The melody that wafts through the gallery is one of Duchamp’s earliest uses of chance: the 1913 “Erratum Musical,” composed (for three voices) by drawing notes from a hat. Appropriately, it has been installed according to chance. I’m looking forward to seeing Gabriele Münter’s “Woman in Thought II,” a painting from 1928 acquired last year, and perhaps writing about these spaces later.Īccording to the Laws of Chance This is the first of the rehung galleries on the fifth floor and once again it concentrates on Duchamp and his Dadaist confreres. A large one will be devoted to Parisian art and design between the World Wars, another to Weimar portraiture. The fifth floor display is temporarily two galleries short for the next week or two. For an institution where permanent collection displays once lasted, largely untouched, for 5 or 10 years, this pace was tantamount to warp speed. But perhaps most exciting was the ambitious plan to switch out a substantial chunk of the collection every six months. Its traditionally siloed art mediums would also be integrated painting and sculpture would share space with photography, design, works on paper, film and music. In the buildup to the reopening of its newly expanded building last October, the Modern announced a philosophical reorientation that broadened its focus to a global, rather than just Western, history of modern art. Also here you’ll find the architect Hermann Finsterlin’s rarely exhibited “Study for a House of Sociability” in polychrome plaster and paint from around 1920, which presages Frank Gehry, Milan’s Memphis designers and Frank Stella. This 1988 suite of 15 blurry gray paintings about the capture, suspicious deaths and funeral of the Baader-Meinhof anarchist group meditates, appropriately, on the power of the state. Given its own stand-alone gallery on the fifth floor for the first time, Gerhard Richter’s wrenching “October 18, 1977” takes on a new prominence. There are some wonderful acquisitions to be appreciated and some pieces that have been in storage so long they might as well be new. In short, the result bodes extraordinarily well. This is the first phase of an ambitious plan to regularly rotate the entire collection. On Saturday, MoMA will unveil what it calls the Fall Reveal, a rehang of about a third of its holdings, or 20 of 60 galleries. It’s not leaving the building but it’s in motion as never before. The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection is on the move.

Prison architect rotate