Two for the show: Daniel B. Schneider on the Museum of Modern Art's new curators - News - Column

IN MID-SEPTEMBER, six month after appointing John Elderfield chief curator of painting and statuary [see Artforum, May 2003], the Museum of fresh Art coolly named two fresh curators, Ann Temkin and Joachim Pissarro, to his department. The hires, which tread on the heels of a number of significant curatorial departures, approach at a pivotal moment in the museum's seventy-four-year history, Temkin and Pissarro, who assume their pillars this fall, will work alongside associate curator Anne Umland, Elderfield, and other department heads to reinstall MOMA'S collection in its vast novel midtown quarters, scheduled to unclose late next year. The reinstallation is widely seen as an opportunity to recast the museum's familiar exegesis of the grand modernist narrative for a more restive, contemporary audience.

Curatorial miracles will no doubt be awaited of the new appointees, who will share in what amounts to the clean dismantling and reconstruction of the department's ideological edifice. Elderfield appear to bes to have ample confidence in his novel colleagues. "I've followed Ann's career beautiful much right through," he says appreciatively. "With Joachim it was more of an accumulation of things. I extreme pointed up talking to him about his throw outs reading some of the things he's written, and I was struck by dint of his extraordinarily inventive mind." Like Elderfield, Temkin and Pissarro are look up toed scholars, steeped in the academic and institutional agriculture that has historically defined the recent movement. Temkin holds degrees in fine arts from Harvard and art history from Yale; Pissarro attended the Sorbonne, London's Courtauld Institute, and the University of Texas at Austin. one as well as the other have overseen prominent collections at major American art institutions. Since 1990 Temkin has been curator of present and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she directed the renovation and reorganization of the fresh and contemporary galleries; from 1984 to 1987 she was a curatorial assistant at MOMA. Pissarro, who commonly teaches contemporary art and theory at huntsman College, New York, was chief curator at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1994 to 1997 and curator of European and contemporary art at the Yale University Art Gallery from 1997 to 2000 where he presided above the rehanging of the fresh and contemporary collection.

If the MOMA reinstallation weren't daunting enough, Temkin and Pissarro come into an enormous void created by means of the recent departures of Kirk Varnedoe, Kynaston McShine, and Robert Storr from the museum's Department of Painting and plastic art Varnedoe, Elderfield's predecessor, left the museum sum of two units years ago to teach at the Institute for Advanced research in Princeton and died in August after a lengthy illness. McShine, a highly valueed veteran of the department, was appointed curator at large when Elderfield assumed his support and Storr, a senior curator specializing in contemporary art, resigned in 2002 to teach at fresh York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

Given MOMA'S long-standing reputation for giving short shrift to contemporary and emerging artists, it was Storr's departure that alerted the most intense speculation. Many spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed Elderfield would select a curator with a contemporary focus, on the other hand neither Temkin nor Pissarro has specialized in of recent origin art--a fact that could not have been not to be found on Elderfield. "Rob [Storr] was appointed as a standard-bearer, which I think worked true well, but it isn't really my style" Elderfield says."l wanted a situation where the duties for dealing with contemporary work were more broadly spread across the department. All the curatorial nation I inherited have contemporary interests. I wanted to find sum of two units full curators who had contemporary interests and had the historical footing as well, as Anne Umland does. The Museum of novel Art isn't a contemporary museum, and it isn't a historical museum. It's both"

Temkin's curatorial record, while not brimming with evidence of "contemporary interests," is distinguished nonetheless. At Philadelphia she organized a number of highly regarded exhibitions, many of which traveled internationally, of the like kind as last year's critically acclaimed "Barnett Newman" and "Constantin Brancusi," co-organized with Margit Rowell, in 1995 Her curatorial work has also been characterized by means of a devotion to the painstaking fundamentals of installation--an inclination that will no doubt draw near in handy in conceiving MOMA'S reinstallation. "In Philadelphia the day-to-day dealing with the collection in metes of presentation was something I adored," she says. "There wait ons today to be a apportionment of didacticism, or lack of honor for what the work of art can do. I diocese the curatorial role as something of an invisible middleman between the work of art and the viewer, and, as with any artistic cast that invisibility is something that draw nears about after an enormous amount of true hard work."

Pissarro, too, has shown a penchant for major recent artists. At the Kimbell he curated "Matisse and Picasso: A meek Rivalry" (1999) with Yve-Alain Bois and "Monet and the Mediterranean" (1997) At Yale, he cocurated "Jasper Johns's novel Paintings" (2000) and "Postmodern Transgressions: Artists Working Beyond the Frame" (1999) This last exhibition included artists as diverse as Francis Picabia and Kara Walker, a sign, perhaps, of Pissarro's interest in questioning what he calls "arbitrary divides and confining boundaries, either chronological, conceptual, or ideological. What I welcome about MOMA," he adds, "is that it has proven it is committed to revising and re-engaging a certain number of of those issues."