I don't love the way paintings are reduced to lobby decor in the soaring but art-killing atrium or the rambling contemporary installation on the adjacent second floor. Nevertheless, I love the way the building looks and feels -- so much so that I've been having bizarre fantasies about working there. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi has struck such a brilliant truce between modernism and postmodernism that this building should give anyone interested in designing museums food for thought -- especially institutions with deconstructivist renovations under way. The new MoMA is an immeasurable improvement over the 1984 Cesar Pelli addition, not least because much of that museum-as-mall has been concealed or destroyed.

But as much as I love the new MoMA, there's a terrible gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach that tells me something is dreadfully wrong. In the midst of all this success there is a serious shortcoming: The amount of space allotted to painting and sculpture from Post-Impressionism to 1969 on the fourth and fifth floors is roughly the same as in the Pelli building. In other words, the total square footage of the galleries housing what is often called "the greatest collection of modern art in the world" is just too small. This spells trouble.

John Elderfield, the curator who oversaw the installation of these crucial floors, has chosen a middle path between MoMA's bygone Old Testament, this-begat-that, "beads on a string" approach and the awful arbitrary thematizing of art so popular of late (e.g., Elderfield's egregious segment of "MoMA 2000"). In his catalogue essay, Elderfield acknowledges that previous MoMA installations were "less real than ideal," and admits that the museum was "overemphatic" and "narrative-driven." He maintains MoMA is now interested in "multiple narratives" and being "juxtapositional rather than continuous." This is all good, although by now everyone knows that the history of modernism was spaghetti and simultaneity, that everything fed off everything else, and that MoMA's former arrangement was too linear and its cast of characters too pale and male.

MoMA is trying to get beyond the art-historical myth it created. That's why it's so heartbreaking to say that this gallant effort is already being impeded by lack of space. How an institution could go to this much trouble, get so much right, spend $858 million and not allow this portion of this vaunted collection more space is beyond me. The canon is being tweaked, but only slightly. One senses MoMA is dying to loosen up, but it's still operating well within its comfort zone. Unfortunately, it's also operating in a disturbingly familiar one: Of more than 415 works (excluding books) in the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries, only 20 are by women! This dispiriting fact undermines many good intentions.

To its credit, the installation proceeds chronologically and stylistically. Unexpected works by lesser names do pop up, which is great. But so far, MoMA has essentially replaced so-called minor Americans and Europeans with minor non-Americans and non-Europeans. When Venezuelans like Armando Revern, Alejandro Otero and Jess Rafael Soto appear, they feel like asides to the big guns.

I'm not suggesting that MoMA should refrain from exhibiting its masterpieces. This collection is staggering. My knees were buckling for galleries at a time. The Pollock room is hair-raising, and the many early and middle-period Picassos are astonishing, although a late one would establish that he was also one of the greatest painters of the 1960s. However, presenting the wild, insurrectionary history of modernism mainly in high points distorts the landscape. Seeing a Fautrier and a Soulages (even though I don't really like their work) and a Wols (whose I do) next to a de Kooning would allow you to grasp an idea about abstraction, and not just the New York School of it. They do this in a gallery with Fontana, Stella, Kusama and Dieter Roth, and it works well. Seeing only peaks means that eventually you won't be able to appreciate hills or valleys, let alone basins and caves. Personal taste is stunted, everyone ends up on the same page, and modernism grows corporate.

Subsequent hangings will rotate artists. This particular installation is dense with quality. But if you think about what easily could have been here as well had there only been more space, you'll see how close MoMA came to having it all. In the painting and sculpture galleries, there's no Ensor, Modigliani, Morandi or Soutine; no Balthus, Hartley, Dove or Albers; no Sonia Delaunay, Alice Neel, Vuillard or Toulouse-Lautrec. The only Stuart Davis is hung by the escalators. Ditto O'Keeffe. Also sadly missing are eccentrics and visionaries like Christian Schad, Florine Stettheimer, Charles Burchfield and Martin Ramirez.

Everyone wants the new MoMA to be marvelous. In a way, if it isn't, we're not. MoMA is more than just a museum. It's the holy seat of modernism. The Met is our walk-in encyclopedia; MoMA is the story of our lives. It's who we are, where we come from and where we're going; where we go to make our spirit journeys, to commune with our ancestors. At MoMA we grow new again. We have to hope that this is what will happen to this remarkable institution in this superb new building.

Backdoor Entry
A private high point in the Museum of Modern Art's new painting and sculpture galleries was the exoneration I felt in the side alcove entry into the fifth-floor galleries. This otherwise cramped space takes you past two Hoppers, a Sheeler and a Wyeth to surrealism and beyond to Otto Dix, George Grosz, and the Mexican muralists. Conversely, the grand entrance on the same floor ushers you past Czanne, Seurat and Degas to Picasso and Braque. The inelegant, peripheral way felt like a personal vindication, an acknowledgment that -- as humiliating as it is to admit -- many of us suburbanites came to modernism through the back door of realism and surrealism.

Elsewhere, MoMA owns four paintings that should be confronted totally alone, and therefore deserve their own wall. Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950 is one such work. It's been installed alone at the end of a gallery and will blow you away. The three other paintings are Monet's Water Lilies, Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis and, of course, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Monet's multi-paneled painting has been utterly defanged in the atrium. It belongs where smelly kids in scruffy clothes can sit on the floor and ogle it for hours. Newman's retinal wow has its own wall, but the wall is too big. The painting gets lost, the color dims and the internal scale dissolves. Meanwhile, Picasso's shot over everyone's bow shares a wall with five other paintings. It looks alluring, but is rendered decorative -- just one of many paintings. It isn't, wasn't, and probably never will be.

Finally, many will say hanging Matisse's Dance (I) over a staircase is a travesty, but a version of it was painted for the stairwell in the Moscow home of collector Sergei Shchukin.

Aftershock
After the shock of seeing the glorious new Museum of Modern Art building and the awe of beholding its permanent collection installed in the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries, there is the disappointment and frustration about how this institution handles the art of the last 30 years. The current, admittedly impermanent but nevertheless desultory arrangement of the art of this period in the museum's gleaming second-floor galleries -- a space so high-ceilinged and immense that it feels as if it were designed with Richard Serra in mind -- is so lackluster that it makes you wonder how this institution views itself.

If the upstairs galleries were installed with as little inspiration and as much slackness, the museum would have a massive fiasco on its hands. Here, one wanders aimlessly, as if in an auction house or an airport.

Over the last 10 years, MoMA has excelled at mounting solid monographic exhibitions. We've seen Richter, Polke, Gursky and Kusama, among others. These in-depth surveys are indispensable -- although they needn't be so slanted towards the Germans. Regardless, except for several notable "Project" shows -- many organized by ex-curator Laura Hoptman, now at the Carnegie Museum of Art -- and a tiny number of group shows (e.g. "Museum as Muse"), MoMA has essentially dropped the ball when it comes to mounting large thematic exhibitions of contemporary art and the art of the last 30 years. Big, messy group outings are the hardest, most ambitious exhibitions to do. They're difficult to fund and everyone grumbles. However, they create a vital discourse.

Clearly, MoMA wants to do spectacular things around the art of this period. If it does inconsequential, conservative shows -- if the curators play it safe, or if management is too top-down -- MoMA will only be a 20th-century museum, the end rather than continuation of something amazing.