Eccentricity Gives Way to Uniformity in Museums
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
MERION, Pa. — After years of bitter legal battles over whether it could be relocated, the Barnes Foundation, one of the country’s most beloved and quirky museums, is finally leaving its idyllic setting in suburban Pennsylvania. By midsummer, the last of its galleries is expected to be packed up for the foundation’s move to downtown Philadelphia in 2012, and one of America’s unique art experiences will be changed forever.
Tim Street-Porter/Esto
MODERNIZED The once-magical Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., after its expansion.
George Bouret, courtesy of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
MORE POLITE? Remaking the iconoclastic Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2010.
But the relocation of the Barnes is about more than the dismantling of a single museum. It also marks the end of an era in American cultural history. Over the past 15 or so years, some of the most original and idiosyncratic art institutions in the country — the Barnes, the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — have embarked on major expansions to modernize (and in some cases, to generate more revenue), significantly transforming their identities.
All three museums, each built by a wealthy eccentric, once represented intensely personal visions. All were conceived as alternatives to the offerings of the elite cultural establishment. And by the time the Barnes completes its move, all will have been remade into slick, corporate artistic institutions of a sort that their founders no doubt would have deplored.
Yet even more striking is what these transformations suggest about what we’ve become as a culture. The three museums’ iconoclastic collectors, and the institutions they built, embodied an America that still embraced an ideal of stubborn individualism. That spirit is now mostly gone, a victim of institutional conventions and corporate boards, and by a desire for mainstream acceptance that has displaced a willingness to break rules.
Nothing about the three museums was particularly forward-looking when they were built. The Getty Villa, an architectural fantasy created by a billionaire recluse and based on the ruins of a first-century Roman cottage at Herculaneum, was derided by many as a garish back-lot production when it opened in 1974. (Its ancient murals, Joan Didion wrote, looked “as if dreamed by a Mafia don.”) The Barnes’s collection, housed in a 1920s Beaux-Arts suburban mansion, was arranged in “wall ensembles” that mixed blue-chip Picassos and voluptuous Renoir nudes with works by forgotten local artists and a bizarre assortment of bric-a-brac. The Gardner, built about 20 years earlier by the New York-born socialite for which it is named, is a hodgepodge of Venetian interiors, Chinese art, Roman mosaics and early Renaissance masterpieces. The critic Lewis Mumford dismissed it as an example of the American pillaging of Europe.
What the museums all had, however, was an eagerness to challenge convention. Albert C. Barnes and J. Paul Getty saw themselves as cultural outsiders. Both saw their museums as ways to thumb their noses at cultural insiders — Barnes at Philadelphia’s insular community of art patrons, Getty at what he called the “doctrinaire and elitist views” of the art world.
Isabella Gardner’s odd, often witty juxtapositions — a Roman mosaic of a Medusa in the central courtyard, a stunning Titian depicting Jupiter’s rape of Europa hanging above a swath of fabric cut from one of her discarded ballroom gowns — conveyed a subversive feminist message.
The result, in each case, was a museum experience that felt deeply private. Walking into one of these galleries could seem like poking around in someone’s bedroom. The winking references, the quirky combinations of acknowledged masterpieces and minor oddities, the mix of personal and public missions — these served to narrow the gap between art and viewer. Instead of feeling lectured to from above, you felt as if you had been invited to share in a private joy.
The Getty was the first to change. In 1996, it began a decade-long renovation and expansion that included a new 450-seat outdoor amphitheater, a museum store, a cafe, a library and plentiful curatorial offices. The plan, designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates, also created a new entry sequence that leads visitors from a four-story parking garage up to the crest of a hill, where they follow a path alongside the villa before descending back down through the amphitheater to the main entry. Elegantly conceived, the plan nonetheless makes going to the villa feel like a pedantic cultural exercise. What was once a magical experience is now just another stop on the tourist’s checklist.
The Barnes’s new plan, which was unveiled in 2009, also diminishes the intimacy of the original experience. In order to comply with Barnes’s will, which stipulates that the collection has to remain exactly as he hung it, the foundation’s board agreed to create identical galleries in the new building. What the plan could not reproduce, however, was the tranquility of the Barnes’s leafy suburban setting. Instead, the architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, designed a sequence of spaces that lead around two sides of the building and through a courtyard before reaching the galleries. The series of turns, which are supposed to put you in a contemplative mood, serve only to put the art on a kind of pedestal, making what was once accessible seem precious and untouchable.
And the Gardner has since embarked on a similar redesign. A $70 million addition, designed by Renzo Piano and set at the back of the existing building, will force visitors to pass through a glass lobby and along a crystalline corridor flanked by gardens before finally reaching the old courtyard, drawing out an experience that used to take a few steps into a 160-foot-long procession.
The uncanny similarity among the three designs — the painstakingly protracted approaches to the galleries — underscores the challenges the architects faced when trying to preserve the essence of these museums while making room for the cafes, bookstores, event spaces and education departments that have become regular features of the contemporary museum experience.
But there is something else behind the uniformity of these plans as well. What were once eccentric creations have become polite and well behaved. Gorgeously crafted, they are about reinforcing the existing cultural consensus — not rebelling against it.
And what are we building in their place? New museums still pop up regularly in America, some of them very good. But by and large these institutions, too, conform to the spirit of our times. They are museums, as the art critic Dave Hickey once put it, for people who “love the winning side, the side with the chic buildings, the gaudy doctorates and the star-studded cast.” At their worst, they are about building social status for boards and collectors.
Most of all, however, they are the product of an art world in which people too often don’t want to offend the powers that be for fear that they might not be invited back to the party. The Barnes, the Gardner and the Getty, for all of their flaws, sprang from a time when even the very rich wanted to ruffle the feathers of the establishment now and again, and in doing so, to open up new possibilities for all of us.
The New York Times
MERION, Pa. — After years of bitter legal battles over whether it could be relocated, the Barnes Foundation, one of the country’s most beloved and quirky museums, is finally leaving its idyllic setting in suburban Pennsylvania. By midsummer, the last of its galleries is expected to be packed up for the foundation’s move to downtown Philadelphia in 2012, and one of America’s unique art experiences will be changed forever.
Tim Street-Porter/Esto
MODERNIZED The once-magical Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., after its expansion.
George Bouret, courtesy of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
MORE POLITE? Remaking the iconoclastic Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2010.
But the relocation of the Barnes is about more than the dismantling of a single museum. It also marks the end of an era in American cultural history. Over the past 15 or so years, some of the most original and idiosyncratic art institutions in the country — the Barnes, the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — have embarked on major expansions to modernize (and in some cases, to generate more revenue), significantly transforming their identities.
All three museums, each built by a wealthy eccentric, once represented intensely personal visions. All were conceived as alternatives to the offerings of the elite cultural establishment. And by the time the Barnes completes its move, all will have been remade into slick, corporate artistic institutions of a sort that their founders no doubt would have deplored.
Yet even more striking is what these transformations suggest about what we’ve become as a culture. The three museums’ iconoclastic collectors, and the institutions they built, embodied an America that still embraced an ideal of stubborn individualism. That spirit is now mostly gone, a victim of institutional conventions and corporate boards, and by a desire for mainstream acceptance that has displaced a willingness to break rules.
Nothing about the three museums was particularly forward-looking when they were built. The Getty Villa, an architectural fantasy created by a billionaire recluse and based on the ruins of a first-century Roman cottage at Herculaneum, was derided by many as a garish back-lot production when it opened in 1974. (Its ancient murals, Joan Didion wrote, looked “as if dreamed by a Mafia don.”) The Barnes’s collection, housed in a 1920s Beaux-Arts suburban mansion, was arranged in “wall ensembles” that mixed blue-chip Picassos and voluptuous Renoir nudes with works by forgotten local artists and a bizarre assortment of bric-a-brac. The Gardner, built about 20 years earlier by the New York-born socialite for which it is named, is a hodgepodge of Venetian interiors, Chinese art, Roman mosaics and early Renaissance masterpieces. The critic Lewis Mumford dismissed it as an example of the American pillaging of Europe.
What the museums all had, however, was an eagerness to challenge convention. Albert C. Barnes and J. Paul Getty saw themselves as cultural outsiders. Both saw their museums as ways to thumb their noses at cultural insiders — Barnes at Philadelphia’s insular community of art patrons, Getty at what he called the “doctrinaire and elitist views” of the art world.
Isabella Gardner’s odd, often witty juxtapositions — a Roman mosaic of a Medusa in the central courtyard, a stunning Titian depicting Jupiter’s rape of Europa hanging above a swath of fabric cut from one of her discarded ballroom gowns — conveyed a subversive feminist message.
The result, in each case, was a museum experience that felt deeply private. Walking into one of these galleries could seem like poking around in someone’s bedroom. The winking references, the quirky combinations of acknowledged masterpieces and minor oddities, the mix of personal and public missions — these served to narrow the gap between art and viewer. Instead of feeling lectured to from above, you felt as if you had been invited to share in a private joy.
The Getty was the first to change. In 1996, it began a decade-long renovation and expansion that included a new 450-seat outdoor amphitheater, a museum store, a cafe, a library and plentiful curatorial offices. The plan, designed by Machado and Silvetti Associates, also created a new entry sequence that leads visitors from a four-story parking garage up to the crest of a hill, where they follow a path alongside the villa before descending back down through the amphitheater to the main entry. Elegantly conceived, the plan nonetheless makes going to the villa feel like a pedantic cultural exercise. What was once a magical experience is now just another stop on the tourist’s checklist.
The Barnes’s new plan, which was unveiled in 2009, also diminishes the intimacy of the original experience. In order to comply with Barnes’s will, which stipulates that the collection has to remain exactly as he hung it, the foundation’s board agreed to create identical galleries in the new building. What the plan could not reproduce, however, was the tranquility of the Barnes’s leafy suburban setting. Instead, the architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, designed a sequence of spaces that lead around two sides of the building and through a courtyard before reaching the galleries. The series of turns, which are supposed to put you in a contemplative mood, serve only to put the art on a kind of pedestal, making what was once accessible seem precious and untouchable.
And the Gardner has since embarked on a similar redesign. A $70 million addition, designed by Renzo Piano and set at the back of the existing building, will force visitors to pass through a glass lobby and along a crystalline corridor flanked by gardens before finally reaching the old courtyard, drawing out an experience that used to take a few steps into a 160-foot-long procession.
The uncanny similarity among the three designs — the painstakingly protracted approaches to the galleries — underscores the challenges the architects faced when trying to preserve the essence of these museums while making room for the cafes, bookstores, event spaces and education departments that have become regular features of the contemporary museum experience.
But there is something else behind the uniformity of these plans as well. What were once eccentric creations have become polite and well behaved. Gorgeously crafted, they are about reinforcing the existing cultural consensus — not rebelling against it.
And what are we building in their place? New museums still pop up regularly in America, some of them very good. But by and large these institutions, too, conform to the spirit of our times. They are museums, as the art critic Dave Hickey once put it, for people who “love the winning side, the side with the chic buildings, the gaudy doctorates and the star-studded cast.” At their worst, they are about building social status for boards and collectors.
Most of all, however, they are the product of an art world in which people too often don’t want to offend the powers that be for fear that they might not be invited back to the party. The Barnes, the Gardner and the Getty, for all of their flaws, sprang from a time when even the very rich wanted to ruffle the feathers of the establishment now and again, and in doing so, to open up new possibilities for all of us.
The New York Times
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