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Begging for Attention
John Haberin New York City
Alberto Giacometti and the Expanded MoMA
Faurschou New York
Giacometti is begging for attention. Or rather a woman is begging, in bronze and only just smaller than life. Should you proceed like most visitors to the new Museum of Modern Art, Giacometti's nude woman will be facing you at the entrance to Surrealism, head on. You can hardly miss her. You would hardly want to.
Maybe you, too, insist that a visit to MoMA still begin with Vincent van Gogh and Starry Night. After an archival but passionate room for early photography and cinema, you will find rooms for Modernism's founders, in Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. You can step away from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, for a painting of riots in the 1960s by Faith Ringgold hanging nearby. 
She and Picasso look all the bolder for it at that—from her faces stained with blood and tears to his mask-like faces and the blue outline added to a woman's leg as if in chalk. And then comes the largest room yet, for a newly diverse museum and the diversity of modern art.
Still not satisfied? Fine: start your own damn museum—and one European dealer and collector just did. Only of all places, it landed in north Brooklyn. The view at Faurschou New York may be grim, but take heart. Greenpoint has a new arts space with aspirations to a museum.
Allowing Modernism to dream
Picasso is still present at MoMA, and his Girl at a Mirror looks bolder, too, for a context in broader movements. She seems literally to embrace her mirror image while clashing with it, their faces divided like phases of the moon. A 1934 woman by Alberto Giacometti, in contrast, breaks symmetry only once—with her cupped hands held out slightly off the level beneath her breasts. She could be gesticulating like pretty much anyone making a point, much as a male figure from the 1940s points with an outstretched arm. She could be praying, and her knees are bent. She could be begging in desperation, and her eyes show her horror or pain.
Alberto Giacometti knew desperation, with one gaunt figure after another, but not only that. The sculptor of Woman with Her Throat Cut and The Palace at Four A.M. knew danger and dark hours as well, but also daylight. This woman, his first on so large a scale, rests within a bronze frame. Does it provide support or confinement, a cage or a throne? Her long fingers could be piercing the void or defining a solid, and indeed he called her Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object). That dialogue between the space of the work and the unseen runs throughout modern art.
It also runs throughout MoMA's 2019 museum expansion, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Gensler (also the subject of a fuller review at the link). It gives more attention to the permanent collection, and then, as often with Gensler, it goes for more. Within Surrealism, you now have such women and cultural crossings as Leonora Carrington, a Brit born in Mexico. And once you leave the room, you have entered the new west wing, with choices in all directions. Much is bound to remain unseen on a given day, because only the most obsessive or determined could hope to see it all. Even that one room in subdued light is a bit of a maze.
Obsessive and determined as I am, I returned in December, past the rarified atmosphere of an October press preview, to see how it is holding up. (Hey, critics raved about the awful 2004 architecture by Yoshio Taniguchi before they caught on.) Even in peak tourist season, it felt manageable. Either the maze dispersed the crowds or the lack of a blockbuster exhibition kept them away. It already felt more than halfway familiar as well. People still posed for idiotic selfies with Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh—although not, alas, half naked and arms akimbo with a Paul Cézanne bather a few paintings away.
I still felt the near absence of Georges Braque from Cubism, but then the display will change often. I still found the assignment of themes to each room rather forced, subsuming early Mark Rothko to war. But then Arshile Gorky, to his side, did survive the Armenian genocide before dying a suicide in New York. The hanging can try too hard at times as well, like the placement of an eye filled with clouds by René Magritte overhead. Then again, he had his head in the clouds, too. I still worry as well that the maze will discourage people from taking in much of the collection.
I also still worry that downplaying movements in favor of diversity can miss something essential to modern art, but look for more with MoMA's "fall reveal" in 2020 and again in 2021. Still, MoMA comes close enough to chronology as an organizing theme in itself. Leaps head in time, like that to Faith Ringgold or, further on, Alma Thomas, the African American abstract painter, are rarer than you might think from the press—and visitors that day paid them no particular attention. Are they no more, then, than virtue signaling and token women, all but begging for attention? Perhaps, but a friend found a new favorite in Carrington's The Minotaur's Daughter. I find its hard-edged realism a bit airless and stifling, but it allowed her to dream.
Aspiring to a museum
The Faurschou Foundation's fourth global display space opens with "The Red Bean Grows in the South," and you have every right to be suspicious. The very notion of a private collection as a foundation should have you on the alert. It aims neither for museum-quality older art nor to break new ground. The show's title quotes an old Chinese poem, for work by seventeen artists from the 1970s to today. All are superstars, with little more in common than their no end of exposure. Exactly three are Chinese.
The title has to sound needlessly obscure. Red beans, it appears, are emblems of longing and loss, but these artists do not traffic in subtlety or metaphors. Still, heartbreak is everywhere, and Ai Weiwei caps off the show with a pile of red seeds beside his and his wife's plaster casts in bed. The bare mattress, too, has taken on a cold white. He is not alone in the bitter cold. Think of the show, like the foundation itself, as united by less a theme than wealth and a sensibility.
It is a grim sensibility indeed, from the very first room. Alison Saar finds even a dying slave by Michelangelo too comforting, so she makes her own in dark pressed tin, pierced by nails and in chains. Photos by Danh Vo record the last days of South Vietnam as young men adrift and gaunt hands. Overhead, a small boat seems adrift, too. Cai Guo-Qiang fills it with bright paper lanterns as A Boat with Dreams, but dreams do not often come true—no more than for boat people today. 
Off to the side, Richard Mosse addresses the refugee crisis more directly, but his actors move, ever so slowly, amid single-engine airplanes with a science fiction chill.
It is only a short step from Saar to a hooded figure in white marble by Christian Lemmerz, arms outstretched and imploring. The Last God has lost its voice and become a ghost. It is a short step, too, to a video by Omar Fast, in which a German who has served as a soldier in Afghanistan can neither find peace nor express love. Anselm Kiefer may refer to refugees as well when he inserts two small wooden boats into a painting. This once, his epic landscape comes weighted less with German history than with winter ice and a wintry forest light. Georg Baselitz paints a man, barely erect, waving the red flag of surrender—just in case you thought his upside-down heroes here and in Baselitz drawings are merely doing acrobatics.
The one-story warehouse space divides comfortably into four large rooms and two video alcoves—enough to accommodate almost uniformly large work. That, too, helps create a sensibility, and it is a strength. While most artists share a room, with a work apiece, they still have room to breathe. A notable exception, Yu Hong, has work from over the years as an installation and a single unfolding narrative. He paints from photographs of historic events, in color, and of his children, in black and white. If you detect an excess of self-absorption, that describes Faurschou's sensibility as well.
As so often these days, large and grim can mean theatrical and glib. A tin-pot dictator for Edward and Nancy Kienholz or a statue by Paul McCarthy crossing Frederic Remington and Charles Bronson is all trash, flash, and splash. For the Kienholz, that means flashing red, white, and blue lights, like an overly patriotic holiday display. For McCarthy, it means splashes of garish yellow paint. Tracy Emin satisfies her ego with a neon message of love, in her handwriting. Yu renders his slapdash history in a kind of slapdash photorealism.
Sentiment and cynicism
Not that sentiment need entail cynicism. At its best, it can bring out a dark side in artists better known for a sunny disposition. Yoko Ono still conveys her and John Lennon's wishes for a happy Christmas and world peace. Yet the children in her video desperately need those wishes, while Robert Rauschenberg for once has teeth—literally so, with saw blades atop his silkscreens. Cecily Brown applies her loose brushwork and pop-culture flair to a scene of abduction or rape. Still, there may be other grounds for cynicism, in the public display of a private foundation.
Museums have taken quite a hit for their wealthy museum boards. Big money, critics say, legitimizes traffic in tear gas and opiates—although for my money legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. Contributions come at a price to museums as well, pushing them to expansions they cannot afford and into the very contemporary art that board members collect. Does it help, though, if the wealthy instead start their own quasi-museums? Does it merely certify their collections? At the very least, it refuses to submit their art to public needs and curatorial expertise.
Collectors have spawned great museums before. The Morgan Library or the Frick Collection anyone—or the Getty and the Norton Simon out west? Then, too, Jens Faurschou got his start in Copenhagen as not a CEO but an art dealer, much like Edith Halpert a century ago in New York. And both Dia:Beacon, the Neue Galerie, and the Neue Galerie collection got their start thanks to a personal and professional partnership between an influential dealer and someone with money. Still, you might object, Faurschou has anything but their context in older art and their scope. He has merely a collection.
Could that be close enough? He covers much the same years as Emily Fisher Landau with her center in Queens, only a bit less conceptual and more up to date. He also shares an interest in vulnerable body-centered art with Marc Straus, a founder of the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art. Besides, he welcomes you in, while collections more often live and die behind closed doors. Sure, The New York Times dutifully swoons at how much Faurschou "liked stretching his limits." You may see his limits everywhere, but you may not mind one bit.
You can test your limits, too. I had not remembered that Louise Bourgeois worked in aluminum, quite apart from her white shelves and dark chambers in wood. Here she shows a treacherous but sensual side with figures hanging from the ceiling, wrapped together in a spiral like inner tubes that shine. They throw one back, where she more often lures one in, and their close embrace sets them apart. They also hint at a representational side to her epic abstraction. That, too, accords with the foundation's theater, but it adds something as well.
The foundation could stand more surprises like that. It could also do without the sentiment and cynicism. It could start borrowing, for the missing context and scope. It could pair its holdings with Modernism and emerging artists. You will just have to wait and see. For now, like Ai Weiwei, sleep as best you can, welcome the invitation, and hope for more.
The Museum of Modern Art reopened on October 21, 2019, and I review it and its opening exhibitions in greater depth separately. Faurschou New York opened December 15 with shows that ran through April 11, 2020. Related reviews look at Alberto Giacometti in retrospective and paired with Barbara Chase-Riboud.