Even some of the most treasured landmarks need a facelift, and if we're speaking in terms of magnitude, this Saturday marks the opening of the Heidi Montag of transformations for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).
On Saturday, in the culmination of 10 years of planning and construction, the MFA will open its brand new Art of the Americas Wing to the public and will hold a free Community Open House to celebrate.
The addition to the old structure doubles the number of works previously displayed, and an impressive 5,000 works are housed in the 53 new galleries. Covering a three-millennia stretch of North and South American history, the encyclopedic span of the collection documents the development of the art of the Americas, stretching back to Olmec and Incan works and through the late 20th century.
The new addition is itself a work of art. Designed by Foster + Partners, it is actually a freestanding structure housed in the courtyard of the older building. Norman Foster, founder and chairman of Foster + Partners, said the goal was to create a building with "clarity, orientation; making something more accessible but at the same time respecting the dignity…[of] the institution, enhancing its civil value."
The actual gallery spaces are distributed over four floors, but the most striking part of the new structure is the beautiful indoor Shapiro Family Courtyard, a juxtaposition of smooth marble and glass and a replication of the old façade. The space is clean and full of light.
This melding of the old and new is not just a model for the design of the new wing, but for the entire collection. One of the main goals of the new structure was to create a space more in line with the one envisioned by the MFA's original architect, Guy Lowell, in 1907. Lowell's vision was of a structure united by two intersecting axes, allowing for the visual and thematic harmony of the museum's diverse collection.
Careful acquisitions during the past 10 years have created a more complete and exciting collection for visitors. The huge span of time that the wing covers allows visitors to get a truly comprehensive look at the art of the Americas, but development of specific areas ensures that the collection's depth does not suffer.
The actual layout of the gallery space is carefully constructed to acknowledge the broad range of cultures that have contributed to the arts of the Americas. As can be expected, Boston's revolutionary history figures prominently in the version of America the museum presents, but the nation's cultural debt to the many civilizations that preceded it does not go unnoticed or unrepresented. The dangers of presenting a teleological vision of such a large historical period notwithstanding, the collection's homage to our predecessors presents a broader vision of America's cultural evolution.
The basement level starts off this tour de force of American history. Represented are the various great empires of South and Central America, Native American cultures of North America both ancient and modern, and examples from post-colonial New England. One work from these galleries is an Olmec jade mask from 1150-500 B.C. Blackened over time because of its use in a ritual involving fire, the mask is a beautiful naturalistic depiction of a man's face, possibly an Olmec ruler. Its smooth carving and expressive features provide a window into an ancient civilization's image of power.
Also in these galleries is a burial mantle made by the Paracas people of Peru, dating from 1-100 A.D. Its state of perfect preservation is due to the burial practices of the Paracas, who buried their deceased in the arid desert wrapped in these mantles. The mantle shows multiple rows of ecstatic shamans against a deep red background and green border. Shamans were believed to travel from the world of the living to the realm of the dead during their trances, making them fitting company for the deceased in their passage into the afterlife. These lively figures play across the incredible reds, oranges, greens and yellows that are still vibrant despite the fact that nearly two millennia have passed since the mantle's creation.
The move from the ground floor up to the first floor is a time warp to revolutionary America. Fittingly, the objects placed front and center in the first gallery are a silver bowl crafted by none other than Paul Revere and a portrait of Revere by John Singleton Copley from 1768. A number of Copleys are in the first gallery of this floor, providing a comprehensive view of some of the nation's most important early figures.
The entire back wall of the second gallery is taken up by a massive painting of George Washington's famed crossing of the Delaware. Thomas Sully's monumental "Passage of the Delaware," an oil painting from 1819, is exactly the type of painting one would expect to see featured on a floor devoted to revolutionary America.
A triumphant figure on horseback, Washington looks back from the right of the painting toward his troops as they struggle toward the decisive battle. Washington is bathed in light in the dark winter scene, confidently perching hand on hip and looking out of the painting toward what is no doubt a bright American future.
A virtuoso mural-sized painting, it is a masterpiece of America's idealized values. Though perhaps a little predictable, the Sully is no doubt suited to pride of place in a Boston institution's survey of American history.
Not to be missed on this floor are other examples of a less picture-perfect American history. The darker side of colonialism is on display in a set of four castas paintings from the 1740s. Castas paintings document the kinds of children resulting from unions between different inhabitants of Mexico in the 18th century. Depending on one's lineage, different work opportunities, levels of taxation and other choices were all made for you.
The second floor opens with an entire room of works by John Singer Sargent. An American painter who happened to spend most of his career in Europe, Sargent insisted on his essential American nature. His masterwork, "Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" (1882), is featured on the central wall in the first gallery. Recently returned from a trip to the Prado in Madrid, where it was displayed with its oft-referred-to thematic partner, Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656), this painting still has a haunting beauty about it that doesn't wear off.
Trumping traditional portraiture conventions of his day, Sargent shows the daughters dispersed around a room, two standing in a darkened doorframe in the background, one girl by herself to the left of the doorframe and a smaller girl sitting on a large carpet with a doll. All but one of the daughters stare hauntingly out at us, the image less one of childhood than of the emptiness and silence that occupies the space around the sisters.
Also on this floor are works by a number of important American Impressionist artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, some painters of the Aesthetic period like James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and the staple of turn-of-the-century decorative art, Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The final stop on the third floor brings visitors to the arts of the 20th century. Covering a broad range of modern American art, the galleries exhibit painters like Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe, who represent painting from American Regionalism to the modernist style par-excellence, Abstract Expressionism.
The two central galleries feature one of Alexander Calder's famous mobiles, "Mobil Blanc," a painted steel example from 1971. It floats above the other paintings in the room, providing a counter-point to the flat, 2-D forms that are the staples of modernists like Frank Stella by expanding them into 3-D space.
One of my favorite works from this room is "Untitled," an oil painting by Mark Rothko from 1970. Rothko's large canvas is a beautiful harmony of colors: two organically painted rectangles in layered blacks and browns over a vibrant violet. The combination of colors is vibrant: the rectangles of black floating over the striking purple. Rothko's paintings are incredibly spiritual despite their simplistic forms. This particular piece, executed in dark colors in the year that he died, is particularly emotive.
The MFA's new wing unites the old and the new, both in architecture and in its impressive survey of the arts of the Americas. The wing certainly projects this image of unification, both in the works it houses and the architecture itself. One hopes the welcoming space will work to open up the museum to the surrounding community, allowing the MFA to shed the stigma that art museums are needlessly elitist and become a real part of the Boston community.
