The Museum of Modern Art opened its $450m expansion to the press for a preview this Thursday with a completely rethought installation of its collection, jettisoning the traditional idea of the Modernist canon for a more geographically encompassing, multi-disciplinary approach. While the permanent collection galleries are organised chronologically—starting with the late 19th century on the fifth floor through to contemporary art on the second—works from different movements and continents now jostle in the same space, with some time travellers thrown in. Before the museum opens to the public on 21 October, we bring you some highlights from the rehang.
Visitors entering the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art from 53rd Street will be greeted by a more open ground floor lobby designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that unites the Taniguchi building with the Jean Nouvel tower
Entering from 54th Street, visitors get a glimpse of the Atrium and a new commission by Philippe Parreno, Echo (Danny the Street), which the artist describes as a “sensible and sentient automaton that perceives and reflects”
The public will be able to access the new ground-floor galleries, including the design exhibition Energy, free of charge
The special project space on the ground floor, which is also free to enter, features paintings by the Kenyan artist Michael Armitage
The fifth-floor gallery Around Les Demoiselles dAvignon juxtaposes Picassos groundbreaking 1907 painting with Faith Ringgolds large-scale painting American People Series #20: Die (1967), which was inspired by another Picasso work, Guernica (1937)
The rehang does not mean that visitors will miss their old favourites, however, like Henri Matisses Dance (I) (1909), found in a whole gallery dedicated to the artist on the fifth floor
Monets three-panel Water Lilies (1914-26) and related works also get their own specially designed space on the fifth floor
Newly restored footage shot from a New York subway car in 1905 by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. As curators from different disciplines teamed up to exhibit an assortment of mediums in the remixed permanent collection galleries, “every department asked for a film installation,” says Rajendra Roy, MoMA's chief curator of film. “It was a shift way from the idea that everyone has to stay in their silos. To me, that's probably the biggest triumph.”
A fifth-floor gallery titled Responding to War has some of the most powerful artistic comparisons, like Rufino Tamayos Animals (1941) Francis Bacons Painting (1946)
A fifth-floor gallery about Design for Modern Life includes Margarete Schütte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen (1926-27), which she designed to reduce the burden of womens labour in the home
The artist Amy Sillman has chosen 75 works from MoMAs collection centred on the idea of "shape" in the most densely installed gallery on the fifth floor
The new Kravis Studio space on the fourth floor features the immersive sound installation, Rainforest V (Variation 1) and the electronic music performance Forest Speech by David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics
Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), one of the perennial favorites that museumgoers seek out, is on view with other works from the 1960s
Joan Jonass six-video installation Mirage (1976/1994/2005), created around the concept of transformation, is given a gallery to itself on the fourth floor
In a fourth-floor gallery exploring Architecture Systems, the portion of the façade from the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York frames a frenetic film by Jacques Tati, Playtime (1967)
Wifredo Lams painting The Jungle (La Jungla) (1943) hangs next to Maya Derens film A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) in the gallery Out of War, filled with 20th-century works by artists displaced by war
Visceral sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois are installed in the New Monuments gallery
