Articles: Men Just Want Their MoMA

Nude descending an escalator.
In any public building, I’m curious about the escalators. Especially in a museum like MoMA, devoted to the wonders of modern design, the escalator, that mechanized stairway that spawned the department store should have pride of place and a nude should descend each afternoon at 4. It does (not the nude, the escalator) at the Pompidou in Paris where it is part digestive tract and part carnival ride, rising quite thrillingly outside the building in full view of the rooftops of Paris. (You also find the world’s worst museum escalator in Paris, at the Orsay Museum where, after 14 years and as many circuitous bathroom quests, I can still never find it.)

Freeze that frieze.
An escalator in a museum today is what a frieze was on a Greek temple—a processional tableau of the rich humanity that the museum itself celebrates. You should be able to stand back and watch, which you can only do at MoMA from the ground floor looking up to the mezzanine.

But let’s talk about paper.
Of course, there are the drawing and photography departments. Works on paper are as old as paper and MoMA has bales of the best of the recent past. And one of the best of those may be a great watercolor on display by Jasper Johns called The Diver, bluely, puzzlingly mystical, which is not a trait you associate with the daunting Mr. Johns.

Do what to my Prada purse?
What about the role that paper had, not as a ‘canvas’ but as an actual ingredient in the sauce, a scandalous pimento? MoMA has some great examples. In the collages by Picasso (1912) and the exquisite papiers collés by the experimental German artist Kurt Schwitters, torn or cut pieces of paper, usually newspaper—the cheapest, commonest thing in the world—were pasted right on the surface of the painting or drawing. It was seen at the time (by the few who even cared) as a down-and-dirty act of desecration, like someone trowelling ketchup over your Prada purse; an affront to the aristocratic tradition of paint, canvas and all those fancy-schmancy rules about what you could paint and how you could paint it.

“The melodrama of vulgarity.”
Modern artists, however, wanted to depict their world with its dirt and color, its “melodrama of vulgarity,’ not dreamy scenes you might find on some duchess’s porcelain chamber pot. And what could bring art and real life closer together than a piece of actual newsprint glued to a canvas? Funny thing is, if desecration was the intention, these torn fragments of paper have achieved, after a century, the thin delicacy and piquant nostalgia of a poppy you find pressed in a book that your grandmother owned, a piece of exquisite old Parisiana.

Occupational Therapist, my scissors please.
With Matisse you find a very different use of paper, particularly in the large, joyous papier collé on display. Matisse was never the urchin that Picasso was. In fact he made no secret of liking the posh Riviera life (as of course, Picasso did too). When he became too ill to stand at his easel, he hit on the idea of having an assistant paint large pieces of paper in solid colors. Then he could lay in his bed or on his chaise and cut out shapes with scissors the way you cut flowers out of construction paper in Grade 1.

Playfully Platonic.
These cutouts would then be pasted to a canvas in big bold frolicking zero-gravity configurations that often evoked objects in the real world but that abstracted them, made the simpler and happier and purer and livelier than they ever were in life. If you recall a Greek geek named Plato, perhaps from a college philosophy class, you might recall as well his famous concept of ideal forms (behind all the chairs on earth there is one perfect concept chair in heaven). Well, Matisse was Plato with a good pair of scissors.

Haute coffee.
We loved the new MoMA. The fact that we arrived just as the admission price (to our surprise) dropped from $20.00 a person to free didn’t hurt. Then we each bought a cup of coffee and lost almost all we had saved.