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You'll need map, walking shoes; cloister garden is gone but Armor Court remains
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Jun 29, 2008
The Cleveland Museum of Art is back, sort of.
The 1916 building, after liberal doses of spit and polish, is reopening today with the hoopla of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, followed by tours of everything that can possibly be toured.
Bring your walking shoes and someone who can read a map, because you'll need both.
As there is work still going on — the rebuilding of the central part of the museum, construction beginning on the new west wing, and finishing touches in the new east wing — visitors who enter the museum from the parking garage must follow a lengthy yellow-arrow-marked route, snappily named the ''Art Detour,'' from the ground-floor admissions desk to the entrance to the 1916 building.
The Art Detour does seem to go on and on, but eventually, after winding around in the bowels of the Breuer building, visitors come to a place where they can choose to take either the elevator or the new escalators, and after ascending two levels and walking down yet another long corridor, will arrive at the east entrance of the 1916 building, entering in the midst of the new American Art galleries.
There is another way to get in, happily. That is to park on the street and enter from the south, the original entrance to the museum, which is the grand 1916 marble front that faces the Fine Arts Gardens.
If we enter here, the first thing we will notice inside is that the CMA's prized objects from the Guelph Treasure are no longer under the rotunda as they had been since they were acquired in 1931. Instead, the marble-floored space has been cleared. It is now an area where visitors can pause to orient themselves.
And there will be some orienting to do. For, while the Armor Court is where it always has been, to the east of the rotunda, the cloister garden to the west is gone.
That lovely oasis of stone floors and cascading fountain, vine-covered walls and Romanesque columns, has been replaced by an ordinary plaster-walled gallery that the museum is calling European Art: Naturalism and Idealism, 1525-1725.
And, except for the skylight, which was always there, and the toe-stubbing threshold, which I'm told will soon be fixed, it is like every other gallery you've ever been in.
But there's still the museum cafeteria, right? With its lovely outdoor eating area?
Wrong. That's going bye-bye as well. The museum is moving the cafeteria to the north entrance, where the special exhibitions gallery used to be. No mention has yet been made of an outdoor eating area, with the fountain, wading pool, sculpture court and great jazz parties once enjoyed outside the old cafeteria.
Armor Court remains
But let's go back to the rotunda and what's still familiar: the Armor Court, which thousands of Northeast Ohio schoolchildren have visited over the years and which has been declared, by the New York Times no less, ''the finest display of arms and armor in the United States.''
They haven't dared to mess with that. They've even added a sword and a couple of pikes to the displays.
''This is the historic home of the Armor Court since 1916,'' said Stephen Fliegel, CMA curator of medieval art. ''The first director, Frederick Whiting, acquired this collection literally weeks before the 1916 opening. He was a proponent of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and he wanted to have wonderful craft works as exemplars in the museum.
''This gallery is our roots. This gallery is the one gallery that will be precisely where it was in 1916. It's a unique space and perfectly suited to arms and armor. There are larger collections than ours, but the space itself is better than any other in the United States for displaying this material,'' Fliegel said.
''Then there's the whole nostalgia factor. Most of the schoolchildren in our area, for their first visit to the museum, begin with the Armor Court. So there's a great deal of nostalgia and sentiment attached to this space,'' he added.
And then, logically, we can proceed from the Armor Court to the wonderful related medieval collection in the surrounding galleries, for which the CMA is justly renowned, right?
Oops. Wrong again. Instead of surrounding the Armor Court with concurrent-era work from the early medieval to Renaissance, museum officials have elected to surround the Armor Court with European art from 1775 to 1870 and American art from 1700 to 1925.
That's because, we're told, the new east wing, the one that's clad in black-and-white stripes and visible from University Circle, will house, among other collections, contemporary American art, and the curators wanted visitors to be able to make that connection.
Plus, curators argue, the galleries are now aligned so visitors can take in the ''lovely flow'' from 18th-century British and French art to American colonial works, particularly the furniture.
European miniatures from 1570s to the 1820s will be on permanent view in a special, dedicated gallery.
There must be more to it than that, because the same connection could have been made if the American collection had been put back where it was, on the west side of the building, with contemporary works housed in the new west wing, when it's finished. And the same ''lovely flow'' from the British and French to the colonial American works surely could have been made on the west side, and a place for the miniatures could have been found.
Another explanation being offered is that the collection is being reinstalled in a strictly chronological order — Armor Court excepted, since that popular favorite had to stay put — beginning with the earliest works on the ground floor, and coming forward in time as we ascend in floor level.
But if we look at the museum's own ''Phasing Diagram,'' which shows the various changes and the sizes of the new additions, we can see that what's obviously at play is size and space. The east wing is substantially larger than the soon-to-be-built west wing.
And, according to the diagram, the CMA plans to house its art collections from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Ancient Americas, Native North America, China, India, Islam, Japan and Korea in the west wing.
So visitors to the Armor Court are treated to the jarring juxtaposition in connecting side galleries of such American icons as Stag at Sharkey's (1909) by George Bellows and the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
'Guelph Treasure' stored
More is still to come. For instance, Fliegel noted, the famed Guelph Treasure, which will no longer be displayed under the rotunda, is in storage until 2010, when the Medieval Galleries reopen.
For now, visitors will certainly be awed with the new French and British galleries and the gorgeous integrated displays. Paintings and sculptures in these galleries aren't separated into their own special display areas, but mixed in among the chairs, cabinets, china and cutlery — and one magnificent French Savonnerie carpet, circa 1750.
The new European Art gallery to the west of the rotunda contains works that range from the Baroque to the Rococo, including four works that were spiffed up for the reopening — three paintings and a marble sculpture, including Giovanni Paolo Panini's Interior of the Pantheon, Rome (1747), said Jon Seydl, CMA curator of European Painting and Sculpture from 1500-1800.
''In the case of the Panini, it had this horrible yellow varnish. It was cleaned, and one thing that emerged was this wonderful beam of light from the ceiling oculus (the round opening in the top of the dome of the Pantheon).'' He also said a 3/4-inch strip along the bottom had been abraded and badly restored. He credits Per Knutas, a restorer with the Intermuseum Conservation Association, with bringing back the image's clarity.
The restoration is so well done that now, said Seydl, the painting, which had ''always been described as a weaker version'' of an earlier painting of the same subject at the National Gallery, no longer displays the flaws caused by the previous restoration.
''Now we have to bring them together and look at them side by side,'' Seydl said. ''Panini was an artist who wouldn't have just done a copy, but a new painting and made adjustments and revisions.''
In the case of the marble sculpture, Sleeping Endymion (1746) by Agustino Cornacchini, the work was in such bad shape that the museum's Web site doesn't even include it as part of the CMA collection.
''There are only two other works by him in the United States,'' said Seydl. The sculpture was ''truly filthy, to the point that I thought it had been left in that state because it would have been too complicated to treat it, and there was an issue with the foot which we couldn't fix because we couldn't tell what was going on, because it was so filthy.''
The museum brought in several restorers to work on the sculpture, including Shelley Paine, who tried a misting technique to lift the dirt, which, said Seydl, ''at first didn't work, then she let it rest for a few weeks and tried it again, and this time everything just dislodged.
''There were dark stains on his chest that practically disappeared. The whole sculpture is based on the juxtaposition of smoothness and roughness, which wasn't apparent before it was cleaned.''
They were also able to properly restore the foot by looking at different versions of the sculpture, Seydl said. ''Getting the foot right was a major accomplishment.''
And then there is A Noble Woman of Genoa by Anthony Van Dyck. ''This is a great example of how good restoration can restore the meaning of a work,'' Seydl said. ''It has a really complicated restoration history, which we are still trying to reconstruct.
''Sometime, probably in the 19th century this had been cleaned with something that you would never use today, something like ammonia, which caused losses in the background.''
Three conservators worked on the painting: Marsha Steele of the CMA, Alexandra Carapella, a visiting conservator, and Dean Yoder, who is in private practice in Cleveland.
''At first, I thought this painting was a wreck. But Dean taught me a lot about how to look at a picture that has had some damage. Sometimes what you see immediately doesn't reflect the actuality of what's going on in the picture itself. And I also learned as a result a lot about Van Dyck as an artist, who is feeling more than most artists and who's really actively observing what's before him.
''The geography of the hands, for instance, they aren't idealized at all. The relationship of the child and the mother and the story of the painting itself is told through the hands.
''That tiny little gap between the mother's hand and the child's speaks volumes. What Dean brought back into this was that while it's an image about power, it's also a picture about intimacy and reality. That was his power, that he could make this tremendous state portrait with its statement of power and bring to it this tender and emotional quality.''
Aura of the new
Rearranged in this way, the collections take on the aura of the new. Works that once we might have passed by without a second look, we now stop to observe, realizing that we have really never looked at them as thoroughly as we should.
And there's more to come.
In the fall the installation of the second floor galleries of the new east wing will begin. These present the museum's holdings of late 19th-century European art, modern European and American art, contemporary art and photography.
And the new special exhibition galleries in the east wing will be inaugurated with Artistic Luxury: Tiffany, Faberge, Lalique, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Keep those walking shoes handy. You'll need them again come fall.
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is back, sort of.
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