L. KENT WOLGAMOTT/Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, June 24, 2006 7:00 pm
KANSAS CITY — Walking through the newly reinstalled European galleries at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art with its director, Marc Wilson, is like being with a dad oh so excited about his new baby. In this case, the baby is a rethinking of the way art is presented in the Heartland’s largest and most important encyclopedia exhibition. And it’s a rethinking that is immediately apparent to an infrequent museum visitor. Paintings share wall space with clocks. Silverwork and sculptures are on pedestals strategically placed in the same room with the paintings. Complimentary works on paper are in the nearby hallway. All of the works in each room were made in approximately the same place at approximately the same time.
So 17th century Italian paintings are presented with sculpture from the same time, which is presented with jewelry of that era, and so on.
That sounds logical enough. But it isn’t the way art is usually shown. Typically, there are rooms for paintings, for sculpture, for silverwork, for ceramics, for furniture, etc., and never do the various media meet.
That, however, has changed in Kansas City.
“It is a new museum concept,” Wilson said as we wandered through the spaces. “It grows out of this idea that I had that people weren’t getting enough out of it. We were splitting things off according to an 18th century classification system, usually by medium or something like that, and it wasn’t functioning well for the ordinary visitor. It might work well for the specialist who invented that classification system, but not for anybody else.”
The traditional hanging system is understandable enough, particularly when one considers that those who collected and exhibited the work tend to be professionals trained in fields related to art and, particularly, art history.
“Too many museums try to teach art history,” Wilson said. “That I don’t think is the way you start. It could be a consequence later on, but art history is basically a tool.
“What I really wanted was a dynamic of presentation that includes architecture, the presentation of the art physically, all the interpretives devices — the labels, the panels, the brochures, the audio guide, the computer station, all of that — thought out very thoroughly to communicate not art history, but the collection as it is. What emerges is a much more meaningful structure based on the collection itself.”
Reshaping the way the Nelson-Atkins presents its collection grew out of a strategic plan the museum has been working from for most of a decade. The impressive new exhibition space, designed by architect Steven Holl, also came out of that plan. The new space will open next year.
But what Wilson and the Nelson-Atkins have done is address one of the major problems confronting art museums in the 21st century — a problem rooted in the origin of American art museums and their organizing philosophies.
Most traditional American art museums were either founded in the 19th century or, if they were established in the early and mid 20th century, operate under the philosophies of the 1800s.
Those museums were established by the power brokers of their communities, the elite of society, and were designed to acquire and exhibit objects that often coincided with the art that the elite collected.
By the 1960s and ’70s, however, society had changed and art museums came under pressure to adapt to the philosophy that “museums are for everyone,” said George Neubert, former director of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.
That required a dramatic change in how museums operate, altering one of their primary focuses.
“I do think that one of the sea changes that have occurred in museums over the past two decades or so is that museums have gone from being about objects to being for people,” said Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery director Janice Driesbach.
Some of that change occurred because of societal pressure, Driesbach said. But some has happened because the makeup of museum boards has changed from reflecting the collecting elite to a more business-oriented approach. And some of the change has occurred because of alterations in the way museums are funded.
For example, Driesbach said, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences used to provided about $120,000 every two years for general operating expenses at Sheldon. But IMLS has eliminated general operating grants and now only provides money directed at programming.
That kind of funding shift helped create a schism in museums.
“A lot of museums are now torn between two extreme opposite philosophies,” Neubert said. “One feels it has to compete with pop culture and mass culture to be relevant and for the big E, education, with lots of well intentioned outreach and participatory programs. It does for a short moment bring up the numbers, but I wonder how meaningful those are in the long term.”
So does Driesbach.
Visiting The Metropolitican Museum of Art in New York when it was showing a collection of outfits worn by Jacqueline Kennedy Onnasis, Driesbach noticed that the former First Lady fashion show was packed with people. But another special exhibition featuring the paintings of Velasquez had plenty of room, and the museum’s permanent collection galleries were almost empty.
So masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and other artists were going unseen even as the museum’s attendance mounted.
“The real challenge is getting people in to experience the Vermeers and the Caravaggios,” Driesbach said. “The same thing could be said about Eakins or John Singer Sargent. I think we still battle somewhat of a public perception that you have to know something to come in and experience art, particularly historical pieces. So there’s a disinclination. That’s the barrier that’s become higher more recently.”
That barrier remains high even though museums have offered blockbuster shows for 30 years. The Met originated the blockbuster concept with “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” an exhibition of artifacts from the Egyptian king’s tomb that toured several American museums in 1976-77.
Ancient Egypt has remained a big draw on the blockbuster circuit as have exhibitions featuring impressionist painters. And there have been several popular pop culture shows, such as the “Art of Star Wars” and “The Art of the Motorcycle.”
The latter hardly fits the definition of art for most art professionals, but they get people in the door of the museum, satisfying the bean counters and grant givers.
But simply increasing audience doesn’t come close to resolving the primary dichotomy facing today’s art museum: Is it a place for mass entertainment and education, or is the museum an institution that, by its very nature, cannot appeal to the broadest possible audience?
For Neubert, the answer is simple. It’s the second option.
“Art has never been relevant except for those it becomes relevant to,” Neubert said. “That’s always been a minority, and we shouldn’t apologize for it.”
While the core art audience may be small, it is not, as some perceive, made up of only the wealthy or highly educated.
A few years ago, the late Kirk Varnadoe, Museum of Modern Art curator, spoke of that core art audience as being a “self-selected elite,” a concept with which Neubert agrees.
“It’s not about your income, your background or your family status,” he said. “It’s ‘Are you open to the experience?’ If you’re open, you can be part of it. It’s the most democratic process possible.”
But it isn’t a process that most people, even many of those who regularly visit museums, care to take part in. In 2002, art museums drew over one-third of America’s adult population — more people than attended sporting events, according to Maxwell L. Anderson, research affiliate in the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Many of those visitors came to museums for their special exhibitions, Anderson wrote. Even though they aren’t art aficionados, they can benefit from what art museums offer.
In the 21st century, visual literacy is becoming ever more a priority, Neubert said, and there is no institution better equipped to help develop visual learning than the art museum.
Studies have shown that young people exposed to art and museums better develop their visual skills than those without that exposure, Driesbach said.
The idea of innate visual understanding is at the heart of the way Wilson rearranged the Nelson-Atkins galleries.
“Everybody does have a visual intelligence — some are highly developed, some not so developed,” Wilson said. “This is one of the major ways we learn visually. These artists have organized a huge amount of visual intelligence into these things. Just as Bach has written much into a cantata and organized it into music that really moves you, visually they’ve done the same thing. I want that visual thing to be the first thing, the entry point.”
The visual can connect in other ways.
At Sheldon, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s art museum, programs are designed to bring in students from other colleges and departments in addition to appealing to those from the art school. In other places, Driesbach said, medical students and criminal justice students come to the art museum so they can work on skills derived from observing actual objects rather than looking at images in a book or on a computer.
“More and more of our experience is mediated so engagement with actual objects and understanding them is becoming rarer and rarer,” Driesbach said. “That’s one of our opportunities. There are ways we can get people engaged through other experiences that might relate to art.”
That theme extends beyond the academic community, Neubert said. With “American folk art” pieces now being made in China, museums have an opportunity to offer people a rare opportunity in an era in which an authentic object is increasingly difficult to find.
“As we become more global, more mass-produced, the impression of the one-to-one experience with high art is becoming unique, something you can’t get anywhere else,” said Neubert, who will soon open a folk art museum in Brownville.
Not surprisingly, the changes in the Nelson-Atkins’ European galleries didn’t come easily.
First, it took a new approach to putting the artwork in the spaces.
“Its one thing to lay out flat things on a wall,” Wilson said. “You can do that on a piece of paper and pretty well get it right. This is a dynamic now. For these things to work well without warring and for the room to work kinesthetically, it’s a whole different thing. You have to feel, not just think, how a room’s going to work.”
Second, and even more problematic, the mixture of media means there is no longer a single curator for a single room. There is no more “my gallery.” Instead, curators must work together and the educators and designers are part of the exhibition process early on.
“Some curators couldn’t do it,” Wilson said. “But you can see the relationship is as charged as the thing itself. And that relationship goes from room to room, suite to suite.”
Even the way the labels are written has changed. The labels, which are reviewed by six people before they go on the wall, are not art historical in nature. Instead, they point out visual aspects of the work.
“We don’t want you to just read labels, so every label leads you back to the object,” Wilson said. “So your first understanding is as a visual thing, then as an object of cultural expression.”
Rehanging the galleries has created some very nontraditional placement of some of the artwork.
Caravaggio’s “St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” one of the museum’s most prized masterworks, isn’t in the center of a wall where it would be expected to be found. Rather, it is placed off center so visitors can see what came before him and his considerable influence on the work of others.
On the other hand, Monet’s huge “Water Lilies” now has a wall of its own in a spacious gallery. “This is the first time that’s had some decent amount of room,” Wilson said.
As the Nelson-Atkins continues its refurbishing and expansion project, all its galleries will be hung using the new philosophy that has already enlivened the museum and will likely be something other institutions will study and perhaps borrow.
“I can’t say that anybody else should do it this way, and I wouldn’t. That’s kind of arrogant,” Wilson said. “But I can say this is the way I want to do it and I’ve thought about it for 30 years and what’s wrong with museums. And this does seem to work.
“The public response has been phenomenal. And everybody says, ‘I love seeing all this together.’ That means they’re learning something and they don’t even know they are learning. It’s subliminal.”
While Wilson wouldn’t presume to tell others how to operate their museums, he did have one suggestion that he believes will help bring people in to see and connect with the art.
“You have to do it on their terms,” he said. “Go with the fundamental thing that attracts the art historians to it in the first place. Go with the visual music. What was it that (President) Clinton said? ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ It’s about the ‘music,’ stupid. It’s about the art. Get them connecting to the art. Let the art build the experience.”
Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.