Feature

Picasso vs. Matisse: MoMA's Subway Series

The high-ceilinged, big-box space of MoMA QNS offered the curators particular freedom. “Over the last few days, we’ve made changes in sequencing, and in the walls on which pictures are hung,” says Varnedoe, still in the thick of installation. A 360-degree rotation, at the center of the show, will provide a sort of panorama of early-twentieth-century experimentation, all in a very late-twentieth-century gallery space. The curators pooh-pooh any suggestion that the industrial setting will detract from the art. Varnedoe says, “The slightly industrial aspect is the floors, which are concrete, but once the exhibit is crowded, anyone who is looking at the floor is wasting their time.”

It isn’t the floors that MoMA watchers are worried about, but the psychological hurdle of the 7 train. “You get on the subway and you’re there in about seven minutes,” says Flam (who has only been once since the opening last June). “But the seven minutes always seem much longer when you have to cross a river.”

Lowry seems unfazed by such fears, crediting the museum’s half-block-from-the-subway location with a degree of MoMA QNS’s success. “After September 11, New Yorkers embraced the outer boroughs. There was newfound civic pride and interest,” he says. “Everyone says, ‘Oh, my God. It only took ten minutes.’ It enhances their sense of enjoyment when they realize it is a simple thing to do.” In addition, attendance by Queens residents has increased tenfold at the new location, and the numbers for Brooklynites are also up. “There’s the 7 train for Manhattan and the G train for the rest of the world,” Lowry says.

The museum is offering late closing times on Friday and Saturday (and one Monday a month, when it will be pay-what-you-will between 4 and 7:45 p.m.). Sixty-five thousand advance timed tickets, $20 for adults, have already been sold.

Other art spaces in the area say weekends and Mondays (when most museums are closed but MoMA and P.S.1 are open) are drawing good crowds, aided by the free Artlink bus service from midtown.

“We’re getting an enormous amount of traffic on Sunday,” says David Dorsky, whose Dorsky Gallery operates a block from P.S.1. “People use Sunday and Monday to come and see MoMA and P.S.1 and SculptureCenter—they figure once they are here they might as well stay here.”

“We are now drawing three to five times what we were getting for the average Upper East Side show,” says Mary Ceruti, executive director of SculptureCenter, open since December in a picturesque former trolley garage. “Weekdays are real slow, but weekends are great.”

Heiss says that while P.S.1’s attendance has not significantly increased, it is getting many more first-timers to contemporary art, an audience it expects to multiply during “Matisse Picasso.” To offer a foothold for these P.S.1 virgins, P.S.1 has invited 100 New York painters to complete same-size works in honor of the two masters, which will be installed floor-to-ceiling in a first-floor gallery.

Restaurants are also seeing an uptick in business. Family-run, 30-year-old Dazie’s on Queens Boulevard has been particularly favored by the MoMA staff and art-focused bus tours. Tournesol, between P.S.1 and the river, draws its jam-packed weekend-brunch clientele from Manhattan, Roosevelt Island, and the hipper parts of Brooklyn.

Councilman Gioia has an instructive tale about the magnitude of interest in the exhibit. While at the Tate Modern in January, he rented an AudioGuide, and had to turn in his driver’s license as collateral. The clerk looked at his address and said, “Oh, you live in Queens. Do you know where the MoMA is?” “He was planning to visit America next month to see ‘Matisse Picasso’ at Queens MoMA,” Gioia says, “both to see the show and to hang in Queens.”

“The museum is 50 yards away from a subway stop,” Varnedoe says with asperity. “Europeans don’t have the psychological hurdle of the East River. To Europeans, a subway stop is a subway stop. Once you get here and stand between two pictures, it doesn't matter where you are."