The greatest show of art returns

By DAVID USBORNE

It's being billed as the greatest gathering of artists staged, at what is arguably the greatest museum of modern art in the world - and every painter, sculptor, photographer or designer with work in its enormous collection is on the guest list.

In the past week a series of spectacular parties have heralded the grand reopening last weekend of New York's Museum of Modern Art. After three years at its temporary space in the borough of Queens, MoMA is coming home to midtown Manhattan after a US$700 million ($1 billion) expansion programme that has spawned a huge and remarkable new wing designed by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

Those attending the first of the society soirees, last night, would be rubbing shoulders with probably the largest assortment of famous and almost-famous living artists to sip cocktails under one roof.

"Everyone is dying to see the museum and everyone will try to be there," gushed Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters, who was flying to New York for last night's party.

Look out for Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and, from Britain, maybe Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. "It will be the greatest gathering of artists ever staged," said one representative of the museum.

Or wait until tomorrow, when MoMA will throw a second bash, but this time for the A-list of America's rich, famous, influential and notorious.

Gazing all the way from the blue slate floor of the wide lobby up to the ceiling of Taniguchi's soaring 33m atrium will be celebrities from both coasts. Playing music commissioned for the evening will be Sigur Ros from Iceland.

Neither evening is likely to provide the best conditions for viewing the reborn MoMA. This writer had the privilege of an early sneak visit.

Workers were still scurrying, hanging pictures, affixing the last of the labels, testing the swing mechanisms on glass doors and even arranging the vases of white lilies in time for the parties.

But if they have the chance, the guests should take the time to move up through the new six-storey wing, built, at a cost of US$425 million ($610 million), and visit the new galleries wrapped around the atrium, with their enormously high ceilings and expanses of white walls that seem to float on the floors.

The architecture is not showy but rather discreet. Depending on your tastes, you might call its understatement sublime.

What the guests won't miss is the 1947 Bell helicopter suspended above the grand stairway leading up from the lobby, one of its rotors pointing the way to the galleries.

"Our Winged Victory," is how chief curator Terence Riley describes it, in a reference to one of the Louvre's greatest treasures.

They will probably also recognise many of those artworks that have formed the core of the MoMA collection for years - the Warhol soup cans, the mesmerising splattered canvases of Jackson Pollock, Monet's Water Lilies, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Dali's Persistence of Memory, and countless other landmark works.

Outside, visible through glass windows from the lobby, is the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, with more than 30 masterworks by the likes of Picasso, Rodin and Giacometti.

The galleries at MoMA now cover 11,612sq m of space, up from 7896sq m in the museum before the expansion started.

It means it can put more of its enormous collection on show, and buy new pieces to expand that inventory.

Some of those acquisitions include works from young Britons, including work by Gillian Wearing, the Turner Prize-winning photographer.

MoMA has bought Wearing pieces, a 20-minute video work, as well as Self Portrait at 17 Years. But any newcomers would do well to recognise what company they are keeping. It is exactly 75 years since the original opening of MoMA in November 1929.

There were some heady invitees on that day, too - 35 Cezannes, 27 Van Goghs and 26 Gauguins among them.

- INDEPENDENT