Entering the Sackler — the temporary composite of all three former Harvard University Art Museums (now going by the
umbrella term "Harvard Art Museum") — is like walking into a social scene, where familiar friends and new faces mingle together. The show on view, taking up the entire museum, is called "Re-View," and is in some ways a review of art history, arranged both thematically and chronologically. Advertised as a refreshing look at the collection, the new setup feels somehow more like a gallery setting than a museum, exhibiting works in the center of the room and on walls connected loosely by subject or style.
Beginning at the bottom floor, viewers find contemporary art, an interesting place to start in this survey of Harvard's collection. In this section, entitled "European & American Art since 1900," visitors are immediately confronted by a relatively unknown piece from 2008 by Kerry James Marshall, "Untitled," an acrylic, frontal work of the artist in action, with his palette brutally thrust out at the viewer.
From there, the gallery eases into old favorites: Matisse's clunky sculptures loiter near Franz Kline's "High Street" (1950), Klimt's "Pear Tree" (1903) and the small, seductive "Red and Pink" (1925) by Georgia O'Keefe. Cézanne and Marsden Hartley find themselves facing off yet again, as they were in the Fogg Museum when it was open, but have inched a bit closer to one another. Max Beckmann's black tuxedo in his "Self Portrait in Tuxedo" (1927) makes a sharp angle reminiscent of Mondrian's "Composition with Blue, Black, Yellow and Red" (1922) across the way — two works from the Busch-Reisinger that made the long trek across Broadway.
The last room on this floor is more shocking with Leonardo Drew's "Number 122" (2007) taking over an entire wall. The work, slabs of wood crammed together in a towering sculptural collage, protrudes into the gallery's space with full tree branches, reaching out far above visitors and frames. The puzzle of wood looks like a disorganized bookcase, alluding to the stacks of frames and artworks packed away in storage for the next five years. Other works throughout the exhibition seem to make a reference to the closed building at 32 Quincy St., like Andrew McCollum's "Collection of Ten Plaster Surrogates" (1982- 1991), black rectangular molds hung on the wall, looking like frames emptied: the anti-exhibit of a closed museum.
On the second floor, "Asian & Islamic Art, 5000 B.C. to the Present" represents the Sackler Museum's collection and has been open to the public since August while the rest of "Re-View" was being installed. The display includes a small representation of Buddhism's portrayal throughout history as ideology spread across South Asia to Southwest and East Asia. Incredibly delicate and refined ceramic works from Korea and China rest in cases where visitors can easily compare technique and style across time and geography. Alongside a collection of Chinese "Garden Rocks" dating from the Ming Dynasty, the wall text seeks to educate its readers in typical Harvard Art Museum fashion, comparing the naturally sculptural objects of gray limestone to abstract sculpture, as both were valued for their formal elements. The idea on this floor is to reveal influence and resemblances between Asian and Islamic cultures.
In "Re-View," the fourth floor is where curators got the most creative, and is also where the stripped away display of the collection becomes most apparent. "The Western Tradition, Antiquity to 1900" is formatted to be loosely chronological, and there is no defined theme of style, subject matter or technique. At the beginning, subject seems to be the link, as was the treatment of mythology between a "Red-Figure Krater" from ancient Greece and Piero di Cosimo's work from the High Renaissance. Some works connect in style, as in a small case housing Sienese master Simone Martini's "Christ on the Cross" (1340) with other medieval works from France, all showing the influence on color and form. In an alcove hang watercolors by American artists Sargent, Homer and La Farge. A wall of landscapes by Monet, Whistler and Bierstadt faces off with portraits by Rembrandt and David. Busts congregate on a platform — a bodi-less meeting of Marcus Aurelius, a Nigerian King, an unidentified Frenchman and a 12th century King from the Basilica of St. Denis. Temporary niches for the time being include photographs by Dorothea Lange and Julia Margaret Cameron, Robert Frank and more recent work by Stephen Shore.
While the Wertheim Collection remains almost fully intact, including Impressionist and Post-Impressionist necessities such as van Gogh and Renoir's self-portraits and Picasso's "Mother and Child" (1921-22), Gian Lorenzo Bernini's lonely "St. Longinus," previously displayed in the Fogg amongst 14 other clay sketches like it, stretches out his arm in his new space, strikingly golden in his new well-lit home. In "Re-View," he stretches out to experimentation, to dialogues new and strange, to the conversations a collection-in-transition has to offer.
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Re-View
At the Arthur M. Sackler Museum on long-term view
Harvard University Art Museum
32 Quincy St. in Cambridge
617-495-9400
