More Talk With: John Elderfield

Let's continue that conversation I started here two days ago with the soon-to-retire chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

LACAYO: Over the past twenty-five or so years we've seen incredible retrospectives, at MoMA and elsewhere, devoted to just about all the big names of the 20th century. Picasso, Matisse, Munch, Miro, Leger, Schwitters, Mondrian, Bonnard, Beckmann, Gorky, Pollock, Kline, Newman, David Smith, Guston, Warhol. Who's left? Is there somebody among the glorious dead who still hasn't gotten the big show treatment and deserves it?

ELDERFIELD: Obviously that's something I've thought about a lot here. I'm very much against the idea of simply re-running the 20th century in the 21st. There were people here who thought we should have done another Fauves show in 2005 and that we should do a Futurist show, and I was like, "I don't think so". It's got to be done on an individual basis, asking which of the artists of the past particularly speak to us now. Looking at it that way, there are some people whom one wants to look now at certain fragments of their work. Miro from the mid-1920s to the mid-30s. That's comparable to what I'm doing with Matisse or what I did with Manet.

But there's never been a Braque show. Juan Gris, there's never been a full Gris show. Joaquin Torres-Garcia, I really think that should be done. It's one of the things I would have liked to have done — and maybe I will.

LACAYO: My choice would be Matta.

ELDERFIELD: A longtime ago I think Bill Rubin did one of those, in the late '60s I think.

LACAYO: What about living artists?

ELDERFIELD: There are people like Robert Gober, whom we will be doing. And people who would be mid-career if they were still around, like Martin Kippenberger.

LACAYO: What about Louise Bourgeois? I recently saw the retrospective at Tate Modern in London, which was good, but I didn't think it was the last word.

ELDERFIELD: Well MoMA did one fifteen or more years ago, which I think had the advantage of having been done before the late expansion of scale [in her art], which I'm not convinced is to the benefit of the work. But this is a phenomenon we deal with, overproduction and a tendency to equate scale and importance.