Last weekend, I went to New York for The Best American Poetry 2009 reading and book launch. In between all the literary fun, I spent a morning at MOMA, the newly-revamped Museum of Modern Art. I had never been there before, although I have seen part of the collection in traveling exhibitions to the Baltimore Museum of Art. (Just so you know, I walked all the way there from my hotel on Eight Avenue at W. 12th Street. Also – two people asked me for directions, which made me even more full of myself.)
If you have never seen the collection, you must. If you've already been, go again tomorrow. Take the elevator to the Painting and Sculpture galleries on the 4th and 5th floors. At every turn, on every wall, with no fanfare or special theatrics, there is a masterpiece.
I arrived just as the museum opened, and I went immediately up to the 5th floor (1880s-1940s). There were only a few people in the gallery, and for a few minutes it was just me and Van Gogh's "Starry Night." I can't describe what it was like to stand there, alone, with that painting. I can't. It was an experience beyond words, so intense that I was almost grateful when other museum goers wandered in and broke the spell.
Next to "Starry Night" hangs one of my favorite paintings, "The Sleeping Gypsy" by Henri Rousseau. Strange, eerie, compelling, and mysterious, it challenges the viewer to decode it. An impossible task – I have no idea what it means. I just know it's enormously cool.
Turn around, and there, framed in the doorway of the next gallery, is one of the most important paintings of the modern era, Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." It is gigantic, filling your whole field of vision. Seeing it in person allows you to feel the full disturbing impact of what Picasso's contemporaries must have felt; reproducing it here can only give a frame of reference. Go see it in person.
There are more and more and more. And these are just on one floor!
"Dance (1)" by Henri Matisse
"The Moon and the Earth" by Paul Gauguin
"Birthday" by Marc Chagall
"The Persistance of Memory" by Salvador Dali
"Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth
This is just a sample, and it doesn't count the galleries on the 4th floor (1940s-1980s – Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollack, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol et al.) and the 3rd floor (contemporary art – Damien Hirst, Christo, Claes Oldenburg, etc.).
To top it all off and send me completely into masterpiece overload, MOMA is currently presenting a special exhibition of Monet's later "Waterlillies" paintings. Here's one of the most beautiful:
Put MOMA on your bucket list and go.