The More Modern Modern

It was a long way from the backwoods hollers of West Virginia; yet there was the First Lady in a white silk faille gown, saying: "This generation is engaged not only in a war against the poverty of man's necessities, but also in a war against the poverty of man's spirit." Then Mrs. Johnson inaugurated Manhattan's revamped Museum of Modern Art, which, as it reopened last week after a six-month, $5,500,000 expansion, looked splendidly equipped to fight in the second of Lady Bird's wars.

Two days later, the museum opened to the public. Back were the sandal-schleppers in ponytails, the docents lecturing groups of housewives, the high-schoolers and collegians scribbling notes religiously. "Are you going to describe only the paintings you like?" one asked another. It was just as if they never had been away.

Double the Fun. The old entrance, known by its Arp-like curving marquee that tried to turn the facade toward Fifth Avenue, is now a wide breezeway through to the garden. To the east of it, Architect Philip Johnson, once the museum's director of architecture and design, has built a new wing with a facade of muscular steel beams framing huge plates of glass from sidewalk to roof (a similar wing will eventually be built to the west). Inside, the doubly expanded museum seems more than doubly competent to its task. Extra room lets it show how the whole family of modern art lives in harmony: photography, cinema, industrial design, architecture, graphics, paintings and sculpture all have permanent galleries.

The whole parade of the last 80 years of art unwinds through a continuous maze of 37 galleries from Rousseau's primitives to Claes Oldenburg's plaster hamburgers, which the museum--swallowing hard but still proud of being first--says it bought before anyone else got the hunger. Of the museum's 1,800 paintings and sculptures, some 550 are on view, more than double the previous number. The sculpture garden grew to three-fourths of an acre, where weeping beeches hang over a raised level roofing on top of a 60-ft. by 75-ft. exhibition hall. Among the garden's weightier new residents are Herbert Ferber's jangle-in-a-box Homage to Piranesi I and Alexander Calder's creeping Black Widow. More than ever, it is an oasis amidst city din, filled with spouting fountains and bronze genies.

Time-Tested Modern. For 24 years the Museum of Modern Art refused to label its works as a permanent collection, and always planned to switch time-tested art to dustier museums. It bought paintings on the calculation that one out of a dozen might have permanent value. "Today's masterpiece is sometimes tomorrow's bore," wrote the first director, now director of museum collections, Alfred H. Barr Jr., in 1942. Even today, the official permanent collection numbers fewer than 20 works.

But in the end, the museum could not find the heart to send away what might yet prove good, and what might yet prove good turns out to be a stunning display of art. Now the Museum of Modern Art has room to show it, and it also has a vast willingness to bank on tomorrow, as if by definition modern art can never run out.

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