On the island museum, and what it means for a country to collect the 20th century
Moderna Museet occupies a 1958 building on Skeppsholmen — the small island between the old city and Djurgården — and it has the particular quality of a museum that is right about its location.
Moderna Museet occupies a 1958 building on Skeppsholmen — the small island between the old city and Djurgården — and it has the particular quality of a museum that is right about its location. The island is not quite city and not quite park: the naval buildings that preceded the museum remain as context, the water is on three sides, and the walk from the city across the short bridge produces the small psychological separation that a museum visit benefits from.
The permanent collection is the reason to come on a Tuesday. The weekend brings visitors who have come for the special exhibition; a Tuesday morning in the permanent collection has the particular quality of a room you do not have to share with purpose. Picasso's Guitar, a 1913 sheet metal and wire construction, is in a case in a room where the light is controlled and the work is sized appropriately for what it is: not very large. This matters. Small works in large rooms lose their scale; this room is the correct size.
The Francis Bacon triptych, the Duchamp readymades, the Swedish Surrealists — the collection has the character of a museum that collected with conviction during the period when conviction was possible, before everything became expensive and institutional caution took over. The 1960s acquisitions policy, under Pontus Hultén, produced a collection that represents the period with a confidence that later museums, working from a later vantage point and with higher prices, have not been able to replicate.
The Rafael Moneo extension from 1998, which added a new wing along the island's southern edge, resolved the question of how to add to a 1950s building with a clarity that has aged well. The new wing is not trying to be the old building, but it is not trying to contrast with it either: it is simply trying to be a good room for showing art, which is what the original building was also trying to be.
Leave the museum by the terrace on the south side, where the view across the water to Djurgården is the museum's final room: an outdoor space that the institution did not design but that the island provides free of charge. The best light on the water is in the late afternoon, when you are leaving rather than arriving.