Fourteen months into the pandemic, Manhattan is showing few signs of recovering its vibrancy. The office workers who used to crowd the sidewalks of Midtown are still working from home. It doesn’t look like they’re returning any time soon. Everyone I talk to gives me the same message: we’ll go back part-time later this year or in 2022, but we’ll never re-occupy our offices in the ways we did before. Time will tell, but for now it feels like a city stuck in a never-ending Sunday morning.

I used to complain about the crowds in galleries and museums. Yesterday, in my first visit for more than a year, MOMA felt like my private museum. If you have longed to study in solitude your favorite Rothko, Pollock or de Kooning, now is your moment. I was alone so long in the room devoted to Matisse’s The Swimming Pool that the motion-sensitive lights switched off.

The purpose of my visit was to see the Alexander Calder exhibition, Modern from the start. Spread over the sculpture garden and some interior galleries, the show includes a number of pieces loaned from other institutions and rarely seen. Calder’s magic was to make sculpture, traditionally that most solid and immutable of art forms, seem fragile, delicate, and impermanent. It’s hard to imagine a genius and a vision better suited to these difficult times.