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MoMA at NGV:130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art

MoMA at National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) was a much-anticipated watershed exhibition. It was billed as the NGV’s largest ever Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series exhibition, featuring 230 exhibits, spanning 130 years of modern and contemporary art. It ran from 9 June 2018 to 7 October 2018 and became the NGV’s second most attended ticketed exhibition on record. As a result of MoMA’s early integrated collecting approach, architecture is understood, promoted, and championed as one of the visual arts, within broad western cultural contexts and constructs. The strengths and clarity of the early to mid-twentieth century vision dissipate somewhat towards the end of the twentieth into the early twenty-first century – as evidenced in MoMA at NGV. Architecture and design have been included variously in the exhibition’s eight themes, yet the accompanying audio tour focusses almost exclusively on art and its concerns. Response to the exhibition has been polarised, ranging from Christopher Allen’s view that “This is a long, dreary, shapeless exhibition that marches doggedly through almost every style and ends nowhere”, to Sasha Grishin’s embracing of the MoMA at NGV as a landmark exhibition, that is “rich, dazzling and profoundly visually exciting”. Both the Directors of MoMA and the NGV claimed the exhibition to be of “extraordinary scale and depth”. And yet it is a survey – and has all the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach. From the perspective of an architectural historian and teaching academic, the exhibition is enticing. Students can see works they have studied in core architecture history/ theory units exhibited here in the broad context of the visual arts. Indeed, the exhibition opens doors, provides insights, and whets the appetite to explore further. Architecture, arguably the greatest of all the arts, is here simply part of the art, almost hidden. Yet it has been integrally part of the tumultuous experimentations, the broad sweep of ideas that began in the late nineteenth century, evolved, changed, challenged, and disrupted the twentieth century and tipped into the next century.