Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/641424
150 CULTURED or someone wearing what she calls "four or five hats," Sheena Wagstaff seems light on her feet and relatively unbowed by the weight of her responsibilities as she darts around the 1966 Marcel Breuer building that once was home to the Whitney Museum of American Art. "Breuer talked about this area, which has always been called the moat, as a sunken garden," she says, her eyes brightening as she assesses the building's unique façade. "When you think of it as a sunken garden, it changes your complete perception of it." The British-born Wagstaff is in charge of programming the Brutalist landmark—alternately beloved and bemoaned—in her role as chief modern and contemporary curator of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has daringly agreed to take it over and program it for the next eight years. The former chief curator at the Tate Modern is surprisingly in her element in the Breuer building. "I've known the Whitney building for a long time," says Wagstaff, who was in the museum's Independent Study Program in the early 1980s. "This is the starting point really of my entire career." The first two exhibitions open March 18, so her deadlines loom, and construction crews are busily at work "sprucing up" the building, in her words. The result is as if it had gone to some kind of modern architecture spa; it seems itself, but refreshed. It's been four years since she got her Met job, and so far it has been a slow burn of plotting and planning. The Met Breuer, as the former Whitney is called, changes all that, notably with the two big opening shows, "Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible" and "Nasreen Mohamedi." But in truth they are just part of a massive overhaul of the museum's attitude toward the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And it all flows through Wagstaff, appointed by her fellow Brit, Met director Thomas P. Campbell, to have the museum taken seriously in an area formerly owned by MoMA and the Whitney, among others. "The Breuer doesn't sit on its own," she says. "The Breuer sits in relation to the main Met in every way, including programming." Physically, it takes nine minutes and nine seconds to walk from the mothership to the new outpost, and the journey's timing gives its name to a sound piece by John Luther Adams, Soundwalk 9:09, also debuting in March. But the intellectual distance from the Met's traditional strengths—everything but contemporary— to this new realm is greater. Wagstaff adds that any new person coming into a similar department-head position would always make changes but, in the case of contemporary art at the museum, "The difference is there hasn't really been a re-installment of the collection for nearly three decades." Among her developments has been a staff overhaul in her department; she hired six new curators over the last four years. Not to mention the biggest piece of the whole puzzle: "Then there's the new building, the new wing, and I've been working with David Chipperfield hugely in the last year and a half on that," she says of the elaborate overhaul of the southwest wing on the Met's main campus (which includes the modern and contemporary galleries), due to be completed in 2018. Acquisitions are on her mind, in a big way, but don't make the mistake of assuming the Met has pots of money to throw around at auction to buy masterpieces. "That's a total misperception," says Wagstaff, hardening just a touch. "We don't. And I knew the reality before I took the job." Instead, they will rely on donations, after having carefully targeted what the museum needs. "There are certain artists without whom you cannot tell that history," she says. "We have come up with a short list of about 15 to 20 artists, and we are working assiduously on trying to bring them into the collection. Most of them are achieving such high figures now that we don't have a hope in hell of buying them." Technically, this list is secret, but a moment later she talks about the dream of having "a magnificent Polke or an incredible Richter," noting that the Met doesn't own a single piece by Gerhard Richter. She adds coyly, "Those could be names on the list, indeed." But the opening exhibitions at The Met Breuer demonstrate that Wagstaff and her team are not just looking to present agreed-upon modern superstars in a vacuum. Far from it: The intent is both to mix old and new, as well as put forward new names into the conversation. "There will be this core of programming that only the Met can do," she says. "Unfinished"—197 works questioning just what it means to complete a piece—starts off with just such a bang. Right off the elevator on the third floor, visitors will see a formidable late Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, announcing that the museum is putting current art in the wider context of history. And Wagstaff thinks the grand old painting gets at the heart of something. "It is the depiction of Marsyas hung upside down by his feet," she says. "He is literally being skinned alive by his antagonists. I think that what Titian was doing was creating a metaphor for painting. If you are stripping off the surface, you are revealing the flesh, the actual viscosity of paint." And you could say that the Met has followed suit, digging deep and at great pains to reprioritize itself with its new contemporary mission. Moving closer to our own age, the Indian-born Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) is a favorite artist of Wagstaff's. The more-than-130-work exhibition at The Met Breuer will likely bolster her name recognition, which has been relatively weak on these shores. Mohamedi's complex and subdued line drawings belie her personal struggles. "Her life was cut short by her death at the age of 53 because of Huntington's disease," says Wagstaff. "Her entire life was spent trying to control the effects of this. The more I spend time with this material the more I realize these very meticulous, steady lines defined her art—it was a physical challenge to create something that was so finely calibrated." The increasing trend of integrating performance works into museum programming is also front and center at The Met Breuer. The American jazz musician Vijay Iyer will be in residence on the lobby floor in March, and has created a composition to accompany the Mohamedi exhibition. It will all be happening inside what Wagstaff calls "a finely textured bespoke museum. It's not a shouter, this building, but it is a great architectural statement." The changes afoot are relatively minor. The architects Beyer Blinder Belle have been busy on the inside, subtly re-staining some of wooden floors and making other fixes; the landscape designer Günther Vogt has tackled the outside, planting Quaking Aspen trees in the "sunken garden." (Don't worry, the Charles Simonds stairwell work came with the lease and is still there.) But Wagstaff sees the building's metaphorical importance, too, considering Breuer's origins in the Bauhaus, the school that tried to bring design to the people. "There is something very egalitarian about this building that I really like," she says. "There's a civic kind of strain running through it." When the Met was founded in 1870, she points out, education was its primary mission, and that continues today, albeit with a very current spin. "The goal is a safe place, a neutral place, where different cultural expectations and different cultural histories can be shared, so Breuer in a way kind of encapsulates a lot of that ethos," she says. At this, Wagstaff perks up, because she knows she's onto something: "You know, it's a great way to begin if we are going to invigorate modern and contemporary art." F