When the National Gallery’s East Building opened last weekend after three years of renovation, no discerning visitor could miss the influence of one critic. In 1998, THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Andrew Ferguson read I.M. Pei’s then twenty-year-old design as a mark of the age—an unpromising one. Above all it was an “advertisement for the cleverness of the man who designed it,” he wrote. Galleries cramped and tucked off the side of a gaping atrium fail the function of an art museum, and succeed as testament to the architect’s taste for triangles. Pei’s tightly angled plan evoked wonder—and Ferguson wondered: “Come to think of it, where the hell is the art?”
So must have the museum. It first committed $39 million in public funds to overdue upkeep, and then thought better and solicited an additional $30 million in donations for dearly needed alterations to Pei’s opus. The renovation added 12,250 square feet, an outdoor trapezoidal terrace joining two new galleries—what an otherwise sympathetic reviewer in Roll Call called “much-needed breathing room.”
But they’ve also made the central maw more navigable and harder to mistake for a corporate headquarters. What then was cleanly sparse—empty but for a thousand pound Calder mobile, twice the wingspan of a mature pterodactyl, and a colorful grid of Ellsworth Kelly canvases—is corrupted by mezzanines, walkways, stairs. Oh, and it’s dotted here and there with art.
Why now? For one thing, from Fourth Street the East Wing edifice looks, now more than ever, like a squat block-letter “H.” (Subliminal campaign signalling might have inspired the renovation.) So, on an even more morbid note, might have the museum’s betting against nonagenarian Pei’s longevity: He did not personally oversee Hartmann-Cox Architects, the firm that face-lifted his creation, but had referred the museum to his former associate Perry Chin.
To the untrained eye, anyway, little has changed. But a new placard reintroducing two floors of core collections, “which present a history of art from 1900 to recent times,” apologizes for starting the twentieth century after the fin-de-the-last-one. The collections never used to bend oh-so-predictably to the march of time: “art in the East Building has rarely been presented in a linear fashion.” Picasso and Matisse belong to “a history, not the history: the strengths of the collection and the choices of curators have shaped this narrative.” Imagining my own narrative doesn’t change the fact that the collections still crowd into two triangular towers on either side of a yawning hangar.
Although the improved East Building wasn’t exactly swamped its debut weekend, oddly angled tower rooms make sharing the space with culturally curious strangers a strenuous exercise in loving one’s fellow man. Barring human obstacles, it’s no use circling Giacometti’s “No More Play,” for instance, pretending to contemplate the artist’s interwar anxiety, when it’s mounted on the same pedestal as half a dozen others fighting for air rights.
Case in point: In the northwest Tower Gallery, currently home to a collection of Alexander Calder mobiles, a woman in a striped shirt and Buddy Holly glasses walked backwards to frame a selfie with a slowly rotating metal modular spider—and nearly backed into me. Rupturing what Walker Percy called the art museum malaise, we might have taken out half a dozen mobiles, easy.
On the other hand, the East Building’s hard surfaces and odd angles are a gift to the amateur eavesdropper—the opposite of the “hushing effect” neoclassical museums achieve. I overheard an old man tell his wife Claes Oldenberg’s Glass Case with Pies was making him hungry, “Why, honey, don’t they look just like real pies?”
Only the new terrace, where the towers spit out climbers numbed-over from art gazing, offers a break from the music of the triangles. And there another dimension of chatter comes to mind: A giant blue bird, Hahn/Cock by Katharina Fritsch, resembling the Twitter logo (unintentionally?) reups an open invitation to engage with the curators on social media.
Ferguson said it best:
