Some time in the month of May—barring, of course, yet another postponement—the Museum of Modern Art will reopen its doors and give us a first glimpse of what our “new” MoMA is going to look like for the remaining years of the twentieth century. The museum has been closed to the public since January. For a longer time than that—since the “old” museum on West Fifty-third Street was pretty much shut down in 1980—it has survived as little more than a shadow of its former existence. Its great collections have been out on loan to other institutions or else locked up in storage, and its program of exhibitions devoted to contemporary art has been radically curtailed. For the youngest generation of artists, therefore, MoMA has been more a myth than a reality, and a significant segment of the art public, too, has come of age with little first-hand knowledge of the museum’s collections or of the role they have played in shaping our understanding of modern art.

No one doubts that MoMA is going to regain an important place on the art scene once its operations are restored to a full schedule. Its collections, after all, are unrivaled in both quality and number, and if the advance publicity is to be believed, the new MoMAwill have a lot more space in which to keep them on permanent exhibition. Yet it is also true that the art scene had already begun to change and expand, even before the