MoMA Mia!

“Welcome to the new museum. It’s still new,” said Agnus, as she lead a tour of the Modern Museum of Art (MoMA) in New York City. The museum was first built in the thirties. In the fifties it received gardens outside, which, according to Agnus, adds “culture” to museums.

The new museum was designed by the Japanese architecht Yoshio Taniguchi. One his influences were the Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings. Several towers make the museum whole. And transparent catwalks connect the galleries between the towers. It almost feels like you’re outside because of the way the plate-glass windows draw in daylight. You can look outside and get a sense of “transparency and openness” rather than closure, especially with the giant skylights.

There are five floors in the museum that feature contempoary paintings, drawings, photography, sculptures, architecture, and films. On the fifth floor, a man in his underwear stepped on the canvas edge, looked at his feat, and grinned. “The Bather” was painted in 1885 by the French modernist Paul Cezanne. The rough and dirty-looking grey-blue color surface he worked on the painting in such a way as to mimic the way a laborer works in a field.

If you stroll onto the fifth floor, you’ll see five nude prostitutes with deformed faces and disproportionate bodies staring at you with huge misshapen eyes. Pablo Picasso painted “De Mozel.” At that time, painters were supposed to paint nude women so as to seduce the viewer. By making the ladies grotesque, Picasso subverted their function as objects of attraction.

Walk down a staircase to the fourth floor and look for Jackson Pollock’s abstract mural “Number 31.” It’s hard to miss – it takes up an entire wall and it looks as if he tried to magnify a tissue smeared with black-blood snot. But really, it’s filled with black and green and white drippings; the surface alternates between shiny and matte. Unlike many of the other paintings in MoMA, you can’t see a structured image in the painting.

On a dark-brown sand dune, the Gypsy lay on her left side. A white moon, along with several sparkling stars, hung above in the deep-sea-blue sky. She held a walking stick in her hand. She wore a multi-colored robe and a pink head towel. The pillow under her head was colored the same as the robe. Her mouth was barely open, revealing tiny teeth and her eyelids were closing over her black eyes – the moment when your mind is retreating from your body.

Several inches behind her back, a lion sniffed the sand. It stood so you could only see its right side. Its circular yellow eye had no lids. The wind blew its mane forward and its tail was in the air. The lions chin was concealed by the gypsy’s right shoulder, but not its mouth and nose.

“Henri Rousseau” was signed on the bottom right corner. His “The Sleeping Gypsy” was painted, oil on canvas, in 1897. It juxtaposes the expressionless, wide-awake lion and the sleepy human whose face expresses emotion, as though humans are the only species with feelings.