MOMA in Australia

A series of six exhibitions from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is scheduled to be shown at the Art Gallery of West Australia (AGWA) over the next three years. This rotating display of the MOMA collection raises questions about what Australian public galleries are for and why they do what they do. At least two things have given rise to the partnership. The first is the arrival of a new director of AGWA, Stefano Carboni, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who has the contacts in MOMA to get the institutional relationship off the ground. The second is the state government’s all too rare delivery of some hard cash to AGWA to make it happen. Let’s not mistake the stature of work featured in the first of these exhibitions, called ‘Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters’, that ran from June to December in 2012. This is not a second rate touring show, and includes such canonical works as Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Nostalgia of the Infinite’ (1912-3), Pablo Picasso’s ‘Two Acrobats with a Dog’ (1915), Constantin Brancusi’s ‘Endless Column Version 1’ (1918), Henri Matisse’s ‘Still Life with Aubergine’ (1917), Joan Miro’s ‘Person Throwing a Stone at a Bir’ (1926), Piet Mondrian’s ‘Trafalgar Square’ (1939-43) and Alexander Calder’s ‘Spider’ (1940). Such a concentration of famous work gives the visitor the feeling of being in a major global institution without actually being in one. For a moment the periphery holds within it the centre.