If one of the objectives of the redesign of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, which opened this winter after a three-year hiatus for construction, was to say to the public, “This is not your grandfather’s museum,” it is a success.
This isn’t merely a re-arranging and updating of the collections, or a cosmetic improvement, it is a re-imagination of where its focus should go, and a vigorous redefinition of the museum’s role.
The New York firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects was charged with adapting the original 1965 design by the late Charles Moore to an expanded collection, and a more prominent role in both the college and the surrounding community. The new atrium and the entrances into the Hood, both the main one facing the college green, and the smaller entrance through the Hopkins Center, tell us that this museum is attuned not only to the past, but to its future.
How do we take in and comprehend a collection of 65,000 objects that comprises centuries of human invention? The answer, the Hood suggests, does not lie exclusively in rote historical interpretations or display, but in continual, evolving reassessment and even a kind of intellectual dissonance. It’s the juxtapositions and unexpected symmetries that excite thought, not the same old, same old plod through an art history textbook.
Take the Kaish Gallery, the first a visitor sees on entering from the Dartmouth Green. The first painting to draw your eye is the magnificent, sprawling 1993 four-panel painting Our Journey, by the Nigerian artist Obiora Udechukwu. Saturated in washes of color, the panels hum with an inner life, suggesting the movement of peoples across landscape and time. The remaining four works in the gallery are by Iranian and American artists, which speak to the global view of the new Hood.
American and European art, which were usually given pride of place in smaller 19th- and 20th-century American museums such as the Hood, are not banished, but they are re-assigned, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they do not enjoy greater prominence than other kinds of art.
Some traditionalists might argue with this approach. The legacy of what historians have called American and European art (i.e. art made largely but not exclusively by white men), is obviously enormous and crammed with works and artists of genius and enormous talent.
But, given the Hood’s holdings in American and European art, this new approach makes sense.
There are gems (a wonderful portrait of a man by Frans Hals which shows his quick-witted apprehension of human psychology; a small, poignant, intensely expressed Angelica Kauffman painting of a scene from the Odyssey, showing Telemachus in Sparta) but the collection does not boast the same breadth and depth of a great metropolitan or university museum.
Larger museums tend to segregate and isolate — by which I don’t mean only by gender or race.
By habit and perhaps by necessity, museums and students have for a long time looked at art history chronologically and in isolation.
The Greeks get their own gallery; ditto, the Etruscans and the Sumerians. English, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch art are grouped within the European tradition. American art is an offshoot. The vast Japanese, Chinese and Islamic traditions get their own wings. Decorative arts, such as furniture, textiles and porcelain, are separate from visual arts. Photography is separated from painting, which is separated from sculpture. Such an approach neglects the fact that the things we use in our daily lives — plates, tiles, rugs — often complement what we think of as “high art.” We don’t quarantine them the way a museum does.
The problem with the chronological, silo approach, which seems unlikely to change for numerous logistical reasons, is that it gives little sense of how disparate cultures developed simultaneously, and what the commonalities were, if any.
Precisely because the Hood Museum is smaller, the redesign affords visitors a sense of the continuum of art history, from the Assyrians to the Romans to the Melanesians to indigenous Australian, American and African art.
The distance from 19th-century New England (landscape paintings of the White Mountains) to 20th-century Los Angeles (the knock-out 1963 painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas by Los-Angeles-based Ed Rusha) is substantial.
But the deft curatorial placement of work, and the intimacy of the galleries, helps visitors to see, and feel, almost in a physical sense, that intellectual and artistic progression.
Here, I valued being able to walk a few yards between rooms, rather than a quarter-mile from one wing to the next, to see the incremental changes in style and subject matter from one era to another. It gives a visitor a sense of the flow and exchange of ideas and influences, which cross porous intellectual borders.
The Native American, Indigenous Australian and African art galleries are sensational, filled with robust, exuberant, vital works that demonstrate how much art historians and critics have missed by viewing these traditions as less sophisticated or accomplished than those that emerged from the European and American art academies.
The art of non-white, non-Europeans was typically called primitive or folk art. It was deemed most suited to ethnographic or anthropological study, but not necessarily judged on its own terms as art. The galleries at the Hood go a good way toward correcting this myopic, frequently racist rationale.
I lingered over the sardonic works of the late Fritz Scholder (Drunken Indian in Car and Dartmouth Portrait #17), an artist from the Luiseno people of Southern California whose canvases have a tactile brilliance and whose themes cast a long historical shadow.
The Albright Gallery’s wall of masks from Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, among other countries, demonstrates, not the naivete that previous generations might have ascribed to the masks, but a supple worldliness, a deep sense of time and an awareness of the public and private roles we all assume.
The indigenous Australian art in the Hall Gallery has a bravura vitality, with shimmering colors and exacting techniques.
The curators have been scrupulous, too, about teasing out the strands of what we lump together under the rubrics of Native American, African and Indigenous Australian art.
These rubrics may be convenient shorthand, but they are deeply inadequate when attempting to describe hundreds of different languages, geographies, cultures, economies, religions and materials. It would be akin to labeling all art originating in Europe through the centuries as simply European.
Walking through the galleries, I thought more about the physical pleasure of making art, and the compulsion to do so, a subject not often discussed in academic writing, which understandably but narrowly focuses on the history behind an object, but not always what the artist might have felt while making it, or the techniques and tricks she or he called on. How an artist makes something and the materials he or she uses, and why, is as integral to understanding an object as where the artist grew up, the jobs the artist held, the culture he or she worked in.
There is a distinct pedagogy at work here, in the museum’s use of wall labels and object biographies. This may be in keeping with its role as a teaching museum for the college, but I have mixed feelings about wall labels.
Yes, visitors require basic information and some art may require more explanation for audiences unfamiliar with the techniques or the subject matter but, on occasion, wall labels stray too far in giving too much information, and imposing a didactic viewpoint.
There’s an innate mystery in how we respond to art. When visitors spend more time reading a label than they do looking at the work it describes, which can happen, there’s a risk that the frisson between art and viewer, that indefinable human connection, is lost. Wall labels, intentionally or not, also contribute to a degree of infantilization: You won’t get this or can’t understand it, so we’re going to tell you what we think it should mean to you. Allow viewers the integrity of their own responses, good, bad or indifferent.
I wish I had also been more enthusiastic about the museum’s external appearance, a grayish sheath with a big, boxy window which is reminiscent of Marcel Breuer’s architecture for the original Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). It is discreet and is tucked neatly into the available space. The entrance from the green is easier to find and it announces itself more directly as the Hood.
But, to me at least, the exterior does not inspire. It is functional but surprisingly mundane.
It is in the interior, with its combination of newer and older galleries, a more generous allowance of space for the oversize works (like the Hood’s Rothko, Lilac and Orange over Ivory, and the boundless expanse of Pat Steir’s Red and Red) and greater use of natural light, that Tsien and Williams responded nimbly to the charge given them.
The curators have responded with displays of art that ask us to be curious, to consider and to investigate — which serves a high moral purpose, one that follows, or should, from the ethos of any institution of higher learning. Most important, the curatorial philosophy behind the redesigned Hood Museum offers a genuinely innovative way forward for other smaller, collegiate museums.
In a phone conversation this week, the museum’s director, John Stomberg, said that the galleries will rotate art from the collection every three months or so. “There are no permanent galleries at the Hood, only the permanent collection,” he said.
One of the ideas behind the redesign was that the Hood would be a Kunsthalle, the German term for an art hall, or art gallery, not a set-in-stone arrangement of the collection. In 2020, the museum will rotate 14 shows, including a few loan exhibitions, an ambitious schedule.
“If you haven’t seen the museum in three months, it’s time to come back,” Stomberg said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.