New York Museums

If the function of an art museum is the display of art, the new building for the Studio Museum of Harlem fails spectacularly. My guess is that not more than 25% of the space contains art. Its most notable feature is a massive main staircase, which is all you see when you enter. In keeping with the rest of the David Adjaye Associates design, it comes across as something out of a medieval fortress, wide enough for the lord’s retinue to climb on horseback. Amazingly, it is not even the principal staircase for visitors to use. There are but three galleries tucked away in the back of the building; the front is taken up by bleacher seats sloping to a cafe, with five stories of open air above. The building is hemmed in on both sides on 125th Street, so there is little exterior presence; but what you do see is a reminder of the new museum at Princeton as well as the African-American Museum on the Mall in Washington that set Adjaye in motion until he was lately canceled. The sole redeeming feature of the architecture is a cut-out window in the 4th-floor gallery that looks south over Harlem and midtown Manhattan.

Three of the four exhibitions on view are offered without label description; they basically name-check Black artists I know or have heard of. Maybe the museum’s budget or donor base preclude it from acquiring major works, but I’ve seen much better, and bigger, pieces in other museums and galleries. Nothing I saw prompted me to  take out my camera or note a name for future reference. One gallery displayed about 50 small (and I mean 6″x8″ or less) paintings by names you know–Bob Thompson to Chris Ofili–but these were rarely finished works, or works with much invested in them. In the entry lobby was a wall hung salon-style with photographs and paintings that weren’t even identified. It provided a nice introduction to the gamut of Black artists in the collection and the range of Black subject matter, but the anonymity led you to assume this was nothing special. The best art was found in the 2d-floor gallery, drawn from the permanent collection, and boxes were ticked: e.g., photographs by James van der Zee, Gordon Parks, Roy de Carava, Malick Sidibe; a large print by Julie Mehretu, a big display of Lorraine O’Grady. But there was nothing to put on a postcard or the cover of a catalogue. The 4th-floor gallery was devoted to a special exhibition of contemporary art, most of which told a story, as explained by the necessary labels. Photographs of trees along the water weren’t poignant until you read that this stretch of the Puerto Rico shoreline had been washed away by climate change. This show is more or less the Uptown equivalent of the Whitney Biennial, and in that sense it wasn’t so bad.

I didn’t know what to expect when I went to the newly renamed New York Historical, except the show about New Amsterdam sounded intriguing. I didn’t realize that “about New Amsterdam” didn’t mean art that was produced in or showed New Amsterdam. Instead, it was an exhibition of 75 or so Dutch 17th-century paintings, on the theory that the inhabitants of New Amsterdam were Dutchmen who had crossed the water and undoubtedly looked like their countrymen back home. The show was built around 45 paintings from the Leiden Collection, Tom Kaplan’s unparalleled private trove of Dutch 17h-century art, including work by Rembrandt, Hals, Steen, Jan Lievens, Gerrit Dou and various minor masters, plus six loans from the MFA Boston and a large Rembrandt portrait from the National Gallery. This is one of my favorite periods of art, and this show didn’t disappoint. The faces could be people you know, the genre scenes were captivating, the technique, even by artists I’d never heard of, was exquisite, the Leiden pictures were in mint condition, and above all, there was nothing saccarine, schmaltzy, pious or preachy, overdressed or over-emoting. Okay, Ferdinand Bol was a little soft, but even his works seem down-to-earth when you think of what was going on in France, Spain or Italy at the time.

Two secondary exhibitions highlighted the up- and downsides of courting obsessive collectors for institutional funding. In the main gallery where I was hoping to revisit the Historical’s wonderful collection of 19th-century American painting I found, instead, the “transformative promised gift” of New York scenes from the collection of real estate developer Elie Hirschfeld (and, nominally, his wife Sarah). Although there were many recognizable names–David Johnson, Childe Hassam, Thomas Hart Benton, Colin Campbell Cooper, Charles Sheeler, Saul Steinberg, Keith Haring–the works were generally undistinguished. By “undistinguished” I mean if you took the top 50 works in these artists’ oeuvres, the list wouldn’t include anything from the Hirschfeld collection. And assuming the artist was prolific, I’d expand that to 100. (Maybe the painting of a black cat by John Sloan would be an exception.) How does absorbing a gift of this size improve the museum?

Down the hall was a smaller gallery hosting a far bigger in importance exhibition: “House Made of Dawn: Art by Native-Americans…” This, too, is a promised gift, this from the Hsu-Tang Collection. The wife of noted philanthropist Oscar Tang (the Met and Andover for starters), Dr. Agnes Hsu collected work by Native-American artists from 1880 to the present over the last twenty years, and half the gift, 75 works, were packed into this show. The term “white-glove sale” is used for an auction where everything sells. Similarly, I would call this a “white-glove exhibition.” Every single piece was artistically interesting, if not thrilling, and most were culturally or historically significant. There were prints, paintings, photographs, a few sculptures. There were artists I recognized–Scholder, Cannon, Morrison, Quick-to-See Smith, Monkman–but more I didn’t. Everywhere I looked there was beauty, power, conviction–attributes absent in the Hirschfeld works. The Hirschfeld and Hsu-Tang names were prominent on the walls of the museum, so it’s no surprise their collections have landed there. And I suppose that if you bat .500 you’re doing okay.