Museum without a soul

Roger Kimball on how Yoshio Taniguchi has transformed New York’s Museum of Modern Art

We are told that our individualist art has touched its limit, and its expression can go no further. That’s often been said; but if it cannot go further, it may still go elsewhere.
André Malraux, The Voices of Silence

‘An institution,’ said Emerson, ‘is the lengthened shadow of one man.’ In the case of the Museum of Modern Art, the man in question is Alfred H. Barr (1902–81). Barr founded MOMA (the acronym by which the museum is universally known) in 1929. From then until Barr’s retirement in 1967, MOMA was to an extraordinary extent the incarnation of the modernist vision that Barr — along with a handful of collaborators — had formulated in the Twenties and early Thirties.

Barr’s idea of Modernism — his idea of how the visual arts might be most vitally integrated into modern life — was complex and multi-faceted.