I'm always fascinated to see how museums manage to combine art and architecture spanning several different eras and styles, and I wondered if the Chicago museum's new modern wing would live up to the glowing reports I'd read online.
I managed to visit the museum during a free-admission Thursday evening earlier this summer, just a couple of months after the expansion's grand opening in late May. Even as the new wing's expansive three-story Griffin Court was packed with people that evening, I could still experience it as the extension of neighboring outdoor Millennium Park as architect Renzo Piano intended.
The extension reminded me a bit of the expansion and addition of a modern wing at the University of Michigan's Museum of Art (UMMA) that I wrote about here last spring, where a modern addition to the museum's original Beaux Arts style building nearly doubled UMMA's space to 90,000-plus square feet and opened to ecstatic reviews from visitors and the local press.
The Art Institute of Chicago is a much larger building. Its modern wing measures 264,000 square feet, and the expansion brings the art museum's total floor space to an astounding one million square feet!
Visitors benefit by now being able to see about 15 percent of the museum's modern art (1945-present) collection, compared to only the only 10 percent of that collection the museum previously could display. Moving the 20th and 21st century art into the new wing also frees up space elsewhere previously housing the modern pieces for other parts of the collection.
The big project had a big price tag. The new wing cost $300 million, with another $110 million spent on other improvements like renovated galleries in the original building.
The hefty price tag, and an accompanying hike in Art Institute of Chicago admission from $12 to $18, drew some criticism. Museum officials point out that special exhibitions are now included in the price of regular admission, and several public spaces within the museum remain open to visitors free of charge. They also say that increased attendance and memberships generated the new wing helped keep the number of staff layoffs lower than they probably would have been without the museum's increased revenue.
I liked the expansive feeling of the new wing, much as I admired the spacious new areas at the UMMA. And, like many other modern art museums I've visited, I ended up enthralled more by the architecture of the building than the art in the galleries.
I loved Chicago's modern wing features like floor to ceiling windows framing great downtown views, blades covering the windows to reflect the most destructive light from bearing down on the collection, and a suspended staircase described by one journalist as "Meisian" (for the famous German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who lived and worked in Chicago after leaving Germany's Bauhaus school when Nazis closed it in the 1930s).
Galleries on the three floors populating perimeter of the Griffin Court provide plenty of space for work from different schools and eras of modern art, and the somewhat sterile look of stark white walls serve to set nicely set off much of the collection.
The art? Well, I've often struggled to understand modern art.
We even took an "understanding modern art" class at our local Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center in an effort to wrap our minds around some of the seemingly random and crazy things we saw in modern art galleries. The class helped us understand a bit of the history and development behind modern art, but I've got to admit that some pieces still have me scratching my head and wondering about what I'm seeing.
I liked what I saw of the modern wing during my visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, though. It will be interesting to see if the public continues to support the museum in increased numbers and revenue as the novelty of the new spaces wear off.
© Dominique King 2009 All rights reserved
Nice post.
Posted by: The Earth Traveler | January 22, 2010 at 03:43 AM