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Inside Art

MoMA Galleries to Change Their Focus

“Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City” (1983), among the Nan Goldin works to be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.Credit...2016 Nan Goldin, The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is changing things yet again. After reinstalling the fourth-floor permanent collection — devoted to works from 1940 to 1980 — MoMA, beginning in June, will radically rework its second-floor contemporary galleries by dividing them into three distinct spaces, each with a major installation from the collection focused on a single artist.

“MoMA is going through this very public experimentation in thinking about its collection galleries,” said Rajendra Roy, the museum’s chief film curator. “We’re all looking at new models and exploring what that can feel like and look like.”

Where the museum annually used to present works from the collection made since 1980, a team of curators (in addition to Mr. Roy, they are Klaus Biesenbach, Stuart Comer, Cara Manes, Lucy Gallun and Erica Papernik-Shimizu) is presenting Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1979-2004), Teiji Furuhashi’s “Lovers” (1994) and Tony Oursler’s “Imponderable” (2015-16).

“It’s a look at how artists use technology to be biographical,” said Mr. Biesenbach, MoMA’s chief curator at large and the director of MoMA PS1.

In “Lovers,” a multimedia installation, life-size images of Mr. Furuhashi and other members of his Kyoto-based artist collective are projected onto the walls of a darkened room, moving like specters around the perimeter.

Mr. Oursler’s work employs “Pepper’s ghost” — an illusion technique used in haunted houses — to track the development of the virtual image, which overlaps with the artist’s own family history.

Ms. Goldin’s “Ballad” is a visual diary of her relationships with lovers and friends in downtown Manhattan, told through some 700 slides from the late 1970s through the ’80s. It will be shown in its original 35-millimeter format, along with photographs from the slide show in the museum’s collection.

“She keeps updating it — it’s a living work,” Mr. Biesenbach said. “And we’re trying to create more of a living museum, to allow a dialogue while establishing a chronology.”

Benjamin Genocchio isn’t wasting any time.

Three months after leaving ArtNet News to become the executive director of the 2016 Armory Show, he’s announcing a “new vision” for the 2017 edition that aims to give the fair more focus and substance, as many complain that it has become unwieldy and amorphous.

“In a way, I think it grew too much,” Mr. Genocchio said. “The idea is to go back to a tighter, smarter fair. We also understand where we are, which is New York as an incubator.”

To reflect the increasing dominance of contemporary art, both Piers 92 and 94 will include work from that period, and Modern art will no longer be the sole focus of Pier 92.

“If you’re able to put a curatorial eye to the presentations, it’s going to make the fair more flexible and responsive,” Mr. Genocchio said, “but, on the other hand, more visually coherent and less overwhelming.”

The “Focus” section, rather than being organized by geographical area, will now include presentations of new or rarely seen work by a single artist. And the “Presents” section will expand as a platform for emerging galleries to showcase new artwork.

What’s so great about portrait medals?

Explaining that will be up to the Frick Collection, now that the museum is receiving 450 of them as a promised gift from Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher.

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The Frick gift includes this medal of Empress Josephine.Credit...Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Collection

“Many people don’t know what they are, so our job is to make them interested and possibly fall in love with them,” said Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director.

Given that each generally portrays an individual or a significant scene from someone’s life, the medals also coincide with the Frick’s strength in portraiture, Mr. Wardropper said, adding, “They’re kind of miniature lessons in history.”

Tracing the development of portrait medals from the 15th century through the 19th century, the collection also complements the Frick’s concentration on European art from the Renaissance through the 1800s.

“It’s commonly acknowledged to be the finest private collection of medals,” Mr. Wardropper said, “a perfect fit for the Frick.”

The medals will ultimately reside in a dedicated gallery. In the meantime, the museum is planning an exhibition and catalog for May 2017.

“Their small size demands intimacy,” Mr. Wardropper said, “which is also what we offer.”

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were among those who preferred not to be lumped together as the “School of London,” a phrase coined by R. B. Kitaj for a group of artists that also included Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach.

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“Leigh Bowery,” by Lucian Freud, a reluctant member of the School of London.Credit...Lucian Freud Archive, Tate, London 2016

“A lot of them don’t like the designation,” said Julian Brooks, curator of drawings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “Bacon worked from photographs. Freud insisted on a living sitter every single time. So they’re very different, even though they were friends.”

Still, in the 1940s through the 1980s, this London cohort did collectively amount to a significant movement toward a new approach to figuration that resisted the prevailing trend toward abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptualism.

Starting July 26, the Getty will present “London Calling,” a show of 80 paintings, drawings, and prints that it says is the first major American museum exhibition to explore the leaders of this school.

“If one thinks back to that period, figurative art was seen to be old hat,” Mr. Brooks said. “These artists very much took figurative art to the next step.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 20 of the New York edition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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