On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art’s photography galleries, I noticed a particularly clever curatorial rhyme: The first photograph a visitor sees upon walking into the museum’s collection installation is the great, late Carleton Watkins picture Late George Cling Peaches (1889, left). The almost-last picture a visitor sees upon leaving the collection galleries is an untitled 1959 Otto Piene. (Below, right.)

I loved the echo of the rounded forms dropped into a grid, one by a pre-modernist and another by a grid-loving, arch-modernist. The semi-pairing was so striking that I asked MoMA curator Sarah Meister to talk about the thinking that went into her installation. Here’s what she said:

I really think of them as counterpoints to one another more than echoes. The Watkins is kind of glorious in its pure claiming of these as objects, while  the Piene is sort of the opposite of that. It’s the removal of specificity, it’s kind of the effervescent light quality… The Watkins is as solid as the Piene is nothing. It’s simply light. Yes, there’s the grid structure in both of them and that’s significant, but I also think the departure from the grid is significant in ways that are opposites of each other. In the Watkins, you have the breaking of the points of contact between peaches that allows it to give you that depth into the space behind them, that darkness. I think that suggests that Watkins was absolutely in control of his picture, that it’s absolutely intentional. I think with the Otto Piene, it’s the imperfection of the way the light shines through these stencils, and how it’s mostly a grid but not really, and mostly sunbursts, but not really.

Those Watkins Peaches, if I died tomorrow and I never brought another work into the collection, knowing that the Peaches is here… that’s certainly my proudest acquisition accomplishment. So as soon as that came into the collection (in 2010), I knew that I wanted that to be the jumping off point for the whole installation. And so that’s what happened. It all starts with that Watkins. Beyond that, whenever you’re doing a collection installation, what I try to do is to tell a history of photography through the collection, but you always use your recent acquisitions to see how they change the stories you can tell. You can’t look at Duchamp the same way after seeing that Watkins picture. I think it radically changes how you see the 19th-century, which then reverbarates through the present.

Related: On this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast, Huntington curator Jennifer Watts and I discuss Late George Cling Peaches (the Huntington is the other institution to own a print), Watkins’s California Missions Project and more.