Size matters, at least as far as the Museum of Modern Art is concerned. The MoMA that reopens Monday after a $450 million redo is bigger, brighter, better — reasons enough to forgive it for demolishing the former home of the American Folk Art Museum next door.
That space made way for MoMA’s new David Geffen Wing. Six stories high, it’s topped by a sleek cafe with a Danny Meyer menu of small plates and drinks, and a terrace high above 53rd Street to enjoy them on.
New, too, are wide open spaces for live performances; a “creativity lab” where you can try your hand at collage, drawing, mapmaking and weaving; and areas where you can sit down and recharge, mentally, physically and digitally, that last one at the second-floor counter overlooking the sculpture garden. Everything — including the restrooms, whose faucets have built-in hand dryers — is cutting-edge.
Best of all, by expanding its gallery space by one-third, the museum can display more art, much of it (finally!) by women. Joining Kahlo, O’Keeffe and Arbus are works by women you may not know, including Grete Lihotzky, who meticulously re-created a 1920s German kitchen, and Rineke Dijkstra, whose series of 11 photos, shot over 20 years, follow a woman from adolescence to motherhood.
One of the joys is coming upon their works in surprising places. How nice to roam through a room of Picassos and find Faith Ringgold’s 1967 “#20: Die,” a “Guernica”-like mural of a bloody riot. Or to discover, among the Matisses, Alma Thomas’ “Fiery Sunset.”
You can hole up in a fourth-floor screening room with an Andy Warhol triple feature: his five-hour-plus “Sleep” and the shorter “Kiss” and “Blow Job” (that last filmed, you may be relieved to know, from the waist up). Slip down to the second floor and you’ll find Richard Serra’s “Equal”: eight 40-ton cubes of forged steel, two cubes to a pillar. Walking around those four, 11-foot-tall pillars makes you feel as if you’re in an urban Stonehenge.
There’s so much here that you’ll need a map — grab one in the lobby — to find your favorites. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is on the fifth floor, along with the dada: Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, Miró’s stuffed parrot, Dalí’s woman with a baguette on her head. Here, too, is an entire gallery devoted to Florine Stettheimer, the New York painter, poet and costume designer whose “Family Portrait, II,” with its elegant women and oversize blossoms, seems lit from within. Nearby are Monet’s waterlilies, in a softly angled room with ottomans that let you sit and enjoy them. If only that Russian movie clip wasn’t blaring from the adjoining gallery!
All told, MoMA may be the noisiest museum you’ve ever visited. Along with the nattering of video and film clips, the Philippe Parreno piece in the lobby has sensors that ostensibly feed off your energy and growl or murmur accordingly. Hit the atrium daily at 4 p.m. for a symphony of bells as Haegue Yang’s Jeff Koons-like sculptures are wheeled around on their casters.
“Every time I think I’m done, there’s something else,” a visitor murmured. So true. Forget that map: MoMA is the perfect place to get lost in.
MoMA reopens Monday. 11 W. 53rd St. $25 adults; free Friday nights, 5:30 to 9 p.m.
