The first and gravest of our disappointments is with the ill-conceived architecture. Yoshio Taniguchi's redesign has at every turn in its cold and elephantine structure the look and feel of a Japanese parody of the kind of American modernism that has itself long outlived its expiration date. Thus the galleries are essentially an architectural assemblage of-what else?-bleak, oversized white boxes in which the scale of the interior space and the unrelieved whiteness of the walls conspire to discomfort the viewer while diminishing the aesthetic integrity of works of art marooned in an environment remarkably hostile to the pleasures of the eye.

These unwelcoming exhibition spaces would under any circumstances entail considerable problems for the installation of MoMA's permanent collection-and these problems are compounded by the apparent determination of the curatorial staff to come up with a scheme that would emphatically be seen to resemble as little as possible the classic installations of the late Alfred Barr, MoMA's founding director. This has been achieved by a systematic deconstruction of Barr's pioneering work in establishing a coherent, stylistically oriented history of modernist art. Barr created programs and diagrams that trace a succession of aesthetic influences and intellectual linkages that constitute a history of modernism; his installations were based on this historical scenario, which for generations of artists and critics became the accepted way of comprehending the modern tradition of art.

What does it mean, then, to speak of a modern "tradition," which some artists and writers on art regard as anathema to the fundamental spirit of modernism? The best answer to this question was given to us by John Szarkowski, for many years the curator of photography in the old MoMA. In Looking at Photographs (1973), Mr. Szarkowski wrote:

"Non-artists often misunderstand the nature of artistic tradition, and imagine it to be something similar to a fortress, within which eternal verity is protected from the present. In fact it is something more useful and interesting, and less secure. It exists in the minds of artists, and consists of their collective memory of what has been accomplished so far. Its function is to mark the starting point for each day's work. Occasionally it is decided that tradition should also define the work's end result. At this point the tradition dies."

That's the spirit in which Barr labored to codify the history of modernist art, and to this day I daresay that no other writer on the subject has succeeded in improving on his work. Yet, precisely because Barr's conception of the modern tradition acquired a kind of orthodoxy, it was inevitable that it would also in time provoke some categorical dissent-and so it has. The new MoMA, in effect, has transformed itself into the principal voice of the anti-Barr opposition. Thus, in a long essay marking the inauguration of the new MoMA, the museum's chief curator, John Elderfield, writes with unconcealed glee that "By a happy coincidence … on the fortieth anniversary of Barr's installation, a truly new one could be created from scratch."

In Mr. Elderfield's view, what went wrong in the Barr installation was that "The painting and sculpture galleries had become unduly hermetic, prescriptive, and progressive in their linear, spinal arrangement-the viewer needed sanction to slow down-while the small size of the individual galleries no longer served the requirements of an intimate address to the works of art." Mr. Elderfield is a writer and curator whose endeavors in the past I have, for the most part, greatly admired. But I nonetheless have to say that just about everything in the sentence I've just quoted strikes me as utter bosh. I've been a regular visitor of MoMA, following its many changes, for some 50 years, and Mr. Elderfield's notion that visitors ever needed a "sanction" to moderate their pace in looking at works of art is tendentious nonsense.

What has categorically changed at MoMA is the way the museum presents works of art to its public. Heretofore, MoMA's presentation was largely based on a formalist-historical model in which the aesthetics of style was given priority over subject matter or thematic motifs. Four years ago, in the series of MoMA 2000 exhibitions, we were put on notice that the formalist-historical model would now be rejected by MoMA in favor of an emphasis on the subject matter of art. One of the consequences of that decision was that the entire history of abstract art was fractured and rendered incoherent as its various phases were assigned to "subjects" which could rarely, if ever, be discernible to the naked eye. On that occasion, anyway, Mr. Elderfield apologized-sort of-for failing to do justice to the history of abstraction. Yet the mistakes of 2000 have been repeated in the installations of 2004.

What we encounter in many of the so-called "subject galleries" in the new MoMA are works of art that have been orphaned from history-from the aesthetic history from which they derive their ideas and from the history of their influence on later works of art. All aesthetic experience is comparative, and the quality of our experience of individual works of art often depends on the relation that obtains between the object before us and our memories of other works of art. In such comparisons, style rather than subject provides the principal linkage. This is one reason why the quality and character of installations in museum exhibitions is so crucial to our comprehension of art.

In the old MoMA, a masterwork like Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon offered an experience that the visitor carried in the mind through an encounter with the entire history of Cubist painting. At the new MoMA, Les Demoiselles is so historically isolated that it looks as if it had been not so much installed as simply abandoned. The same may be said of the sculpture of Wilhelm Lehmbruck-and much else. And once again, as in 2000, the history of abstract art is a mess.

It's one of the further curiosities of the new MoMA that while Mr. Elderfield dwells at length on the achievements of Alfred Barr, just about everything Barr stood for in the realm of responsible museology is repudiated in this inaugural installation. It's almost enough to persuade one to believe in Freud's Oedipus complex.

Back then, in the installation of MoMA's permanent collection organized by the late Alfred H. Barr, Prendergast's Acadia (1922) was hung near Vuillard's Mother and Sister (circa 1893) and Bonnard's The Breakfast Room (circa 1930-31). This inspired placement effectively removed Prendergast from the uncongenial company of Robert Henri, John Sloan and other realists of the Ashcan School, with whom he'd won attention in 1908 as a member of a group called "The Eight." For some viewers, anyway, Barr's installation had the effect of establishing Prendergast as a painter whose work belonged to a very different order of aesthetic experience.

Prendergast had never, of course, been a realist of the Henri persuasion. His own artistic loyalties had been shaped by, among much else, the combined legacies of Cézanne, Puvis de Chavannes and the Nabis group. Yet as far as I've been able to discover, Acadia was never again similarly exhibited at MoMA after Barr's installation of the permanent collection was dismantled.

Given the number of latter-day curators who have displayed either ignorance or indifference in regard to Prendergast's achievement, I have sometimes wondered if Acadia became the casualty of yet another deaccession blunder at MoMA. Fortunately for us, it has not. And at the moment, this late masterpiece can once again be seen in New York in the exhibition called Maurice Prendergast: Paintings of America , which Warren Adelson has organized at the Adelson Galleries. While the show is not, to be sure, the definitive museum retrospective that Prendergast aficionados, myself among them, have long been awaiting, its survey of some 58 paintings and watercolors is more than sufficient to serve as an introduction for the many people who remain unacquainted with his achievement.

The uninitiated need to be cautioned, however, that Prendergast is not the kind of painter who goes in for what Picasso once described as "the big clash of the cymbals." As reported by Françoise Gilot in her memoir, Life with Picasso , the artist uttered those words in the course of a tirade in which he denounced Bonnard as "just another neo-Impressionist, a decadent; the end of an old idea, not the beginning of a new one." Picasso was clearly phobic on the subject of Bonnard-he even arranged for a blistering assault on Bonnard's reputation to be published in Cahiers d'Art -but he wasn't stupid. The very terms he used in denouncing Bonnard provide us with a remarkably accurate account of what we now admire in this great painter, and, with certain modifications, it may also illuminate some key elements in Prendergast's paintings.

"Another thing I hold against Bonnard," the quotation in Life with Picasso continues, "is the way he fills up the whole picture surface, to form a continuous field, with a kind of imperceptible quivering, touch by touch, centimeter by centimeter, but with a total absence of contrast. There's never a juxtaposition of black and white, of square and circle, sharp point and curve. It's an extremely orchestrated surface developed like an organic whole, but you never once get the clash of the cymbals which that kind of strong contrast provides." What you do get in Prendergast are paintings of extraordinary chromatic invention and subtlety, and paintings that at the same time give us a highly poetic, almost dreamlike account of turn-of-the-century American life.

It has sometimes been claimed that Prendergast was the first American modernist. Be that as it may, he's certainly one of the greatest, and was recognized as such by an earlier generation of American critics, collectors and connoisseurs of modernist painting-among them, besides Alfred Barr, John Quinn, Albert Barnes, Henry McBride and Duncan Phillips. Here, for example, is a passage from Phillips' obituary tribute to Prendergast in 1924:

"Prendergast was an unprecedented colorist in that the gamut of colors under his masterly control was apparently boundless. He did not load excessive quantities of pigment, but produced delectable variations of subtle hues. Nor did he obtain these variations at the expense of brilliancy through mixing his tones, but through the interweaving of separate stitches of pure clear color, laying in his designs in a melody of many colors and finishing them with a harmony of superimposed touches, the undertones and overtones mingling. He organized his colors and marshaled their arrangement, but he did this spontaneously, on the inspiration of the moment. The chosen colors recur in precisely the right places on the pattern, and they are all a happy family with special affinities and inseparable association. The end which he had in view as he apparently improvised so lightheartedly with his mosaics in aquarelle, or with his many tubes of perfect pigment on whatever shreds of old canvas happened to be at hand, was to make each decoration a unit of colorful design by making each vividly suggestive little figure in his foreground frieze a functioning part of the complex pattern. This decorative unity is a comparatively simple matter when an artist is content to confine himself to the organization of two or three closely related or effectively contrasted tones; but Prendergast, especially in his latest and best works, achieved a unified tonality which fills our eyes and delights and satisfies our minds and senses with an array of no less than a dozen variously colored spots which he distributed and balanced with positive assurance and blended in exactly the way Nature blends the world's many colors in the harmonizing element of air. It is the same old principle of the Luminarists, but applied with the emphasis on fantastic decoration rather than on realistic illusion."

Maurice Prendergast: Paintings of America remains on view at the Adelson Galleries in the Mark Hotel, 25 East 77th Street, through June 20.

For aficionados of modernist art, moreover, the timing of this development could hardly be better. Next summer, as already reported, the Museum of Modern Art will be closing its doors on West 53rd Street to complete its current expansion program, with operations shifting to Queens until sometime in 2005. Only God–or Thomas Krens–knows where in the world the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will be dispatched to in the interim, given this museum's current globalization project. Thus, for much of the first half of this first decade of the 21st century, the Met seems likely to be the principal museum venue for modernist art in Manhattan.

This is not something that could have been predicted even a generation or two earlier. When I came to live in New York in the 1950's, the Met was the last place anyone would look to for a comprehensive account of 20th-century painting and sculpture. For all practical purposes, the history of Western art at the Met had ended with Impressionism. Under the directorship of the late Francis Henry Taylor, the museum had simply closed its eyes to the fact that New York, in the aftermath of World War II, had emerged as the capital of the modern movement. Which is why, of course, the Abstract Expressionist painters were so bitter about the Met's refusal to acknowledge their work, and publicly attacked the museum for its backward policies.

What happened under Taylor's immediate successors–James Rorimer and Thomas Hoving–might best be described as progress at a price. Particularly in the stormy Hoving era, some of the modern paintings that were shamelessly de-accessioned–a Van Gogh, for example, and a Henri Rousseau–were of far greater quality than some of the modern works acquired with the proceeds. At best it was an erratic, undisciplined and often chaotic period for the museum, and while some important modern acquisitions were made and some major exhibitions mounted when the late Henry Geldzahler served as the Met's curator of 20th-century art, modernist art remained a marginal interest at the museum.

All of this was to undergo a huge change, both in terms of quality and of quantity, under the directorship of Philippe de Montebello and his hiring in 1979 of William S. Lieberman as chairman of the Met's department of modern art. Mr. Lieberman brought to the Met both extensive experience and extensive connections from his long period of curatorial service at MoMA, where he'd begun his career under the late Alfred H. Barr Jr., that museum's founding director.

To his duties at the Met, Mr. Lieberman also brought something of Barr's vision of modernist art–of its complexities and what might even be called its sometimes contradictory impulses. And he did so in a period when there was emerging at MoMA itself a tendency to discredit Barr as having too narrow a vision of modernism. In my judgment, anyway, this was always a bogus charge and had, perhaps, more to do with generational conflict–a desire on the part of the new regime at MoMA to establish its own authority at the expense of MoMA's famous father figure–than with Barr's remarkably wide-ranging record of exhibitions and acquisitions.

One of the things that characterized MoMA's installation of its permanent collection in Barr's day was the special attention it accorded to the work of the early American modernists–among them, John Marin, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley. Maurice Prendergast was shown in the company of Bonnard and Klimt. And so on. Certain masterworks of American modernism that had iconic status at MoMA in that period–Hartley's late Evening Storm (1942), for example–disappeared into the storerooms as soon as Barr stepped down and have never again been seen at the museum.

I mention this now because Mr. Lieberman has been even more generous in the attention he has lavished on American modernism in the galleries the Met now devotes to modern art. When you go to the Met today, you can see excellent examples not only of Hartley, but of Milton Avery, Florine Stettheimer, Stuart Davis–really, the list is too long to recount here–in addition to the extensive holdings in European modernism. Indeed, you can see a more comprehensive account of American modernism at the Met than at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is supposed to be devoted to such art. This is something that simply did not exist at the Met on this scale under previous administrations.

The same is true, of course, for the installation of European modernism, to which the Gelmans' collection now adds a number of masterpieces–among them, Bonnard's The Dining Room at Vernonnet (1916), Balthus' Thérèse Dreaming (1938), Braque's The Billiard Table (1944 and 1952), Chagall's The Lovers (1913), Derain's Regent Street , London (1906), Matisse's The Young Sailor II (1906), Mondrian's Composition (1921) and, most amazingly, the hanging of Picasso's Still Life with a Bottle of Rum next to Braque's Still Life with a Pair of Banderillas (both 1911), as well as excellent examples of Giacometti, Juan Gris, Léger, Rouault and Miró.

This is the big leagues, and it is only part of the Gelmans' bequest. Later on, the Gelmans' collection of modern drawings will also be exhibited. For all this, we owe Mr. Lieberman–and the Met–a large debt of gratitude. With so many other museums going haywire, it's a comfort to know that the greatest of our museums remains on a steady upward course.

Before turning to Mr. Georges' painting, it may be useful in an amnesiac culture like our own to recall and correct some history. In thinking about painting in New York in the 1950's, many people-particularly those whose first acquaintance with the New York scene dates from the late 1960's, 1970's or 1980's-still regard the "triumph" of Abstract Expressionism as the only thing that really mattered. Yet many of the key accomplishments of the New York School actually belong to the 1940's, the first decade of the Abstract Expressionist movement and the one when its aesthetic character was established in the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart and Hans Hofmann.

In the 1950's, while the Abstract Expressionist movement continued to flourish, a reaction-or what might better be called a defection-emerged from within its ranks in favor of one or another mode of figurative painting with sufficient force to alter and complicate the entire outlook of the New York art scene.

It was de Kooning who won the lion's share of attention with his Woman paintings, but Pollock, too, reverted to a kind of figurative painting after 1950. The principal momentum of this defection or countermovement was to be found, however, in the work of the so-called "second generation" painters of the New York School-Fairfield Porter, Nell Blaine, Leland Bell, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Philip Pearlstein, Grace Hartigan, Alex Katz and Paul Georges, among others. So emphatic was the impact of this countermovement that, in 1954, the Artists' Club, which had been founded in the 1940's to discuss the problems and promote the interests of the Abstract Expressionists, convened a panel on the then-controversial issue of the "New Realism," as the figurative painting of the 50's was called. John Bernard Myers, who was exhibiting some of these figurative painters along with some of the younger Abstract Expressionists at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, was the moderator of the panel. The speakers were Alfred H. Barr Jr., Clement Greenberg, Frank O'Hara and myself.

It was, as I recall, a fairly stormy discussion. But that was to be expected. The Artists' Club wasn't much given to formal rules of debate. Alfred Barr caused some commotion when he suggested that abstraction itself might be coming to an end, and that a return to history painting might be in the offing. (He had in mind Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing the Delaware .) A few years later, Barr found in Jasper Johns' flags, targets and maps what he was looking for: an alternative to abstraction. But abstract painting didn't come to an end, though some people felt it might just as well have when, in 1959, they saw Frank Stella's black-stripe pictures hanging in the Museum of Modern Art for the first time.

Meanwhile, the countermovement-which favored various styles of figurative painting but essentially rejected the antics of Mr. Johns' neo-Dadaism and the Pop Art painting that derived from it-went its own way, mindful of tradition, including the tradition of Abstract Expressionism in some cases, and often producing some of the most ambitious painting to be seen in the latter decades of the 20th century.

Mr. Georges (born in 1923) is one of the big talents to come out of this countermovement in figurative painting in the 1950's. The ambition, in his case, was the attempt to reconcile the scale and freedom of Abstract Expressionist painting with the figurative content of the Old Masters. Thus, in the big, early Self-Portrait in Studio (1959), which is over 8 feet wide, there is as much Franz Kline in the painting of the tall easel on the right as there is of Rembrandt in the painting of the self-portrait on the left. If the picture falters in places, as it does in the unfinished painting of the artist's feet-which has the curious effect of making the entire figure seem to levitate before his canvas-it is owing as much to exuberance as to impatience. Yet whatever its incidental faults, the impact of the painting is tremendous.

There are, in fact, a lot of self-portraits in this retrospective, as well as narrative paintings in which the artist is also a character. There are paintings of nude models, still lifes and even, alas, a very strange painting of classical ruins, Frieze and the Temple (1990). The show is called The Big Idea , and bigness-in the size of the canvas, in the sweep of the painterly gesture, in the conception of the painting's subject and in the exorbitant energy the painter brings to it-is the keynote.

My own favorite among the paintings in this exhibition is the group portrait called The Cedar Tavern (1973-74), another big picture measuring nearly 8 feet wide that is surely Mr. Georges' masterpiece. The scene is what might be called the post-Jackson Pollock Cedar Tavern, in which Mr. Georges himself (seen in the lower left corner) is in the company of some painter friends-among them, Aristodimos Kaldis (in the lower right, wearing his signature red scarf) and Paul Resika (partially seen just behind Kaldis). This is at once the most moving, the most disciplined and the most beautifully constructed painting by Mr. Georges I have seen. In a more perfect art world than ours, it would be hanging in one of our major museums, for it is itself part of the history of the New York art world in the later 20th century.

Paul Georges, The Big Idea: A Retrospective remains on view at the Center for Figurative Painting, 115 West 30th Street, through June 10. The center is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.

The Art Show is the annual production of the Art Dealers Association of America, and this year the A.D.A.A. was one of the few institutional entities in the professional art world that wasn't under a cloud of suspicion or investigation. You didn't have to be an art dealer, either, to experience a wee bit of Schadenfreude at the spectacle of the auction houses' current ordeal. It's almost enough to make one believe in a just universe.

That this year's Art Show gave the public a lot of very fine things to look at was an additional bonus for those of us-the majority-who go to art fairs to look rather than to buy. The Art Show was thus also another salutary reminder that, despite the quantities of faddish nonsense and bad taste that one often encounters in dealers' shows, the commercial art galleries continue to play a major role in contemporary cultural life. They often recall us to artistic accomplishments the museums have neglected, and in some cases their standards of quality are actually higher and more scrupulous than those prevailing in museums that specialize in contemporary art-the Whitney, for example.

In my own generation, moreover, the galleries have been as much a part of our art education as the museums. And, except on occasions like The Art Show , which is organized as a charity benefit, the dealers' galleries are free to anyone who has the curiosity to seek them out. They are indeed second only to our public libraries in offering us free public access to an essential feature of our civilization. That the dealers also contrive to make a profit from this public benefaction may still be troubling to people who regard capitalism as a very bad thing, but in the year 2000 these benighted souls are more deserving of our pity than our contempt. Life today-and not only in the art world-must be very difficult for them.

At this year's Art Show , which ran for five days in February, some 70 art galleries were represented. It was a rather more elegant show than some I can recall, and while there was inevitably a fair number of objects one would be glad never to see again, they seemed to be in shorter supply than usual. In a show this size, nobody can be absolutely certain of having seen everything, but I did take a certain pleasure in the fact that I didn't encounter a single painting by Norman Rockwell. Given current museum trends, that too must be counted as a contribution to civilization.

As for the exhibits that remain a special pleasure to recall from this year's Art Show , two installations devoted to works by a single artist were especially noteworthy: the extraordinary collection of prints by the German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer, mounted by David Tunick Inc.; and the very beautiful series of recent Minimalist paintings, each one foot square, by the American painter Agnes Martin, mounted by Pace Wildenstein. Both were indeed of museum quality, and the Agnes Martin series ought to go straight into a museum as a permanent installation.

Elsewhere, too, there were pleasurable surprises. In the Zabriskie Gallery's booth there was an exceptionally beautiful sculpture by Alexander Archipenko, a Female Torso (1948), made of cast and polished terra cotta that might easily be mistaken for marble. This represents a phase of Archipenko's work that few of us are familiar with, and in the spring (April 18 to June 2) Zabriskie will devote an entire exhibition to these polished terra cotta sculptures from the years 1935-48. Both this Female Torso from 1948 and the earlier Archipenko figures from 1910-16, exhibited in The Art Show by Rachel Adler Fine Art, left one wondering if the time may not be ripe for an Archipenko retrospective. It would have to be carefully selected, to be sure, for Archipenko was a very uneven artist. Yet at his best, some of which can be seen at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge-a gift from the late Lois Orswell-Archipenko was in the top rank of 20th-century sculptors, yet he remains virtually unknown to many museumgoers today.

Finally, there were three extraordinary items in the Achim Moeller Fine Art booth: a still-life watercolor, Tulips (circa 1920), by Charles Demuth, that is one of the artist's finest pictures; a drawing by George Grosz called Pandemonium (dated August 1914, but probably created between 1915 and 1916), that is one of this artist's finest works in any medium; and Saul Steinberg's poignant Self-Portrait drawing from 1946.

Meanwhile, among current exhibitions in the galleries one that is not to be missed, at least by admirers of the paintings of Marsden Hartley, is an unusual show of the artist's drawings at the Kraushaar Galleries-a show that will later travel to the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, N.Y. I don't think there has ever before been a show of Hartley's drawings in New York. This one ranges in its dates from 1908 to the very year of the artist's death in 1943. Of particular interest are several silverpoints that give us a glimpse of the more delicate aspects of Hartley's draftsmanship, but the star of the show is the late drawing of Three Men Standing Behind Two Seated Women With Aprons (circa 1943), on loan here from the Bates College Museum of Art. Marsden Hartley: Drawings remains on view at the Kraushaar Galleries, 724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, through March 11, and will then be seen at the Heckscher Museum from March 21 to May 28.

More on the New MoMA

In his letter to The New York Observer last week, Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry takes exception to some of the questions I have raised about the new "narratives" he proposed for the future of MoMA in the talk he gave at the museum on the evening of Jan. 25. In his letter dated Feb. 14, however, I was glad to see that the evangelical tone of Mr. Lowry's January talk has been somewhat purged of its incendiary rhetoric in favor of museological alternatives that can be reasonably debated. Still, certain issues remain to be clarified, and foremost among them is the use of a cant term like "narrative," which in today's parlance is virtually a synonym for fiction, as a substitute for the discipline of history. Why an institution like the Museum of Modern Art should now be scornful of the "H" word-history-does indeed call for some clarification.

Unlike the traditional discipline of history, which requires factual verification as well as interpretation based on solid evidence, a "narrative" is a species of invention-in the present instance, a curatorial invention. Such narratives, or inventions, tend to be based more on the thematic content of works of art-as Mr. Lowry's reference to "thematically organized displays" tacitly acknowledges, than on their formal or esthetic character. There is thus an antiformal, extra-esthetic bias built into such narratives from the outset. The history of an esthetic idea, say, geometrical abstraction, gets chopped up into discrete little subject-matter narratives that make hash of the esthetic continuities which governed the conception of the art in the course of its creation. This, alas, was the fate of almost every variety of abstract painting in MoMA's Modern Starts exhibition, which, notwithstanding its many merits, did indeed represent the triumph of subject-matter narratives over the history of pictorial thought. The history of abstract art in the first decade of its existence was thus a casualty of a narrative that couldn't accommodate it. What we are talking about, then, is a Procrustes' Bed school of museology.

Directly related to this Procrustes' Bed approach to the history of modern art is Mr. Lowry's somewhat confused and confusing remarks about Alfred Barr. On the one hand, Barr's historical view of modern art, which was indeed based on "identifying key works of art and tracing the development of critical schools and movements, and important artistic relationships," is said by Mr. Lowry to have "oversimplified a great deal and left much unaccounted for." On the other hand, Barr is also said to have believed that nothing that he worked so hard to accomplish in formulating a connoisseur's history of modern art was meant to be anything but a temporary museological expedient. The clear implication is that Barr's pioneering historical labors in this field constituted little more than a subjective narrative that has now been superseded by more up-to-date but equally expedient narratives. To believe that, however, would be tantamount to dismissing the discipline of history as an exercise in solipsism, if not indeed an intellectual solecism.

No doubt certain artistic developments were "unaccounted for" in Barr's historical approach to modern art. He was, after all, traversing an intellectual terrain that had not yet been comprehensively explored, yet with his few significant predecessors-among them, Julius Meier-Graefe, Leo Stein, Duncan Phillips, Roger Fry and Albert C. Barnes-he was in essential agreement, and he extended the study of history of modern art a lot further than they had. In the variety of exhibitions that were organized at MoMA in Barr's time, moreover, many aspects of 20th-century art-and even 19th-century art-that didn't fit neatly into his basic reading of the period were also included. The Mexican muralists, for example. The charge that he "oversimplified a great deal" is itself an unwarranted simplification of his accomplishments and his methods.

As a trained historian, Barr understood that in every period of human endeavor there are developments that are central to determining its achievements and others that are less so, and that it is the vocation of the historian not only to distinguish between them but to illuminate their relation to each other and to their immediate posterity. As an art historian, he also understood that the best way to chart the course of these developments and relationships was to try to see them as the major artists of the period saw them-and, of course, to be able to identify who the major artists might be. Barr had the great advantage, to be sure, of coming to this task in a period when many of the greatest masters of modern art were still at work. His successors at MoMA have not, for the most part, been as fortunate. Barr was in a position to look to Matisse and Picasso for his standard of quality. His successors have had to settle for Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Cy Twombly for their standard. You would have to be a museum curator or an academic-or both-to believe that this doesn't represent a significant decline. Yet it is upon the faulty premise that ours, too, is a period of high achievement in art that MoMA's current plans for a huge expansion of its galleries and programs devoted to contemporary art appears to be based. And it is upon this faulty premise, too, that the new narratives at MoMA are likely to give us those "stories about modern art" designed to "privilege" (as we say now) the very different work of the contemporary artists the museum now favors.

History, alas, has never been an equal-opportunity enterprise as far as the arts are concerned. (Is this, perhaps, the reason why the top brass at MoMA is now so determined to jettison the historical approach to modern art?) Great periods in art are often followed by some swift decline: Think of what happened to English painting in the immediate aftermath of Turner and Constable. That we may be living in a comparable aftermath today is something that our museums ignore at their peril-the peril of turning modernism itself into yet another academy. But this is what Mr. Lowry's new narratives appear to be guaranteeing for MoMA's future. Let's face it: The age of the avant-garde is long gone, and there isn't a museum narrative in all the world that can reverse that historical reality. What the discipline of history can do, however, is give us a broader and deeper understanding of the many ways the age of the avant-garde continues to shape the world in which we live today. If this entails a sense of loss, then that, too, should be faced up to-and not disguised under some "narrative" rubric.

I don't mean by this merely the reinstallation of familiar modern masterworks from MoMA's great collections in ways that radically depart from the allegedly "linear" reading of the modern movement that was established by the late Alfred Barr and more or less reaffirmed by William Rubin during his tenure as director of the museum's department of painting and sculpture. This reconfiguration of MoMA's masterworks-and indeed, of a fair number of works that don't exactly qualify as masterpieces-is, of course, the most obvious thing about Modern Starts , and has already been much commented upon. The agenda I have in mind is about something else.

Simply stated-and in certain sections of Modern Starts it is an agenda that is very simply implemented-what governs the conception of this extraordinary exhibition is a shift in intellectual priority from the esthetics of modernist style to a concentration on the subject matter of the art under review. This is, to be sure, a perfectly legitimate way to approach the art of the modern era. Yet, in common with other approaches to such a large and complicated subject, this emphasis on subject matter, or thematic "content," is more illuminating about certain works of art than it is about certain others.

About many forms of representational or figurative art, for example, it can sometimes be very illuminating indeed. Yet even in that area of modernist art it can also at times be very misleading, for it tends to reduce the iconography of modernism to a succession of illustrations-illustrations, that is, of the social or technological history of modernity. And that is not, perhaps, what many of the major talents of the period under review, 1880 to 1920, had in mind in creating their work, even their representational work. Moreover, the tripartite division of Modern Starts into sections devoted to People , Places and Things made this tendency to reduce modernism to the level of historical illustration more or less inevitable.

Where this approach to the modernism of 1880 to 1920 most conspicuously fails, alas, is in its treatment of the rise of abstract art, which is one of the major events in the last decade, 1910 to 1920, covered by this exhibition. Amazingly, there is simply no attempt made in this very large exhibit to provide a coherent account of this development. In his introductory essay for the catalogue of Modern Starts , John Elderfield acknowledges that the birth of abstraction did indeed present vexing problems for the organizers of the exhibition. "It has originally been our idea to devote a separate section to abstraction," he writes. "We felt that this was necessary, not only because of the intrinsic importance to our period of the creation of abstract art, but also because of the difficulty of its comprehension, even now, nearly a century later. It took quite a long time before we realized that, by dealing with abstraction separately, we were creating enormous problems for ourselves, and quite possibly for the viewer, too."

The solution that Mr. Elderfield and his colleagues settled upon, then, was an exhibition devoted to what he calls "the themes of figural representation," to which, in effect, examples of abstract art by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and other pioneers of abstraction are not only subsumed but presented to the public as if they, too, were somehow to be regarded as examples of "figural representation." To drivxe home this dubious point, certain works that lie outside the historical framework of the Modern Starts show are introduced to underscore what the eye, unaided, might not be able to discover for itself. Thus, Mondrian's abstract drawing, Pier and Ocean 5 (1915), is hung alongside a series of 1990 photographs of ocean surfaces by Robert Adams, and Kandinsky's classic abstractions, called simply Panels for Edwin R. Campbell 1-4 (1914), but said by later writers to be a representation of the four seasons, are installed in close proximity to Cy Twombly's 1993-94 series of paintings actually called The Four Seasons . It is at moments like these in Modern Starts that the exhibition descends into the worst sort of intellectual humbug.

Mercifully, in most cases the examples of abstract art in Modern Starts are exhibited without comment or comparison. For some of the wall-text commentary in the installation of the exhibition is risible. Thus, the immense abstract black-and-white wall drawing that MoMA commissioned Sol LeWitt to create for the entrance to the People section of the show is burdened with the following explanation. Because this abstraction incorporates curved lines, they are said to be allusions to "the corporeal," and "For these reasons his abstract drawing is presented as an introduction to People ." Similarly, the vertical "zips" in the huge Barnett Newman abstraction in the first room of People are said-on whose authority, I wonder?-to represent some sort of masculine principle, therefore appropriate to the People section.

About the Sol LeWitt abstraction, by the way, it isn't until the reader gets to the notes on page 350 of the catalogue that there is offered the following explanation: "The work by Sol LeWitt is, in fact, not precisely related to the section called People : It is a fully abstract work. We wanted to include it because its combination of linearity and curvilinearity is reminiscent of some of the more extreme, abstracted figural representation in the People section. (We do not presume, however, to suggest that the artist himself would think about it in this way.) Furthermore, we wanted the contrast to show how far modern art has changed since the abstracted figural representation included in this section of the project." Then why not say so in the exhibition itself?

Modern Starts is, as I say, a marvelous exhibition, but in its treatment of the rise of abstraction it remains a hopeless muddle. To this subject, anyway, Barr's reading of the history of modern art remains a far more reliable guide.

If only for the great hall in which we see Léger's Three Women (1921), Matisse's Piano Lesson (1916), Picasso's Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Picabia's I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie (1914) in such close and unfamiliar proximity, and then turn to see Matisse's The Moroccans (1915-16) confronting Picasso's Three Musicians (1921),this show would be an event. And then the visitor to People enters another great hall dominated by the sculpture of Rodin and Matisse, which is equally breathtaking.

To be sure, not all of the surprising juxtapositions of familiar works are equally successful. In the very first gallery, the use that is made of a big, bright abstract painting by Barnett Newman as a backdrop for Maillol's highly dramatic female nude sculpture called The River (1938-43) is undoubtedly good theater, but it effectively reduces Newman's painting to serving as stage décor, and the bogus claims that are made for Newman's nonfigurative painting as somehow representing the "male" principle–because of those abstract vertical "zips"–doesn't help matters much. On the other hand, one of the best things about this People show is its rehabilitation of Maillol as a major modern artist. He more than holds his own even in that extraordinary room dominated by Rodin and Matisse.

Another conspicuous failure of taste in this first segment of this Modern Starts survey is the side-by-side comparison it makes between Cézanne's painting The Bather (circa 1885) and an utterly banal same-size color photograph of a youth in a bathing suit that was taken in the Ukraine in 1993. Such close confrontations between painting and photography rarely work to the advantage of the latter. In this exhibition, the photographs come off best when they are isolated in installations devoted solely to photography itself, for photography really is a separate universe of esthetic discourse. It was, in any case, rather cruel to pit this unremarkable photograph of the boy in the bathing suit against a Cézanne–and particularly this Cézanne.

Still, these are incidental irritations and disappointments in an exhibition that at almost every turn introduces us to unexpected pleasures. What might be called the structure of the exhibition–its division into sections ostensibly devoted to "Composing the Figure," "Composing With the Figure," "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space," etc.–are not, I think, likely to engage the attention of most visitors. The purpose of these divisions is in any case more elaborately articulated in the accompanying catalogue of the show. What matters here is the quality of the works of art and the esthetic intelligence with which the curators of the exhibition have contrived to exhibit them in ways that cast new perspectives on that quality. It is in this respect that John Elderfield, MoMA's chief curator at large, and his curatorial colleagues–Peter Reed, Maria del Carmen González and Mary Chan–have scored a considerable triumph.

Needless to say, they couldn't have done it–at this esthetic level, anyway–if their predecessors at MoMA had not provided them with the single greatest collection of modern art in the world. It is for this reason that this exhibition is also another posthumous triumph for the founding directors and curators and patrons of MoMA. However much the structure of the People show may depart from the ways in which the founding director at MoMA, the late Alfred H. Barr Jr., used to show the permanent collection, Barr's spirit still makes itself felt in the very quality of so many of the major works on view.

In this connection, I want to quote something I wrote about MoMA back in 1984 when the museum reopened after one of its periodic expansions." 'The Louvre,' wrote Cézanne, 'is the book in which we learn to read.' For a great many artists, as for a great many art critics, scholars, collectors, curators and dealers, and for its ever-expanding public, too, MoMA has long been the principal 'book' in which we have learned to 'read' the history of modern art. It has in this sense come closer than any other institution in the world to serving as the Louvre of modernism, and it is in this spirit that the installation of the permanent collections has been carried out in the new MoMA."

I think the same can be said today of the People exhibition, whatever its incidental flaws may be, and I look forward to the forthcoming Places and Things segments of this Modern Starts survey, however much I deplore such mangling of the language. Whether MoMA can sustain this level of quality in the future in the absence of a visionary leader like Alfred Barr remains to be seen. But it is mainly for what they tell us about the past that museums are most valuable to us, and it is for its view of the past that People is a resounding success.

The Places segment of Modern Starts opens on Oct. 28, and Things on Nov. 21, with all three parts remaining on view at MoMA through Feb. 1, 2000.