Mounting Taniguchi's staircase, one is conscious of the helicopter, suspended above one's head like a menacing mobile, not only proclaiming the museum's interest in modern industrial design but making a punning reference to the Calder mobile that used to hang above the Bauhaus staircase in the Goodwin and Stone building. In fact, Taniguchi has re-created the brilliant black-trimmed Bauhaus staircase, now between the second and third floors. There indeed is a Calder mobile, as well as a Mondrian painting, both of which, together with the staircase, evoke the Modernist aesthetic of the original museum. The wonderful Oskar Schlemmer painting of Bauhaus students on the stairway--which used to hang where the Mondrian is now--has regrettably been transferred to one of the galleries on the fourth floor, deprived of its earlier meaning. There is one other referential staircase, between the fourth and fifth floors, both of which are given over to painting and sculpture. It alludes to the staircase of the Shchuchin mansion in Moscow, on the landing of which Matisse's La Danse once hung. Shchuchin was one of Matisse's early patrons, and his collection one of the few sites where Russian avant-garde artists could study the kind of modern art that they aspired to create. Each of the staircases in the new building, functional and evocative, thus reflects the aesthetic and historical intentions of MoMA at their best, when architecture and art act as one in imparting Modernism's lessons. The escalators, which dominated the Pelli building's lobby, have been discreetly set to one side.

One also sees La Danse through an opening high in the atrium wall. Indeed, there are balcony-like openings at each level onto the atrium floor, through each of which one sees across to La Danse, with more and more of the gallery stairway revealed the higher you ascend. The museum is a cat's cradle of crossing sight-lines, so one keeps seeing what I think of as the defining works from various angles. When one stands on the level with the helicopter, one can see Balzac below. And of course from one opening onto the atrium, one can see across to the others, as well as people looking over the barriers. As with the view from the lobby into the atrium, other viewers are always part of the scene, which gives the place a tremendous sense of animation. I have never been in a building with so optical an essence, and in which other people by their very presence contribute to its aesthetic impact. In most museums I think of Sartre's famous line from No Exit: "Hell is other people." In MoMA, the consciousness of others moving from stage to stage and space to space is so much a part of the experience that one feels one is always part of a constantly changing work of art. That too makes it feel like New York.

The atrium is clearly the spiritual core of the building, and its floor a kind of piazza, with Broken Obelisk destined to become a meeting point, the way Picasso's Guernica used to be. But what works for monumental sculpture works less well for the paintings, however large they are. The fact that one is always aware of people on every level somewhat reduces the unequal struggle in scale between the immense height of the atrium's walls and the paintings hung at viewing height from the atrium's floor. It was a huge mistake to hang Monet's Nympheas in this space. Even though Monet lived and painted into the 1920s, even though the great paintings of his lily pond, with clouds and their reflections interacting with the floating flowers, influenced--or at least had some affinity in their all-over composition with--Abstract Expressionism, the painting is out of place as well as out of scale. Monet's water-lily paintings were designed for a circular, relatively low-ceilinged room in the Orangerie, as a kind of diorama; and though any one of them is a great treasure, treasures have to be treasured, and not abused. I am sure the wall display is temporary, but space must be found for this work that is consistent with the mission of aesthetic education that La Danse serves, and in which the work can yield a meaning without losing a fight with scale. None of the paintings currently on view there really stand up to the pressure the atrium exerts, even if they fare better than the Monet. Brice Marden's calligraphy and Jasper Johns's Untitled look drab and drained by all that space and light, and Willem de Kooning's Pirate, for all its bright hues, is outmatched by the architecture. Even worse, they become reduced to rectangular patches when seen from the upper openings.

The theory, as I understand it, is that the high ceilings of the museum's second floor were dictated by the anticipated scale of the contemporary work the museum expects to acquire, as it copes with the future of modern art. But very little now displayed, either in the atrium or the side galleries, justifies the height of the spaces. In one of the side galleries off the atrium, there is a marvelous work by the late Felix Gonzales-Torres, called Perfect Lovers. It consists of two quite ordinary kitchen clocks, set at the same hour and keeping the same time. One of them will finally stop--will metaphorically die--before the other. Contemporary work like Gonzales-Torres's is capable of dealing with the greatest of themes--love and death--without requiring immense space. Perfect Lovers, a physically small work, is exhibited in a space designed for something as imposing as one or more of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipse series.

It is extremely chancy, moreover, to anticipate the future of art architecturally, or to presuppose that modern art will continue to be shaped principally by painting and sculpture, albeit on a larger scale. Performance, installation and video don't necessarily call for the kinds of spaces required bythe classical Modernism so successfully displayed on MoMA's fourth and fifth floors. This is even more true of computer art, which is almost certain to play a significant role in the future. An artist I admire, for the moment without a gallery, makes his work on a laptop, which he recently carried with him to the Art Basel fair in Miami to show to potential collectors. The high ceilings on the second floor boldly project a future that may never come to pass.

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