Global Fall Culture Preview: From a New MoMA to TV Stars on Stage

That’s set to change on Oct. 21, when the museum reopens after being shuttered for a four-month, $450 million renovation and expansion designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. “This project allows us to rethink the experience that our visitors have when they come to the museum,” says Sarah Suzuki, a MoMA curator of drawings and prints who’s spent the last two years coordinating the renovation. “That has both a physical manifestation—in the architecture and the way that people move through spaces—and a different approach to a visitor experience.”

The lobby has been redesigned with human flow in mind. The ticket desk has been moved and a lounge area added. There are new elevators and a separate staircase to improve circulation, and 40,000 square feet of gallery space have been built, both inside the new Jean Nouvel skyscraper next door and in the area where the American Folk Art Museum used to be. Overall, the museum’s exhibition space increases 30%.

Historically, MoMA’s permanent collection on its second, fourth, and fifth floors was grouped by categories—painting and sculpture, drawings and prints, photography, architecture, design, and film with little overlap. Now categories will be integrated. Just as important, art from the museum’s storage will regularly come and go, which ultimately allows much more to be seen. “The collection will not be permanent but one that’s constantly in motion,” Suzuki says. “We’ve committed to rotating a third of the collection floors every six months.”

Before anyone gets up in arms about their favorite paintings disappearing from view, “none of us got into this business to break hearts,” she says. “We actually have a relatively small list of things that we know are at the top of the must-sees.” Those—Starry Night included—will stay up. “But,” Suzuki adds, “it will have new neighbors, and it might not be in the same place you saw it last time. We’re trying to make the visitor experience as rich as possible.”

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

“Modern Maharajah: A Patron of the 1930s”
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Sept. 26–Jan. 12
The Maharajah of Indore (1908–1961) was famous for being elegant, cosmopolitan, and very rich. After studying at the University of Oxford, he was exposed to modernists in Paris and London before acceding to his father’s throne in 1926. Almost immediately, he set about constructing an au courant palace in India called Manik Bagh. Designers and artists including Eileen Gray furnished the interiors, from which some 500 objects will be on view.

“Richard Gerstl: Inspiration—Legacy”
Leopold Museum, Vienna, Sept. 27–Jan. 20
Before Richard Gerstl committed suicide in 1908 at age 25, he was considered a promising, if not prominent, member of Austria’s expressionist movement. He became famous only after his death, and in the past century his art has influenced the likes of Georg Baselitz and Paul McCarthy. This will be the first monographic presentation of his art in Austria in 25 years.

“Gauguin Portraits”
The National Gallery, London, Oct. 7–Jan. 26
Paul Gauguin’s French Polynesian landscapes have been crowd-pleasers for a century, but his portraits of Europeans in his native France are less well known. Now a collection of about 50 portraits, which span his early career through his later years in the South Pacific, will go on view in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing.

“The Impressionists and Photography”
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional, Madrid, Oct. 15–Jan. 26
Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet have occupied space on museum walls for so long it’s easy to forget that they were once considered vanguards. As self-appointed members of the late-19th century avant-garde, these painters were eager to celebrate the new and novel, such as photography. The lens introduced ways of seeing and ways to interpret light, framing, space, and movement. The exhibition combines paintings with photographs that might have inspired them.

“Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art”
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, Nov. 19–Feb. 16
Amid the current vogue for figurative portraiture of black subjects, the Getty is coming out with an exhibition to remind everyone that the focus has been a cornerstone of Western art for the past 600 years. The original impetus was Biblical—early medieval legend asserted that one of the three kings to pay tribute to the infant Jesus was African—though the reality of depicting black figures at a time when slavery was widespread across Europe was, for obvious reasons, less than straightforward. The Getty doesn’t shy from the controversy inherent in the subject matter.

THEATER

Plays on and off Broadway and in London’s West End have always relied on celebrities to bring in crowds, but the fall season seems to have an unusual amount of star power. In London, Claire Foy and Matt Smith, both of Netflix’s The Crown, will face off at the Old Vic in Duncan Macmillan’s LUNGS (Oct. 14–Nov. 9), an intimate character study of a couple grappling with a chaotic world and their own fraught relationship. (In other words, just like The Crown but with fewer tiaras.) At the Playhouse Theatre a few steps from the Thames, X-Men star James McAvoy will play the title role in CYRANO DE BERGERAC (Nov. 27–Feb. 29), Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s romantic comedy. One hitch: The play hinges on de Bergerac’s ugliness, and McAvoy … isn’t ugly. Talk about range.

Meanwhile in New York at Studio 54, Weeds star Mary-Louise Parker will lead THE SOUND INSIDE (Sept. 14–Jan. 12) as a creative writing professor at Yale who gets drawn into a complicated relationship with a student. She starred in the same role when the play opened at the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer and won raves. Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne stars in AMERICAN UTOPIA (Oct. 4–Jan. 19), a “theatrical concert” based on his 2018 album that bears the same name. Alongside recent songs, there will be some greatest hits at the Hudson Theatre. Finally, Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei plays Serafina, a widow rediscovering love, in Tennessee Williams’s THE ROSE TATTOO (Sept. 19–Dec. 8) at the American Airlines Theatre. It might not be Williams’s best-known work, which means Tomei can make the role her own.

DANCE

Blixen
Royal Danish Ballet, Copenhagen, Sept. 11–April 16
Company soloist Gregory Dean has choreographed a three-act dance about the author Karen Blixen set to music by Claude Debussy. Blixen, the Danish baroness who wrote Out of Africa, was born into a wealthy family, bounced around the world in a series of unhappy relationships, and became a literary superstar before dying from medical treatments that included mercury pills and arsenic tablets prescribed, it’s suspected, for imaginary ailments.

Fall for Dance Festival
New York City Center, New York, Oct. 1–13
There are five programs that include everything from tap dance to ballet in the 16th annual festival’s lineup. Particularly anticipated is a new work by choreographer Kyle Abraham, a 2013 MacArthur fellow who has his own New York-based dance company. Abraham has created a solo work for American Ballet Theatre principal Misty Copeland, which will appear along with works from Mark Morris and Skanes Dansteater.

Kunstkamer
Netherlands Dance Theater, The Hague, Oct. 3–Nov. 16
Since their appointment in 2002 as the company’s in-house choreographers, Sol León and Paul Lightfoot have created more than 50 works of fast, gestural dance that channel classical ballet. This celebration of the company’s 60th anniversary will travel to Europe’s capitals.

Re-Mark
City Contemporary Dance Company, Hong Kong, Nov. 16–24
Sang Jijia, the CCDC’s resident choreographer and a onetime dancer in the company, premiered this multimedia piece last year in Florence. Now he’s bringing it to Hong Kong, incorporating components of the city’s culture and geography.

Congo
Theatre de la Ville, Paris, Nov. 20–23
In a new work by the influential dancer/choreographer Faustin Linyekula, Eric Vuillard’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel Congo will be brought to life onstage. It’s a synthesis of dance and theater that interrogates colonialism.

BOOKS

There are plenty of good books to curl up with as the seasons change. In the nonfiction category, those seeking creative inspiration should turn to New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins’s forthcoming collection, THE LIVES OF ARTISTS (Phaidon, Sept. 25). It’s a massive boxed set of 82 profiles that he wrote from 1962 to 2019. Equally personal, but thankfully much shorter, is THE UNDYING (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 17), a quasi-memoir by the poet and essayist Anne Boyer, which chronicles her battle with breast cancer in often harrowing detail. It’s less a story of quiet inspiration and more a chronicle of rage, financial hardship, and physical torment—not for the faint of heart and yet eminently readable. For another compilation by a dazzlingly good writer, crack open the classicist-cum-contemporary commentator Daniel Mendelsohn’s collection of essays, ECSTASY AND TERROR: FROM THE GREEKS TO GAME OF THRONES (New York Review Books, Oct. 8). Mendelsohn has mastered a crisp, easy pace, and his criticism, while always pointed, reads more like a snapshot of the zeitgeist than a list of grievances.

Patti Smith continues to mine her rich past with YEAR OF THE MONKEY (Knopf, Sept. 24), a slightly more fictionalized chronicle than her two previous books. Far more limited and invariably more controversial will be former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s FOR THE RECORD (Harper, Sept. 24), a memoir that’s expected to be a justification for wreaking Brexit on the Western world. He delayed the release at least once before, but apparently, like Britain’s uncoupling plans, the wait is over.

If a break from reality is needed, try THE DUTCH HOUSE (Harper, Sept. 24), a tale of sibling trauma and companionship by the bestselling author Ann Patchett. Alternately, there’s THE CHEFFE (Knopf, Oct. 29), a triumphant chronicle of a star female chef told from the point of view of her former assistant, by the Booker Prize-nominated writer Marie NDiaye. Think Kitchen Confidential with more ambition and drama. And for a bit of dreaminess, try LAMPEDUSA (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 17) by Steven Price, a novel that follows the real-life Italian prince Giuseppe Tomasi as he tries to finish his first and last novel, The Leopard. Aside from writer’s block, the prince, stuck in a sunny, aristocratic Sicily, is facing down his imminent death.

MUSIC

A Monumental Intimacy
London Symphony Orchestra Season Opening, Barbican Hall, London, Sept. 14
The LSO starts things off with a bang with a world premiere by British composer Emily Howard, conducted by the orchestra’s music director, Simon Rattle. The rest of the evening also consists of music by English composers—Colin Matthews’s Violin Concerto and the late William Walton’s sweeping four-movement Symphony No. 1 from 1935.

Porgy and Bess
Metropolitan Opera, New York, Sept. 23–Feb. 1
George and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 opera, which is filled with now-famous songs (Summertime might be the English language’s most popular operatic tune of all time), will be performed on the Met stage for the first time in almost 30 years. Bass-baritone Eric Owens and soprano Angel Blue lead the cast in a season-opening production co-produced with the Dutch National Opera and the English National Opera.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago, Sept. 26-28
In honor of Beethoven’s 250th birthday, the CSO will perform all nine of the composer’s symphonies as part of a season-long celebration. Conductor Riccardo Muti will begin with the first and third symphonies. In the following weeks and months, stars including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida, and András Schiff will play pieces from the canon in a rousing program delivered by an orchestra famed for its smooth, virtuosic execution.

Trifonov and Babayan in recital
Carnegie Hall, New York, Oct. 16
Daniil Trifonov, 28, is one of the hottest pianists on the recital scene; Sergei Babayan—a generation older—is a fixture in the world’s most prestigious concert halls and, not coincidentally, Trifonov’s former teacher. To call reviews of their 2018 joint recital at Carnegie Hall “ecstatic” would be underselling it. Now they’re returning as part of the celebrated “Keyboard Virtuosos” series, a seven-month program that includes some of the world’s best pianists. The duo will play works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel.

Madonna: Madame X Tour
BAM, Brooklyn, N.Y., Sept. 17–Oct. 12
Traditionally, Madonna concerts have been all about spectacle—lights, pyrotechnics, massive disco balls. Her concert series at BAM celebrating the release of her album Madame X will be a more modest affair. The album—a collection of 15 songs influenced by Lisbon, where she mostly resides now—will make its debut in a so-called theater tour. In the announcement video, Madonna explains why: “I want to have an intimate experience with my fans,” she says, sharing a margarita with DJ Diplo.

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