Director's Letter Summer 2012

Until now it’s been a closely guarded secret that I’m a bit of a failed architect: I originally imagined studying architecture as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia before opting instead for history and the life of the art object. I have, nonetheless, long looked closely at buildings and their experiential character. For the past couple of decades, I’ve especially considered this phenomenon in the context of museums: how a museum creates (or doesn’t) a sense of welcome; how its galleries shape the experience of great works of art for better or worse.

When I was a curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum in the 1990s, I came up against this question every day. Installing the collections and temporary exhibitions in Mario Ciampi’s brutalist masterwork (sadly, soon to be vacated by the museum due to seismic issues) and in his wedge-shaped, concrete galleries with few right angles was no small challenge. And while those galleries weren’t always welcoming—they were tough on small-scale Old Master pictures, for example, and many visitors found them difficult—I always felt that their rigors (what I termed a Cubist Guggenheim) made me a better curator by forcing me to think more clearly about space.

In conceiving and overseeing the planning and construction of a new museum building at the University of Michigan, these habits of looking at space were essential. In partnership with Brad Cloepfil and his team at Allied Works Architecture, we were literally making spaces for art, spaces over whose scale, proportions, configuration, and lighting we obsessed during design and construction. Later our focus shifted to paint color and gallery furniture, to checklists, layouts, and wall texts as we came to understand how those new spaces could best be occupied by art.

A recent visit to the newly opened Barnes Foundation on the Parkway in Philadelphia brought all these matters back to mind. Leaving aside the long-controversial question of whether the Barnes and its legendary collections and quirkiness should have left Merion, the building is, in my view, one of the best new vessels for art in many years. Tod Williams, Princeton Class of 1965, Graduate School Class of 1967, and Billie Tsien have created a structure of rich materiality (Negev stone, stainless steel panels, and delicate bronze fins) whose top-lit upstairs galleries deploy day lighting as brilliantly as any museum I can recall. As Ada Louise Huxtable noted in the Wall Street Journal: “The ‘new’ Barnes that contains the ‘old’ Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. It has changed, but it is unchanged. . . . This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.”

At the Princeton University Art Museum, our choices for the moment are relatively modest ones—although we do hope one day to grapple with the challenges and inadequacies of this building once and for all. For now, we’re seeking to make improvements in small ways: new raised lettering to signal that you’ve arrived as you enter the lobby; new wayfinding elements to help guide you through our circuitous galleries; color choices that enhance a sense of context and texture; gallery layouts that highlight our greatest works. Visitors will have seen many such improvements to our upper-level galleries, given over to European, American, and modern and contemporary art. Now we begin the more arduous task of making similar improvements to our lower-level galleries—arduous because these galleries house collections of ancient Mediterranean, Asian, Pre-Columbian, and African art that are largely dominated by threedimensional objects. The casework demands to protect these works are great and the galleries less than commodious, so we have our work cut out for us.

As Huxtable noted, at the new Barnes the genius is in the plan: “Architecture is not just buildings, but the way they are put together to direct our progress through a calculated sequence of spaces, and how those relationships control our movement and mood.” I hope you’ll visit in the coming months to see the small choices we’re making to improve the experience of Princeton’s exceptional collections and perhaps even help us to think ambitiously for the future.

James Christen Steward 
Director