4. A Place of Consequence

Weiss, Daniel H.

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4. A Place of Consequence

Daniel H. Weiss

Why the Museum Matters

We all inhabit real and fictive spaces, which serve, for better or worse, as the setting for our daily lives, our memories, and our dreams. The places of greatest importance...

Author

Daniel H. Weiss

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.54-75

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00353.7

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23597

Chapter subject tags:Art museums--HistoryMuseum studiesArt--Collectors and collecting--HistoryArt museum architectureDesign--History--ExhibitionsMuseum ethics

4. A Place of Consequence

We all inhabit real and fictive spaces, which serve, for better or worse, as the setting for our daily lives, our memories, and our dreams. The places of greatest importance—where we live and work, rest and play, learn and find inspiration—become in the fullness of time interwoven into our cumulative life experiences and deepest sense of ourselves. Places form an essential part of each life story, helping to shape and provide context for who we become.

For a great many people, the art museum is a place of consequence because it offers—through its collections, exhibitions, and programs; its physical presence and accessibility; and its community—opportunities for exploration, personal enrichment, fellowship, inspiration, pleasure, and, with accumulated experience, memories. If the museum is often seen as a citadel of culture, it is also a sanctuary, providing a place of peace, stability, and permanence in a world where such things are in short supply. The most impactful art museums are a great deal more than the sum of their collections: they are places of beauty and consequence, thoughtfully designed and curated to provide experiences that, at their best, can transform us. As Nicholas Serota has written, museums allow us to “situate ourselves in space and in time through the vision of another creative being. Cumulatively, museums offer thousands of small and large epiphanies.”1Quoted in Maggie Fergusson, ed., Treasure Palaces: Great Writers Visit Great Museums (New York: Economist/Public Affairs, 2016), x.

To accomplish these lofty and transcendent objectives, curators, designers, conservators, and many others work collaboratively to align the formal elements of the museum—structure, design, appearance, collection, and basic functions—with its performance, which is the degree to which it transcends these constituent elements to excite us visually, inspire us intellectually, and move us emotionally. At their best, art museums take us to new places, allowing us to see the larger world differently than we otherwise would and, in turn, to learn something about ourselves. To be sure, this magical experience does not happen for every viewer on each visit, but it is the goal. Of course, the specific experience an individual might have inevitably depends on a constellation of factors that are themselves interconnected and mutable with time and circumstance. These include the formal properties of the building; its location and particular setting; the collection on view and the manner of its presentation; the particular circumstances of the visit; the quality of the experience; and the memories it might evoke. Although there is no way to make all of this right for every visitor at all times, it is the mission and business of the museum staff to try.

In my years at The Met, I have been privileged to hear from many visitors, friends, and colleagues about the special relationship they enjoy with the museum, which more often than not extends back to their formative years. The bond between museums and their people is often an enduring one, sustained with effort and care across long expanses of time; early visits are remembered for how they helped to shape specific interests, tastes, or even an emerging sense of identity. In exploring the richness and diversity of cultures across vast expanses of human history, especially at moments when we are especially alert to learning about them, we discover new and more resonant versions of ourselves. For many, the museum provides an ideal setting for our own learning and empathetic engagement with other times and cultures; this helps us form our own distinctive identities, and in so doing, become inextricably connected to the museum itself.

Buildings

The concept of time is an important and multifaceted component of the museum idea. As works of architecture, the various spaces constituting the museum are themselves markers of time, reflecting the moment of their creation as much as the ideas that inspired them. At The Met, with ever-expanding collections spanning more than five thousand years, the museum structure is both an architectural palimpsest, revealing the building’s history in multiple layers, and an organic entity that continues to grow and evolve. As of this writing, The Met consists of an accretion of twenty-one connected buildings, several dozen wings, and hundreds of galleries, collectively representing a multitude of styles that have been knit together—with varying levels of success—into a single structure from one campaign to the next over a period of nearly 150 years. Some design elements remain iconic, such as the beaux-arts Fifth Avenue façade and Great Hall by Richard Morris Hunt and the glazed pavilion enclosing the Temple of Dendur by Kevin Roche. Other design elements have, in the course of time, been subsumed by subsequent building campaigns, detectable now only if one knows where to look for them. One prominent casualty of expansion is the original Gothic Revival building of 1879 designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, an airless, gloomy box that fell into disfavor soon after its completion. Traces of the original building are visible today in various adjacencies, as, for example, in the structure’s west-facing exterior façade that now adjoins to the Lehman Wing. Throughout the building, these spaces reflect the particular objectives and distinctive circumstances of their time as much as they reflect our own. As Kathleen Curran has observed, The Met was a great recycler of old parts, which led one critic to complain that the museum’s plan was a “chaotic labyrinth where you need a chart and compass to get up or down stairs.”2Kathleen Curran, The Invention of the American Art Museum: From Craft to Kulturgeschichte, 1870–1930 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 81–82.

As a living building, constantly evolving in response to new ideas, opportunities, and challenges, a museum is not everywhere a well-integrated masterpiece of design but rather something of a perpetual work in progress. Just as the disparate and evolving collections of an encyclopedic museum represent a diversity of styles and subject matter, so too does the architectural space contain a synthesis of disparate times, or at least a gathering of distinct moments in a shared space. An interesting case in point can be found at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where the neoclassical West Building, designed by John Russell Pope in the 1930s, is adjacent to the modernist East Building, designed by I. M. Pei in the 1970s. If the museum’s ambition is to allow the art of all times to coexist, so too does it seek to reach people within this space throughout the times of their lives. With regard to collections, spaces, and people, central elements of the museum idea are to encompass all of time and preserve individual moments.

In the fullness of time, and with ongoing engagement, the museum can become an essential part of a person’s core experiences and identity. I think this is what Alain de Botton was referencing when he wrote, “What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”3Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Vintage International, 2006), 152. For those who care most deeply, each visit is a form of pilgrimage, reaffirming something of personal consequence while also expanding understanding and a particular frame of reference. Mastery of the intricacies of the place becomes a point of pride. This is why so many people refer to beloved museums as “theirs.” What is most remarkable about this process is how distinctive the museum becomes for each person—a bespoke version of the greater institution reflecting specific tastes, rituals, and experiences. I know of no other kind of public space that can do this for people in quite the same way.

The relationship people develop with their museums tends to be stable, which offers the comfort of predictability and a sense of permanence in a rapidly changing world. Because of the personal importance the museum holds for such people, they tend to take a deep interest in how these institutions are run and when they are subject to change. After having life-enhancing experiences in a particular setting, people often want to preserve those aspects of the place that remind them of their own pleasure and personal transformation. We seek to relive those powerful and positive experiences each time we visit and therefore want to limit the ways in which “our” museum is altered. In my experience, and this is entirely a good thing, museums are watched very closely when we make changes.

My own encounters with the Louvre offer a useful case in point. My earliest visits, which predated the massive interventions of Pei in the late 1980s, were exciting and memorable explorations, but so too were they arduous. At the time, the vast collections were displayed throughout what was then a tired old palace within a labyrinth of difficult-to-find galleries. With time and experience I was able to achieve some level of mastery over the complex and idiosyncratic spaces, which provided for me a sense of satisfaction, even if each visit required long waits at any one of the myriad palace entrances open on that particular day. As I saw it then, access to such a reward had to be earned. Although the collections were beyond compare, the museum experience was something of an ordeal.

I was not alone among devoted visitors to have found Pei’s ultramodernist design for the Grand Louvre project, with its glazed pyramids blighting the Cour Napoléon, to be aberrational. The controversy was, from the outset, labeled by critics and the public the Battle of the Pyramid.4Leah Hsiao, “The Battle of the Pyramid: Architectural Criticism on I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid,” Mapping Architectural Criticism, https://mac.hypotheses.org/leah-hsiao. Perhaps because I had mastered the intricacies of what had become “my” museum, I was unmoved by the plan to refashion the Louvre into a welcoming and efficient center for more casual visitors. Opposed though I initially was to the Pei design, I was soon captivated by its visual brilliance and obvious functional advantage. The new Louvre had become a better and more welcoming museum for everyone, including those like myself who had grown accustomed to the old model. I was especially grateful for the ready access to all of the museum from a single dazzling and highly accessible point of entry. Getting in and around would no longer be the main focus of my effort. I learned from this experience that when form and function align so well, the sense of beauty increases with the performance of the space.5This idea is explored in de Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 62. Like the once-controversial wrought-iron tower designed by Gustave Eiffel, the Grand Louvre is now a beloved landmark in Paris.

Like The Met and the Louvre, most historic or encyclopedic museums are complex structures with their own histories. Because the aesthetics and functioning of the building are so important to the overall experience, most major museums inevitably and appropriately evolve with the times, even if they also present an image of permanence and stability. One of the most imaginative and compelling recent renovations to a historical museum is the Neues (New) Museum in Berlin. Opened in 1855, the Neues was built to hold the expanding collections of the rapidly growing Königliches, or Altes (Old) Museum, which had been dedicated in 1830 as the first cultural commission on what was to become Museum Island, a Kulturzentrum dedicated to showcasing art and science. The Altes, which was commissioned to house art that had been repatriated as part of the settlement of the Napoleonic Wars, soon required a new structure to accommodate a growing collection of ancient art. Friedrich August Stüler, architect for the Neues, created a museum in the neoclassical style, replete with such classicizing elements as a life-size replica of the Porch of the Caryatids from the Athenian Acropolis, but he also employed modern building technologies, including a steam engine to facilitate construction and steel frames for the stairways. The building was, in its design and function, a monument to the ideals and spirit of optimism of the Enlightenment. Like much of the cultural property on Museum Island, the Neues was badly damaged during the Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II. But unlike other damaged museums in postwar Berlin, the Neues was neither rebuilt nor repaired; it was left exposed to the elements, where it was slowly dissolving into ruin. The German Democratic Republic eventually developed a master plan to rebuild the rest of Museum Island, but the Neues was left to deteriorate as a haunting symbol of a tragic and terrible time.

It was only in 1997, more than a half century after the museum had been destroyed, that the reunified German government initiated a project to transform the Neues from the lamentable relic it had become into a functioning museum once again. The commission was awarded to British architect David Chipperfield, who sought in his innovative design to balance three central elements: Stüler’s neoclassical building; the ruinous legacy of the war; and more recent developments in contemporary architecture. What is remarkable here—and wholly unexpected among more traditional museum renovations—was Chipperfield’s desire to create something new that nonetheless embraced a conflicted and difficult history. This would not be a renovation that simply recalled, albeit with modern materials, the golden age of the original building. For Chipperfield, the material sources for his design would include in equal measure Stüler’s building and the ruin that it had become. This approach was, at the time Chipperfield began his work, a significant innovation for such historical renovation projects, most of which sought to erase the destructive evidence of time and circumstance in favor of fidelity to the original idea. Chipperfield’s vision for the Neues was particularly appropriate for a nation with such a steadfast commitment to confronting its ghastly history under National Socialism. From the moment of its rededication in 2009, the Chipperfield renovation was lauded as a significant and visionary achievement, a “spectacular reconstruction that has left visible the traces of ruination in the very substance of the building,” as Kerstin Barndt wrote in 2011.6Kerstin Barndt, “Working through Ruins: Berlin’s Neues Museum,” Germanic Review 86, no. 4 (2011): 295.

As we experience it today, the Neues offers a multilayered vision of the past, what Barndt called “temporal pluralism” for how the elements of the building—architecture, interior design, and the collection itself—contribute to careful and deliberate presentation of mythical, historical, and art-historical time.7Ibid., 307. At the Neues this includes, with equal prominence, the inspiring nineteenth-century monument, the devastated ruin of a century later, and the present realization under a reunified Germany. For an institution dedicated to understanding the continuities of time and cultural progress, the Neues embraces its history—the good with the bad—and in so doing offers a new vision for its future.

I remember well my first visit to the Neues, which was mostly a pilgrimage to see its greatest treasure, the magisterial bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. Arriving at the East Entrance, I passed through the heavily repaired classical arcade of Doric columns and then beneath the pedimented façade, noticing throughout evidence of war-related damage and other losses, as well as areas of modern replacement. Within the vestibule, I encountered a large, open area dominated by the main staircase, a Chipperfield redesign made of white cement and Saxonian marble chips intended to reflect Stüler’s lost original without imitating it. Climbing to the second floor, I turned to my right to enter a rectangular and surprisingly tall skylit gallery constructed of aged recycled brick. The space introduces the museum’s extraordinary collection of ancient Egyptian sculpture: pristine figures interspersed with beautiful fragments, displayed on axis under a diffuse light. Once I reached the far side of the room—having experienced in just a few moments the sculptural achievements of millennia—I could see before me the corner gallery where Nefertiti, lit only from above, presides at the center of her darkened audience hall. The painted walls of the domed gallery evoke an ancient palace, or at least a nineteenth-century version of such a space. The small but stunning object holds the room and the gaze of all who enter.

In the few moments it takes to pass from the East Entrance into this sublime space, a profound sense of history becomes palpable, encompassing the bold vision of the museum’s founders, the devastations that were to follow, and especially the epic journey of Nefertiti herself across vast expanses of time and space, from ancient Amarna to modern Berlin. To visit Nefertiti within this redolent place is to feel a sense of connectedness—perhaps spiritual in its intensity—for all of us embarked on our own journeys, from wherever we began to wherever we are headed. This is what museums can do for us.

Interior Spaces

Within the architecture of the building itself, the creation of distinctive galleries and exhibition spaces is an essential part of what museums do to inform or guide the experience of viewing art. The galleries dedicated to special exhibitions, which generally change with each new installation, constitute a special opportunity to enhance the quality and distinctiveness of the visitor’s experience. At large institutions such as The Met, considerable resources are devoted to maintaining an active schedule of rotating exhibitions that generally highlight some combination of works from the permanent collection and loans from elsewhere. For each special exhibition, the design of the space is an essential element in creating an engaging experience—visually, intellectually, and viscerally—for the visitor.

For more than a half century, since the innovative programs developed at The Met under Director Thomas Hoving, special exhibitions have become a prominent and resource-intensive part of programming in most art museums. One of the earliest and most memorable of these special exhibitions, which occurred prior to the Hoving years, was surely the special visit of the Mona Lisa, which drew nearly one million visitors to the Fifth Avenue museum during a three-week period in 1962. Since Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was long regarded as the most famous painting in the world—an unprecedented draw even for New Yorkers—the actual exhibition required little more than a serviceable gallery with proper lighting and manageable access for crowds of visitors. The painting was the show, but the essential message was clear: the public would turn out in large numbers to see something new and different. Just two years later, in 1964, Michelangelo’s Pietà was offered on loan from the Vatican for the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. Although this was not an installation within an art museum, and there were a great many other attractions at the fair, Michelangelo’s sublime masterpiece was the highlight for most who visited.

During the Hoving years, ambitious special exhibitions became a means to create distinctive events that would generate new levels of interest from the public and substantially increase audiences. Most “blockbuster” exhibitions, to use a phrase coined in the Hoving era, are highly ambitious projects requiring an innovative and exciting programmatic vision, special loan agreements for objects that are often difficult to borrow, carefully designed spaces that evoke a particular setting or context, and significant resources to make it happen. The objective for such exhibitions is to provide an immersive experience for the visitor, not unlike what happens for audiences in the theater. The earliest of these major special exhibitions, and in many ways a touchstone for all that were to follow, was the Treasures of Tutankhamun, a loan show organized by The Met between 1976 and 1979, featuring fifty-three objects that had created a global sensation when they were excavated in the 1920s from the young pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Hoving’s achievement was in persuading the Egyptian government to lend these objects for the benefit of audiences that otherwise would never have the chance to see them. The museum’s challenge was in creating an experience that would justify the risk and expense. The work of a major exhibition includes substantial investment to design and build spaces, transport and conserve precious and fragile works of art, produce new scholarship and didactic materials, and present a narrative to engage diverse and wide-ranging audiences.

Since the Tutankhamun exhibition, The Met has mounted several hundred shows of comparable ambition, each requiring specially designed spaces. In a typical year, The Met presents twelve to fifteen major exhibitions, along with several dozen on a smaller scale. Since the Hoving era, The Met has maintained a department dedicated to management and oversight of the special exhibition program, which engages several hundred members of the professional staff, from curators and conservators to exhibition designers, art handlers, and casework fabricators. Over the years, both at The Met and at museums around the world, we have learned that large and increasingly diverse audiences are drawn to museums for the special exhibitions and events that provide new and distinctive immersive experiences within spaces that are familiar to many of them. For these visitors, the context and gallery design contribute fundamentally to the overall experience, informing in fundamental ways their encounter with the art. At major museums like The Met, the special exhibitions program is an important attraction for regular visitors but also for tourists and those with an interest in the particular topic.

For the most part, the special exhibition galleries at The Met are vast open spaces, veritable “white boxes” that are transformed for each show. Think of a warehouse or large retail store without inventory. Members of the exhibition team—curators, conservators, designers, editors, art handlers, technicians, and tradespeople—all work together to execute a vision to transform this space into something inviting and immersive, which facilitates careful looking at the art while also setting a context for critical thinking and learning.

In recent years, one of the most popular special exhibitions at The Met was Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer, which ran from 2017 to 2018 and was curated by Carmen Bambach, the Marica F. and Jan T. Vilcek Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. Although the show was dedicated to exploring the full range of Michelangelo’s artistry, the majority of the works in the show were small-scale drawings. The greatest challenge for Bambach and the design team was to capture the sense of monumentality that is at the center of Michelangelo’s art in all of its forms, from his massive sculptural works and large-scale wall paintings to his small but powerful drawings. Bambach wanted visitors to experience the artist as a creative force with a monumental vision but also as a human being. For Bambach, conveying a sense of Michelangelo’s human dimension, along with his artistic brilliance, helped to make the visitor’s experience more meaningful and accessible. “Visuality is what matters most. It is what enables us to forget, at least for a few moments, so much about ourselves, so that we can learn more about this remarkable artist as a great master and as a person who lived in a particular time and place. In so doing, as we move through the exhibition, we try to provide a context for a transformational experience. Our goal is, in some small way, to change each visitor through the experience of seeing as they haven’t before.”8Carmen Bambach, conversation with author, April 6, 2021.

To convey this sense of monumentality within the white box of the museum’s special exhibition galleries, Bambach and the design team chose to emphasize the large scale of the spaces without overly designing them. Several of the galleries in the show, which featured relatively small drawings, had high ceilings and large open spaces between the objects in order to convey the sense of scale and monumentality present in the images themselves. By contrast, in one of the largest galleries, the team employed a different approach to evoke a sense of monumentality and the human scale of Michelangelo’s achievement by re-creating the frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, complete with a scaffold to show how the artist actually undertook this daunting and debilitating commission. Such a theatrical design for a complex, scholarly exhibition is not without risk, but Bambach was committed to the idea that museums are laboratories for creativity, just as they are for scholarship. She wanted the visitor to experience a “different kind of learning that is not possible in a book or a classroom, that allows for deeper engagement with the art and the person who created it.”9Ibid. For Bambach, this is what makes museums places of consequence.

Exhibition design inevitably plays a crucial role in shaping the desired experience and helping to convey the central ideas. For example, in a recent exhibition at The Met on the complex and sensitive topic of slavery and race in nineteenth-century Europe, Elyse Nelson, assistant curator of European sculpture, who cocurated the show, wanted visitors to understand that the objects can be both beautiful and troubling. This means that we can take pleasure in the beauty of such works as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! while also recognizing that the motives of the artist might not be aligned with the progressive values they ostensibly champion. The sculpture portrays an enslaved woman, with a defiant gaze and exposed breast, straining against the ropes that bind her. Nelson has argued that Carpeaux has created an image of “aestheticized violence—the transformation of human carnage into erotically charged drama.” For Nelson, “Exhibition design can help express these complex and contradictory ideas in various ways, by encouraging visitors to slow down to see specific details or arrangements, by disrupting the traditional subject-object relationship, by refusing a linear narrative path in favor of a thematic one, and by drawing the visitor’s awareness to their own gaze.”10Elyse Nelson, conversation with author, April 5, 2021. See also Nelson’s essay in the exhibition catalogue: “Sculpting about Slavery in the Second Empire,” in Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered, ed. Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022), 48–59.

In addition to the immersive experience enabled by “white box” spaces, other kinds of viewing experiences are possible in galleries that are not isolated or readily transformed. At The Met we had a special opportunity to experiment with new approaches to exhibition planning when in 2015 we reached an agreement to use the former Whitney Museum of American Art on Madison Avenue. Our plan was to transform the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer’s modernist masterpiece into a Met space focusing on special exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, and particularly in ways that connected to our encyclopedic collections. The idea was to present more innovative and edgy exhibitions than is customary for The Met within this iconic building. In the four years that we occupied the “Met Breuer” we presented more than two dozen ambitious and distinct special exhibitions. Because this formidable building is such an insistent and powerful presence, each of these exhibitions was designed to integrate aspects of the architecture into the overall design.

The assignment for leading the Breuer project was given to Sheena Wagstaff, the former Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. For Wagstaff, the project offered a special opportunity for The Met to engage in a new kind of programming, one that placed our permanent collections and historical materials in service of new questions and in more innovative ways. For Wagstaff, the Breuer building was itself a central element in her project. As she explained to me: “The Breuer must be taken on its own terms, as a powerful and compelling modernist statement and, actually, a superb space for viewing art.”11Sheena Wagstaff, conversation with author, March 16, 2021. Wagstaff reflected on the complexity and ambivalence of the building’s design as it related to its setting in New York. As an inverted ziggurat made of reinforced concrete and gray granite, the building has been characterized as a monolithic fortress, surrounded by a moat and protected by a simulated drawbridge intended to isolate the museum from the noise and energy of the surrounding city. For Wagstaff, such an interpretation misreads the building’s design and intended purpose, which she sees as a formal commitment to embracing that energy. As Wagstaff observed, the moat is actually a sunken garden and the entrance a concrete gateway spanning the garden, effectively linking the museum to the city.12Ibid. Of course, it is possible that Breuer was alert to both interpretations of his controversial design, allowing the bustling urban setting to be either a distraction to be minimized or an enhancement to be embraced. Over the years, both approaches have been used within the building, depending on the particular vision at the time.

The brilliance of Breuer’s imposing design lies in its subtlety and flexibility: it is both an iconic architectural landmark and a remarkably effective space for viewing art. My own experience of the Met Breuer was initially quite negative, just as had been my response to the I. M. Pei redesign of the Louvre. As an occasional visitor over the years prior to my joining The Met, I was generally disdainful of the massive block of granite and concrete that disrupted the chic Madison Avenue streetscape. When I found myself responsible for overseeing the Met Breuer and actively involved in programming it, I came to see its superlative qualities as an art museum and found myself agreeing with the assessment of architecture critic Victoria Newhouse, who called the museum one of the most successfully designed in the world.13Victoria Newhouse, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, December 3, 2010.

The concrete, granite, and oiled bronze interior of the galleries, along with the bluestone floors, presented various options for the display of art within well-lit, generously proportioned spaces but never without accepting the strong presence of the building itself. For each of the exhibitions The Met installed at the Breuer, the building—and by extension the architect—was an important participant.

The Frick Collection, which succeeded The Met as tenant of the Breuer during the period the Fifth Avenue mansion was closed for renovation, also chose to embrace—rather than conceal—the building’s modernist design as a central element of its installation. The Frick Madison, which served as a temporary exhibition space for highlights from the permanent collection, included early modern paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, all of which were more naturally suited to their permanent home within the sumptuous and decorous interior of the Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion. To install the Frick masterpieces within such a hard-edged modernist building was not without risk, especially if the overarching vision was to embrace the space on its own terms rather than attempt to disguise or erase it.

In my view, and that of many colleagues and critics, the Frick team realized an entirely new, and wholly sympathetic, space for viewing their collection. The new installation offered a visually powerful and highly complementary synthesis of art and architecture, made possible because of the distinctiveness of the Breuer design. The contrast between the hard, gray surfaces of the Breuer building and the warm, sumptuous interiors of the Frick mansion could not be more stark, but the new setting foregrounded the Frick masterpieces in well-lit, purpose-built galleries, ideal for viewing the works of art as independent objects rather than as part of a larger decorative program. In commenting on the dramatic presentation of Giovanni Bellini’s masterpiece, St. Francis in the Desert, New York Times art critic Jason Farago remarked on the powerful and startling synergy between art and architecture: “Now the Bellini has been isolated in a room of its own, in a gallery bare as a monastic cell. Light falls, from the same angle as in the painting, through a small Breuer window that the Whitney and Met often obscured. As I sat in that empty room, the cold February sun streaming in, it felt like a space worth a pilgrimage.” Farago went on to draw the connection between the Breuer space and the Frick vision: “In the Renaissance and in the modern age, in the Bellini and the Breuer, sometimes aestheticism is the path to the sublime.”14Jason Farago, “The Frick Savors the Opulence of Emptiness,” New York Times, February 25, 2021.

Even for those who long admired the Frick mansion as the ideal backdrop for the collection, the Breuer setting offered something intriguing and important. James Panero, art critic for the New Criterion, is an ardent fan of the mansion as a superb setting for viewing the Frick Collection, even if it has “gone against every modern museum trend of pasteurized, homogenized white-cube walls.” Nonetheless, Panero was full of praise for the Breuer installation, which “offers us an opportunity to have a direct engagement with art … in an achingly spare, intimately thought-out presentation.”15James Panero, “Sublet with Bellini,” New Criterion 39, no. 8 (2021): 56. For Panero, as for Farago, the place—the setting, the light, the sheer physicality of the space—is a central element in creating the experience.

The museum, at its best, allows visitors to see things in new ways that might challenge, provide comfort, inspire, or entertain. The goal is for the place to contribute to, or even provoke, new ways of seeing and thinking. In embracing the Breuer on its own terms, the Frick team was able to provide viewers with a unique opportunity to see the greatest works of their collection in a new way, and in so doing, provide visitors with a sublime experience. For the Frick, as for The Met and the Whitney before, the distinctive qualities of a superb art museum help to shape the visitor’s experience and fulfill a distinctive vision.

Ethical Spaces

As carefully designed, welcoming institutions that are built to last, museums allow us to have conversations with ourselves, in real time and across the years. With each visit, we are able to see new things and to learn, to observe the familiar with fresh eyes or take an interest in the distinctive and different within settings that are beautiful, comfortable, and safe. Over the years, our relationship with the place and the objects it contains becomes deeper and more meaningful. Learning and deep engagement work in a complementary way for occasional visitors, primarily through the experience of exhibitions, collections, and programs.

It is for these reasons above all that museums are, to borrow a phrase coined by Karsten Harries, ethical works of architecture.16Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 38–40. For Harries, the ethical function of architecture is to seek a common ethos, transcending its formal and functional properties to help us understand our place in the world, to activate shared values, and, along the way, to inspire the best in us. Such an approach is to be distinguished from a purely aesthetic one, which more narrowly joins an aesthetic component to a functional space. For Harries and his followers, ethical buildings are investments in the future, holding the promise of progress and better days. The American art museum is, at its best, a powerful social experiment: a place that aims to represent the best version of ourselves, created by our own effort, enabled through collaboration, and sustained with our own resources. If we apply such a framework to Harries’s concept, museums are inevitably, and perhaps quintessentially—by virtue of mission, purpose, use, and impact—ethical buildings; they are places of consequence both to individuals and society at large. In reflecting on this concept, critic Paul Goldberger wrote, “When architecture is both beautiful and ethical, it invites belief.”17Ibid., 43. The mission of the museum is to allow us to experience beauty and wonder, to learn, and to reflect on our place in the world.

The museum is a place of consequence because of its determination to reflect us at our best—collections, spaces, ideas, and community—even as we recognize that it is always imperfect. An ethical approach to the museum is to recognize that the institution and place matter in shaping lives and values, while also acknowledging that it must be a work in progress. At its core, the museum idea is about progress, about learning from our past, valuing beauty and truth, understanding our place in the world, and, most important, about where we go from here.

1 Quoted in Maggie Fergusson, ed., Treasure Palaces: Great Writers Visit Great Museums (New York: Economist/Public Affairs, 2016), x. »

2 Kathleen Curran, The Invention of the American Art Museum: From Craft to Kulturgeschichte, 1870–1930 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 81–82. »

3 Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Vintage International, 2006), 152. »

4 Leah Hsiao, “The Battle of the Pyramid: Architectural Criticism on I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid,” Mapping Architectural Criticism, https://mac.hypotheses.org/leah-hsiao. »

5 This idea is explored in de Botton, Architecture of Happiness, 62. »

6 Kerstin Barndt, “Working through Ruins: Berlin’s Neues Museum,” Germanic Review 86, no. 4 (2011): 295. »

7 Ibid., 307. »

8 Carmen Bambach, conversation with author, April 6, 2021. »

9 Ibid. »

10 Elyse Nelson, conversation with author, April 5, 2021. See also Nelson’s essay in the exhibition catalogue: “Sculpting about Slavery in the Second Empire,” in Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered, ed. Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022), 48–59. »

11 Sheena Wagstaff, conversation with author, March 16, 2021. »

12 Ibid. »

13 Victoria Newhouse, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, December 3, 2010. »

14 Jason Farago, “The Frick Savors the Opulence of Emptiness,” New York Times, February 25, 2021. »

15 James Panero, “Sublet with Bellini,” New Criterion 39, no. 8 (2021): 56. »

16 Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 38–40. »

17 Ibid., 43. »

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