MoMA Names Ann Temkin

The two biggest unfilled jobs in the museum world this summer have been the next director of New York's Metropolitan Museum and the next chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. Now there's just one. Ann Temkin, a MoMA curator in that department since 2003, will succeed the just-retired John Elderfield — who was on the Time 100 list a few years ago of the 100 most influential people in the world. That's because whoever fills that job, or at least whoever fills it capably, is pivotal to how the story of modern art is told and understood. People may disagree with MoMA's version of events, they may even hate it, but whenever they attack it they know they're storming the citadel.

Temkin got her start at MoMA in 1984 as a curatorial assistant for three years. She moved on eventually to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where in my book she made her decisive impact six years ago with the altogether terrific Barnett Newman retrospective, which almost made me warm to Newman's transcendentalist notion of paint as a gateway to the ineffable. (As my favorite poet Czeslaw Milosz said about abstraction generally, that's expecting too much of mere pigment.) She's also well involved with contemporary art — well enough to help the Modern with its perennial challenge of deciding how contemporary it needs to be. How she'll work with MoMA's new associate director Kathy Halbreich, who was also brought in to rethink MoMA, will be interesting to watch.

UPDATE: And in other museum news, if that's what it turns out to be — did I say there were just two big jobs to fill?