Brancusi: Fish, 1930Photo: Chris Hildreth

Rorschach's earliest museum memory was "being dragged to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston by my mother. I distinctly remember being bored and lying down on the cold marble floor, throwing some kind of tantrum." By the time she made her first visit to MoMA, as a college student, she had adjusted her attitude: "I was taking art history and learning about all the iconic works that are at MoMA, and it was an incredible and very exciting experience." Rorschach came to Duke a year ago as the Nasher's first director, following ten years as director of the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art.

As we confront the maze of MoMA, she notes that scholars continue to debate just when modern art emerged. MoMA's displays begin with Post-Impressionism, including Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh. Rorschach says she prefers to start with Edouard Manet, "thinking about his innovations in the 1860s." In his Olympia, now in the MusÈe d'Orsay in Paris, Manet took the traditional subject of the female reclining nude and instead of producing a Venus or a Daphne, he produced a large painting of a prostitute, "completely naked, lying on a bed, presenting herself to a potential customer," Rorschach says. "It was a very shocking painting, because of the way it confronted and played with tradition. That seems to me a very important ingredient of modernity--not just working within a tradition and pushing it forward a little bit, but really trying to do something so radically different that it makes people sit up and take notice."

The art critic John Russell called Olympia "a declaration of war." In The Meaning of Modern Art, he wrote that the artist and the subject of his composition alike seemed to be saying, defiantly, " 'Here I am, and what are you going to do about it?'" Russell reaches for similar vocabulary with MoMA's great icon of modern art, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted in 1907: "Picasso was out to capture art as a great general captures a walled city--by storm."

Rorschach approaches Demoiselles with obvious familiarity, but also with the excitement of renewing a treasured acquaintance. In the painting, five women, their figures composed on flat, splintered planes, their faces distorted or covered with masks, pose seductively. Rorschach says the painting acknowledges art-history tradition--as suggested by the bowl with grapes at the bottom of the composition, and by references to African masks and ancient Iberian statuary--even as it thrusts art forever forward. Picasso employs the familiar conventions of beauty on parade and grouped human figures, and gives them a rude twist, depicting five naked prostitutes in a brothel. Two of them are pushing aside curtains, opening the composition to the viewer's scrutiny and metaphorically opening the way to modern art at the same time. The work, says Rorschach, is a proving ground for Cubism.

"This was really a breakthrough work," Rorschach says, gesturing toward the painting, "expressing an intellectual notion that Picasso had about being able to represent different views of things simultaneously, representing figures as broken planes. I know its historical importance, and I can't forget that when I'm looking at it. But I love the contrast between the masked faces and the bodies. Some of the faces are very painterly in the way that they are brushed on, are very exciting in their expressiveness. Then the bodies, which are beige in color--seemingly not so exciting--are reduced to flat planes. The whole thing is set in this very shallow space with fragmented blue triangles kind of holding it all together. You can just see the process in the artist's mind, doing something new, struggling with it."

Picasso: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, centerPhoto: Chris Hildreth

Looking around the room, Rorschach observes how the galleries are arranged to form a dramatic gateway to Demoiselles. She says she's impressed with MoMA's combination of grand spaces and more intimate ones. "I think what's happened to museum architecture is very exciting. It's become a showcase, a tour de force, for contemporary architecture. And so the museum is a work of art itself, though there are cases where it goes too far, where the architecture doesn't serve the art well.

"The ideal situation is where the building is architecturally very exciting, and yet it makes works of art easier to see, easier to understand, easier to contemplate. You want a wonderful space that people will enjoy being in, but that won't be oppressive. Every space has its challenges; every space has its constraints. Some art might look great in one sort of space, and some art needs another sort of space. I'm hoping that the Nasher will strike the balance. I think it is an exciting space to be be in. But it also has very serene, flexible spaces for viewing art."

In a serene area of MoMA, removed from the main galleries, Rorschach lingers over Constantin Brancusi's Fish, a 1930 sculpture in gray marble. Brancusi once said that he was interested not in the physical appearance of any given fish but in "the flash of its spirit." Simplicity, he said, was the expression of "the true sense of things." The simplicity here--the streamlined form of fin and scale, tail and head; the watery medium suggested by the blue-gray marble flecked with white stripes; the contrast in materials between the sculpted form and the pedestal of white marble and limestone--is alluring for Rorschach. "I like it as an abstract shape," she says, walking around the sculpture and noting how it seems to shift in volume and form--thin and streamlined from one perspective, curved and sensual from another. "I don't even know it's a fish. Like Matisse in his series of heads, Brancusi is playing with shapes and forms."

Rorschach says that it's hard to define the form of today's art movement. Diversity seems to be the byword. "Painting is vibrant still, but it isn't by any means the only thing. There are all kinds of photo-based and digital media; a lot of artists are working in those mediums today." We pay brief homage to a pair of Mark Rothkos, rectangular blocks of color that seem to be hovering above a color ground. The colors are beautiful, yet clash when arrayed together; the forms are at once pleasingly regular and disturbingly ragged. The works are sublime, as the British Romantics understood the notion of the sublime--overpowering, alluring, a little dangerous, Rorschach says. Rothko participated in the famous "Fifteen Americans" show at MoMA in 1952, a breakthrough for the Abstract Expressionists. "It's probably fair to say that abstract work is of less interest right now," Rorschach says. "Abstract Expressionism was all about turning away from the image, but the image seems more important now."

A study of illumination rather than an image attracts Rorschach to a tall, slender, glowing fluorescent light piece in the corner of a gallery. The work of Dan Flavin, she says, gains power when individual pieces are multiplied many times over. Rorschach began following Flavin when, as a high-school student, she went to an installation of his work. "It was one work per room, and it lit up and sculpted the whole room. It was just terrific--no paint, no canvases, just plain old neon tubes that you could buy at the hardware store, industrial materials that he got and configured into works of art." Keeping those works running is getting difficult, she says, since a lot of the fixtures are no longer made--testimony to the impermanence of this type of art.