Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Art Review

When Three Into One Equals More

Slide 1 of 10

A visitor walks through a gallery of Buddhist works at the Harvard Art Museums, including one the most important Japanese sculptures in an American museum, the doll-size 13th-century wood figure of Prince Shotoku Taishi, left, depicted as a toddler, from the Sackler collection.

Credit...Stewart Cairns for The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 10

    A visitor walks through a gallery of Buddhist works at the Harvard Art Museums, including one the most important Japanese sculptures in an American museum, the doll-size 13th-century wood figure of Prince Shotoku Taishi, left, depicted as a toddler, from the Sackler collection.

    Credit...Stewart Cairns for The New York Times

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Six years is a long time for an art museum to go dark, and at Harvard, make that two museums, and eventually three. Such was the case when the university decided to unite its three very different museums — the Fogg (Western European and North American art), the Busch-Reisinger (art from German-speaking Europe) and the Arthur M. Sackler (Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean art) — under one new Renzo Piano roof. Closings started in 2008, with a promised 2013 reopening. The clock ticked. The date passed. Still no lights, but much discontent, inside and out.

With the architectural merger came another consolidation. The museums’ director, Thomas W. Lentz, did some curatorial streamlining. Nearly a dozen departments, some as boundary conscious as nation-states, were smushed together into three large ones. European art and American art, for example, became one functional entity. Egos were bruised. People left, or were let go. And, long after deadline, Harvard was still art-museum-less.

Now there’s a happy ending, and a beginning. As of last Sunday, the three museums, identities more or less intact, are back as the one-title Harvard Art Museums. They’re together at the former Fogg site on Quincy Street, but while the old Fogg facade and courtyard have been preserved, nearly everything else is brand new. And the brand new is, generally speaking, Mr. Piano’s doing. He pushed the original building’s back wall through to the next street and raised the roof to add a story. The roof, a bifurcated glass pyramid, is all but invisible from Harvard Yard, but, along with a boxy new entrance facade, it reads loud, clear and clunky from the other side.

Mr. Piano’s exteriors are seldom pretty. You learn to live with them if his interiors work, and this one, for the most part, does. Unlike his glass pavilion “expansion” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which provides little more than shelter from the rain, Harvard has gained a controllable flood of daylight, useful to the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies here, and some extra gallery space, though nowhere near enough for three museums with a total collection of some 250,000 items.

Slide 1 of 12

Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen on Sunday after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano.

Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 12

    Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen on Sunday after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano.

    Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Some of the Asian galleries feel as narrow and tight as they all did in the old Sackler. By contrast, the Early Italian Renaissance gallery is too wide open; Asian art leaks in, but not purposefully. On the upside, the big spaces look versatile. (Presumably, they can be subdivided.) And there are neat innovations, among them half-hidden glass-enclosed corner galleries for sculpture. What a wake-up it is to come upon a cluster — a burst, really — of Bernini’s writhing, quaking clay models in such a setting.

So, overall, the visual impression is strong. The expanded interior feels like a new space rather than just a tinkered-with old space, which is important for museums clearly bent on raising their decades-long, and to some degree self-created, low profiles within the university. At the same time, enough “classical” touches have been retained to suit a school that has always been conservative and tradition bound at its cultural core.

Beyond obvious efforts at outreach — a cafe, a gift shop, an art research center where visitors can interact (by appointment) with the collection — the news from the reopening is about the return of art that has for years been out of sight, some of it presented with brilliance. Work from the Busch-Reisinger, on the first floor, has never looked better. Conceived as a “Germanic museum” in 1903, this institution had its own building until 1991, when it was moved to a Fogg annex, where it more or less disappeared. In the new galleries, its collection, especially its pre-World War II Expressionist paintings, looks smashing.

The first thing you see is Erich Heckel’s 1912-13 triptych painting “To the Convalescent Woman.” With its sallow-faced subject reclining among monstrous sunflowers and African sculptures, it’s a radically neurasthenic, underground image of an odalisque. Just beyond it, a 1927 self-portrait by Max Beckmann — he’s posed in a dinner jacket, hand on hip — projects precisely the opposite spirit: healthy, on-top-of-the-world confidence. Both artists were destined for the Nazi “degenerate art” blacklist.

An adjoining gallery that nominally belongs to the Fogg is devoted to the collection of Maurice Wertheim. Wertheim, a big-time banker and loyal alumnus (Class of 1906), bequeathed a breathtaking group of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings. The handful here will set your head spinning: a van Gogh self-portrait from Arles (he looks like a tonsured Buddhist monk), one of Picasso’s earliest Blue Period pictures, geraniums by Matisse and hydrangeas by Seurat alongside a pocket-size oil study for his “La Grande Jatte.”

Galleries upstairs hold similar beauties, large and small, familiar and not. On one wall in the Early Renaissance gallery is a small crucifixion panel by that 15th-century Florentine favorite, Fra Angelico, who depicts even the most in extremis events with serene tact. Across the room is a picture by a Sienese contemporary known only as the Master of the Osservanza, of the resurrected Jesus visiting Limbo. By comparison, this is like a scene from an action film. Bathed in an aura as bright as a headlight, Jesus flattens Satan under a door and greets waiting souls with an outstretched hand.

Some objects come with surprises invisible to the eye. A doll-size 13th-century wood figure of the Buddhist prince Shotoku Taishi depicted as a toddler, from the Sackler collection, is one of the most important Japanese sculptures in an American museum. This is true not only because it’s among the oldest known images of its kind, but also because it was found to contain a cache of dedicatory objects — relics, miniatures sculptures, handwritten charms — that made it an undisturbed treasury of medieval Buddhism.

And there are back stories. The Chinese galleries have fabulous jades, thanks in part to the omnivorous eye of Grenville L. Winthrop (Class of 1886), who coveted everything from Bronze Age carvings to Ingres nudes. He also left the museum a magnificent eighth-century high-relief sandstone Buddha, which had been chiseled free from a cave wall in northern China by unknown hands. We know exactly whose hands detached Buddhist frescos from another Chinese cave site, in Dunhuang. They belonged to Langdon Warner, Harvard’s first teacher of Asian art. He made off with the fresco fragments — several are on view — in 1924, an act still reviled in China as imperialist pillage.

The above are must-sees, though en route you’ll pass things you will want to linger over, too: an operatic religious scene by the Rococo painter Corrado Giaquinto; a glorious flower-strewn Iznik bowl from Turkey; John Singleton Copley’s portrait of the Boston merchant Nicholas Boylston, as chipper as a sparrow in his silk turban and gown; a great late Philip Guston painting and one by Kerry James Marshall, highlights of a middling contemporary collection; and, perched on a column in a courtyard arcade, a 16th-century bronze head of a Benin king from Nigeria.

Unlike the Yale University Art Gallery, the Harvard Art Museums don’t add up to an encyclopedic collection. There’s almost no pre-Columbian art from South America, or Native American art, or art from Africa outside of Egypt in the permanent galleries. (A fascinating installation of African material assembled by Kristina Van Dyke for the reopening is in a gallery for temporary exhibitions.) For all of that you must go to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology down the street, where such art wasn’t, at one time, art at all and was segregated from high art in a way that mirrored American racial politics.

Is this still so? It is. Are such issues still pertinent? Yes, and students should be learning about them. Maybe they will. The best thing about Harvard’s new museum headquarters is that it feels as if it really was designed, as advertised, for students of all persuasions and disciplines, and for accessibility, not just as a material fact, but as an aesthetic and ethical ideal.

Thanks to Mr. Piano’s love of glass you are privy to certain institutional inner workings, such as conservation projects in progress. And you can see outdoors: the school, the street, the weather, the world. Art, and how it is looked at, will change a lot in the years ahead. Harvard, artwise, has a lot of globalist thinking to catch up on. Mr. Lentz has given the chance for change there a firm start.

A correction was made on 
Nov. 22, 2014

An art review on Friday about the newly united and reopened Harvard Art Museums misstated the year they were scheduled to reopen. It was 2013, not 2011.

How we handle corrections

The Harvard Art Museums are at 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Mass.; 617-495-9400, harvardartmuseums.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: When Three Into One Equals More. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT