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Met Director Philippe de Montebello is careful to point out that the museum has collected and shown the work of contemporary artists for the past half-century and that modernism -- early, middle, late and post -- is part of its mandate as an encyclopedic museum. True, up to a point; but its early relations with modern art were never enthusiastic, and during the crucial years in which great modernist collections could still be formed for not much money -- from 1930 to 1965 -- it fudged the issue of commitment. Despite two bequests totaling $250,000 given early in the century by Retailer George A. Hearn for acquiring contemporary American paintings, the Met did not have an active department of contemporary art until Henry Geldzahler joined it as / curator in 1967; and even then it was seldom in real competition with either MOMA or the Whitney.
Hence its collection is uneven: strong in fauvism and the pre-cubist school of Paris but weak in surrealism, with some early Picassos, like the 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, and the late Braques, like The Billiard Table, 1944-52, of ravishing quality; obstructed by (mostly) dull American figurative works by John Steuart Curry, Jack Levine and the like, bought with Hearn's money in the '20s and '30s, that ought to be a footnote to the American Wing; dense with fair-to-splendid examples of early American modernists (Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and others) and later abstract expressionists, but far too light on German expressionism, Dada and constructivism. Lieberman and his associate curator, Lowery Sims, have done a brilliant job with what they have, installing the paintings and sculptures so as to evoke unexpected similarities, rhymes, comparisons, rather than the stolid march of historical sequence. Theirs is a reflective hanging, full of aesthetic surprises, and the most sensible way to make the best of an incomplete conspectus that is, nevertheless, well sprinkled with masterpieces.
They have also plunged deep into the art of the '80s to build a base for the year 2000. Given the shrinking number of 20th century masterpieces filtering onto the market and their relentlessly inflating prices, the Met will never be able to catch up with MOMA. But its gravitational pull as an institution should not be underestimated. The Met is the greatest general museum in America, and its new wing marks what may be the final phase in the competition for modernist icons. Quite a few of the privately owned works that Lieberman was assumed to have lined up for MOMA at the end of his 34 years of curatorial service there now seem to be pointed at the Met. Over the next few years, the battle of the codicils and the wooing of art widows should prove quite intense.