted sunflowers and cracked, dry soil — Mr. Kiefer has chosen to depict Rembrandt with objects distinctly attributed to van Gogh.
The sculpture, a detail of which is pictured above, is on display in The Night Watch gallery; the Rijksmuseum has also mounted a photography exhibition showing Kiefer at work nearby. Every weekend, the museum has a program introducing the relationship between Kiefer’s work and the Old Masters.
The other exhibition took place in London in 2009 at Robilant + Voena: it was called Back To the Future: Young Artists Look To Old Masters, and I wrote about it here.
The trouble with both examples is that they are rather literal, and all of the new art was commissioned by the museum or the gallery. I’d like to see exhibits that do not depend on such instigation, but rather interpret contemporary works that were made, on their own, by artists, without interventions.
Perhaps readers know of such models.
I’m not suggesting that the entire Breuer building be devoted to these shows. But it would be nice to see them come around from time to time. If done well, they could be very popular, as well as enlightening.
Photo Credit: Myra May, Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum