Across the hall, the warrens of cubicles are gone, replaced with an expanse of gallery, airy and daylight-filled, that’s now the new home of the MFA’s Modern art collection. It’s the first time the space has been used as a gallery in more than 15 years. To walk into it is to be both grateful for its revival and shocked at what any sane person would consider to be a stunning misallocation of resources. Broad and airy, it has lovely views to the Back Bay Fens through windows scrimmed by translucent blinds to blunt light exposure for the pieces that line its walls. Even so, the presence of day just outside the walls here, amid an array of exceptional works, heightens the senses and breathes life into the works themselves, an architectural clarifying device. It was, no doubt, a great place to work. But this, finally, is clearly what it was made for.
Through the nearly five-dozen pieces on view, the new Modern galleries provide a broad overview of art world upheavals from the late 19th to mid-20th century, when Modernism, a headlong rush to shift perspective and technique to keep pace alongside the breakneck speed of change in a rapidly-industrializing world, rose to dominate the discourse in virtually every discipline. Among those five-dozen pieces, though, is a tacit admission: More than half of them are loans, not owned by the MFA, whose own Modern collection is famously thin.
There’s a reason for that: After being early adopters of Impressionism — the MFA’s collection of paintings by Claude Monet is among the best in the world — the museum cognoscenti of the early to mid-20th century largely stood pat. Fads, maybe they thought, largely taking a pass on major Modern movements like Surrealism, Fauvism, Cubism, and, maybe most dishearteningly, Abstract Expressionism, the first bona fide, all-American art movement that came to dominate the international art world.
There’s no way to correct that: Those works, by giants like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, or Rothko and Jackon Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, to name a few, are far out of reach price-wise on the global auction circuit, if they come up at all. So the renewed Modern department at the MFA will have to take a different tack. “I prefer to think of it as an opportunity to consider new points of view, and to find voices that haven’t necessarily been heard,” Claire Howard, the MFA’s recently installed curator of Modern art, told me on a recent walk through of the new spaces. “We can’t, as an institution, buy our way out of it, but we can be smart and innovative with what we do have.”
The MFA had been planning to retake the space for its Modern collection since 2024, and its opening is an outward symbol of a reinvigorated priority. A $25 million grant from the Wyss Foundation made it possible, and the grant’s endowment for dedicated Modern art staff — a curator and a conservator — made it a long-term commitment.
In other words, this is a beginning, better late than never. The largely loan-based display starts the new initiative with a bang: Rothko and Giamcometti are absolute giants, and the pairing illuminates a collaboration between the two that never reached fruition, a 1969 commission for UNESCO headquarters in Paris (Rothko, ultimately, declined. He would die by suicide less than a year later, at 66). Across a hallway, another intimate gallery puts together the American sculptor Alexander Calder and Paul Klee, the German polymath whose playful, free-flowing interests spanned expressionism, surrealism, and touched on Abstraction, too. In the big, broad galleries that look out on the Fens, the installation charts an arc across the chasm in the museum’s holdings. “The Pont St. Michel,” 1900, an early piece by Henri Matisse, is a post-Impressionist startler, its vigorous brush strokes and unorthodox palette, earth tones to electric blue, are the starter engine of the new galleries’ ambitions. (It is, alas, a loan, too.)
The display is a sample platter of both have and have not. It includes two works from the MFA’s collection by Piet Mondrian, the Dutch master of the abstract grid, before he submitted to his formal high-Modern rigors (one a painting of a lowland Netherlands pier, the other a wild tangle of swipes and gestures in black that coalesce into a semi-abstract eucalyptus tree); and a lovely, gloomy, small Wassily Kandinsky painting, “Dunaberg,” 1909, before his own flight into abstraction (a loan); one piece each from the MFA’s collection by American proto-Modernists Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove; and four works by French superstar Surrealist Rene Magritte (all loans).
There’s friction here, and a hint of where Howard might hope to take her new home from here: A huge, fiery 1953 canvas by Robert Matta, from the MFA’s collection, notes a gap not only in the MFA’s holdings but in art history of the role of Latin American artists in the Modern story; and Remedios Varo’s “Tailleur pour dames,” 1957, a prized recent acquisition that helps fill in the space in the Surrealist story in which women, like Varo, were largely left out.
In other words: It’s a start. And a good one. Howard promised new rotations of works by September. Now that the Modern collection has a home, let’s see what happens once it gets settled.
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS: MODERN ART GALLERIES
Ongoing. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave. 617-267-9300, mfa.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
