Blanton Museum of Art

Review: Real art isn't outside, but the thoughtful displays inside

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS CRITIC
Sunday, June 04, 2006

The aesthetic thrill of the Blanton Museum of Art derives from the art, not the architecture.

After all, since its inception in 1963, a chief accomplishment of the University of Texas art museum has been to accrue — and interpret for the public — a significant collection of European, Latin American and American art.

Now, after years of awkwardly dividing its treasures between the Art Building and the Ransom Center, the new Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building gives the Blanton a grand blank canvas to paint a refreshing portrait of its 17,000-piece permanent collection.

Unfortunately, "blank" is part of the message the interior architecture projects upon entering. With its enormous white walls and smooth limestone floor, there's nothing about the formal two-story atrium that signals what lies just beyond the oddly old-fashioned loggia surrounding the first floor.

Fortunately, a thoughtfully placed, dynamic three-dimensional painting by Fabian Marcaccio — one of several dozen new acquisitions featured in the temporary exhibit "New Now Next" — grabs the eye from inside the first-floor gallery and leads one into the 8,000-square-foot L-shaped room.

If it's not exciting space in and of itself, this gallery doesn't have to be. Instead, with gleaming dark floors and movable walls, the high-ceilinged windowless gallery is primed for the nimble rearrangement needed to accommodate changing exhibits.

And it's doing that well right now. That openness suits large art like Marcaccio's. And buzzing projectors for Paul Chan's digital video exhibit conveniently disappear into high ceilings. At the same time, the interior walls have enough flexibility to create surprisingly intimate spaces — even narrow passageways such as the one that houses Shahiza Sikander's beguiling modern versions of Persian miniatures.

For a more familiar rhythmic procession of rooms, head up the grandiose limestone staircase, where 28,500 square feet of galleries wait to offer an exceptionally intelligent and surprising presentation of the Blanton's permanent collections.

Architect Michael McKinnell designed the second-floor galleries as two concentric rings, with smaller inner rooms (about 20 feet by 20 feet) designed for more intimately sized artworks, the sweeping outer rooms for large-scale paintings and sculpture. It's a physical arrangement the Blanton curators smartly exploit, making superb use of the museum's unusually strong collection of prints — about 15,000 of the 17,000 works counted in the permanent collection and one of the largest and most historically balanced in the Southwest. And that means that throughout the permanent installation — roughly divided in half between European holdings and the newly dovetailed Latin American and American collections — connections abound.

Nowhere are those junctures more clear than in the European Gallery (turn left at the top of the staircase for this experience). Formally arranged in the classically proportioned rooms, the 150 Renaissance and Baroque paintings culled from the Suida-Manning Collection — a third of which have never before been on public display — offer a surprisingly comprehensive, broadly chronological overview of four centuries of European painting, even if the majority of paintings are not first tier. And because it's possible to balance their ceremonious posture against the more casual nature of the prints that crowd the accompanying galleries, visitors can read a more complete art history — if you can concentrate on all there is, that is. With at least 20 or more prints (each with a lengthy text label) crowding the walls and filling exhibit cases in each of the six small galleries, it takes considerable patience to ponder each and every one.

A better balance between prints and paintings is found in "America/Americas" (as the installation of Latin American and American art since 1900 is known) with only a dozen or so prints placed choicely and accompanied by short, unobtrusive labels. More importantly, by combining all the Blanton's 20th-century art, the whole looks better than the individual parts as it unfolds chronologically through vast white-walled galleries accented by tall, barrel-vaulted ceilings.

Indeed, roaming the second floor galleries reveals one delightful sight after another. Every entrance frames an artwork just beyond it. Sideway glances into the next gallery disclose clearly well-conceived views of what lies just ahead. It's obvious the Blanton curatorial team — led by Jonathan Bober, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro — exercised enormous creativity composing the two journeys they set before us.

All but in one place.

A small room filled with Western American paintings leads to the sky-blue corner rotunda filled with plaster replicas of classical sculpture. Both collections are odd footnotes to the Blanton's core strengths, stuffed into cramped spaces that act as traffic roadblocks. They mark a main path to the "America/Americas" room — and it's a strange and awkward introduction.

That inconvenient detour seems more a constraint of the rigidly ordered procession of rooms coupled with a museum collection that, well, has every idiosyncracy that any large collection bears. It's a minor hitch on an otherwise satisfying journey.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699