At the end of December, I visited Houston to see the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building at the Museum of Fine Arts. I love it. It’s a Texas-size step toward putting Houston atop the Olympus of the nation’s culture world along with places like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In fact, I think it’s there. This fast, high climb happened in my lifetime, so it’s been heartening to see. The MFA’s story is a world-class lesson in the power of positive thinking, civic pride, ambition, philanthropy, and good taste.
The new wing cost $450 million and provides more than 100,000 square feet of new gallery space. Steven Holl Architects designed it. Holl became famous, in art circles at least, about ten years ago via his new wing for the Nelson-Atkins Museum. It’s great, and it meets the herculean challenge of building a modern addition to a neoclassical building with a spartan exterior and an interior of Roman exuberance. At the MFA, Holl, happily for him, needed to harmonize with buildings done by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Rafael Moneo, modern at least, since its original neoclassical home has long ago been sidelined.
The architects seem to have decided that one of their enemies was bulk — massive, menacing, inhuman, aggrandizing bulk. I’ve seen so many big, intimidating stone and glass museum boxes that call themselves welcoming but, instead, leave children with the willies and dogs baying.
Enemy vanquished, with aplomb. The curtain walls are a succession of translucent, milky-white attached glass columns. They do three things. They give the exterior vitality and rhythm but also have just enough curve to suggest a voluptuary. That’s good. Art’s sexy. It’s not, blessedly, a box. The cladding protects the interior from Houston’s summer heat, which simultaneously bakes and bastes any and all. At night, illuminated from inside lights, it glows.
I started my visit around noon but left when the museum closed for the evening. Once it’s dark, the museum is a Japanese lantern. It doesn’t sparkle, which would have been gaudy. Rather, it casts light that made me wonder whether Holl has ever designed a church because he has a way with the spiritual. His firm has done one or two, but it has designed lots of museums, concert halls, and libraries, all of which address the soul.
The building’s big, but its soft, gauzy luminescence gives it a human scale. I’m not describing a feeling of awe. Day or night, the building rests in equipoise between comfort and beguilement, a far better result than awe. Returning to Holl’s battle against intimidating bulk, I think the building seems so approachable in part because it’s divided into pavilions that, seen from the outside, create garden spaces. Nice sculpture and seating make them attractive. I visited on a warm day at the end of December and enjoyed the time looking at flowers and outdoor art as I’d just walked along busy city streets from the Rothko Chapel.
I spent a long time in the atrium because I couldn’t believe how beautiful it is. It’s three stories high, so it’s big and it’s pure white. The Kinder building has multiple entrances, which usually I don’t like because I think museums should have one grand entrance. This building is different, though, because the architects sought to welcome, not to overwhelm or preach. There are few stairs, so visitors enter from the surrounding garden. Though the entrance isn’t grand like the Met’s, the atrium took my breath away, so I was happy.
It’s not bleeding-edge, and that’s the first thing I liked. It’s a big, beautiful open space that’s sleek, serious, transparent, and inviting. A Calder mobile enlivens it, as does a staircase that’s got a clean Bauhaus look without being obnoxious about it. The floor is a variegated terrazzo that’s active enough to notice. Floors cover immense surfaces. I sometimes wonder why architects don’t think more about their aesthetics.
The atrium evokes life. There were lots of people in the museum, young and old, and lots of families. That was a joy to see. A culture of fear and unease is strangling the America that actually believes the COVID quacks, sob sisters, and pols who like their public paralyzed. That’s the Northeast, roughly from Boston to Washington. Texans aren’t fools, and they have a healthy disrespect for authority that abuses their intelligence.
And they like their wide-open spaces. From the atrium, I could see the buzz on each floor as people climbed the stairs to big, open landings displaying art. It’s a feeling and look of spaciousness.
Having once replaced a glass museum roof at great cost and more misery than I care to remember, I tend to think about roofs and wince. Like floors, though, roofs and ceilings cover a lot of real estate. The Kinder building’s roof is a series of overlapping petal shapes. I suppose the birds think they’re nice, and they parrot puffy clouds, but I’m unlikely to get a bird’s eye view. I like them because, from the floor of the atrium, they look debonair, even jazzy. They also cap a network of clerestory windows that let filtered light flow through the space. The ceiling petal forms themselves are punctured, too, so the little windows sparkle. There are floor-to-ceiling windows on each landing as well. I liked the preference for natural light, augmented by artificial light when needed.
More than I like, I walk through a museum and hear Casey Stengel whisper, if not shout, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Not so in Houston. It’s in the galleries off the atrium that I first saw a brilliant curatorial touch. I’ve written a lot about looks and feelings, but the things that impress me the most about the Kinder wing are intellectual, or the rapprochement between the intellect and aesthetics. The curators convey the story of modern and contemporary art in a way that’s compelling, sensible, and authentic.
The atrium galleries give a taste of what’s shown in the three floors above. Calder and Tinguely sculptures speak to pure, blue-chip Modernism. There’s a big illusional glass wall sculpture from 2000, City of Abstracts, by William Forsythe, that’s delicious and fun. Gyula Kosice’s The Hydrospatial City is an installation of Space Age sculptures floating from the ceiling in its own gallery. Kosice is a Czech-Argentine artist I didn’t know. He died, at 92, in 2016. The sculptures are small plexiglass objects that look like Star Wars space cities, but they float in a darkened space with blue walls and sparkling lights, all designed by Kosice. The MFA is rich in South American modern art, and this introduces us to the field. There’s a James Turrell light gallery, too.
The top floor is divided into areas with titles such as Line into Space, Color into Light, and Collectivity and address the state of art over, say, the past 50 years. The art’s perfectly arranged. Even the things I didn’t like, among them a pile of 400 adobe bricks by Teresa Margolles, look good and almost convincing until I pinched myself and said “no.” Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series was in the same gallery and restored my sense of wonder.
One of the features I like the most is the placement of big works by, say, Frank Stella or James Rosenquist in the lovely, big galleries on each floor hugging the atrium. Many of them are by South American artists, and they fortify the point the Kosice installation made: The MFA is the only American museum with South American masterpieces. The interior of the Kinder building isn’t a box, but the atrium feels round. This softens the atrium galleries, which have many more than four walls. The effect is that the big art seems to rest on pillows. It’s a nice effect.
The Kosice gallery off the atrium introduced me to another curatorial strength I saw over and over — it’s also a gutsy way to teach. Less about chronology and schools, the galleries sometimes become tutorials on individual artists or niche movements. These occur in places where the museum has depth, like in the work of Jasper Johns or a bracing space centered on Romare Bearden’s Odysseus Leaves Circe collage from 1977. Surrounding the Bearden are works on myth and religious belief by Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Chris Ofili. This approach promotes experiential learning rather than learning by memorizing dates and what movement follows which. It’s learning by osmosis and not at all intimidating.
I adored the LOL! gallery though I would have simply called it “Laughter” rather than dive into text-speak. It’s art with humor, such as a William Wegman dog photograph and a goofy chair made of big, blue stuffed animals by the Campana brothers. It’s a delightful space. Tony Oursler’s and Claes Oldenburg’s art is there, too.
The message is clear and welcoming: Art speaks to the totality of human feeling, and humor is a dynamic and essential leaven. Social-justice art rules the roost these days, and I’m often moved to look at it and its enablers and think “sourpuss,” in addition to “boring” and “when are you going to pack your sad sack and go away?”
I liked the Border, Witness, Mapping gallery. I love maps, which yell adventure and discovery with a good Texas yee-haw but are also intricate, colorful, and linear. They delight in topography and terrain while making sense of them. Julie Mehretu’s Fragment, from 2009, is superb. Much of the art in this space treats the border between Texas and Mexico. Some of it is weepy, but that’s probably justified.
Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Transparent Migrations, from 2001, is a mirrored armoire holding a small gauze dress, a mantilla, and glass miniatures. The mirror is shattered, suggesting dreams ruined. It does what good art needs to do. It puts me, a WASP from Vermont having had every privilege, in the shoes of a woman from Mexico with a tenuous hold on home. She’s a fantastic artist who deserves a big show.
Decorative-arts galleries are challenges these days, and I wonder why. A good curator, and the MFA has the best, will have the right touch, but without perfect pitch these spaces often look like an antiques mall. The MFA’s is a proper gallery done by an art historian to teach and to delight, with good juxtapositions, and not like a showroom at Sotheby’s or a commercial space in New York.
The decorative arts, craft, and design galleries on the second floor. (Photo: Tom Dubrock/Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
The space treated the intellectual topic of design reform in the 20th and 21st centuries, concentrating on Britain, the Vienna “Secession” movement, Bauhaus, and Italian post-war design. People will leave it not only better educated on design history but with their personal aesthetics enhanced by a few notches. Museums teach art history, but they should teach good taste, too.
I felt the same way as I walked the Line into Space and Color into Line galleries. They are well done art-history spaces, beautifully arranged with wall art and sculpture not only playing well together but saying things that make sense. The color gallery is buoyant, with asymmetrical but pleasing comparisons among Frank Stella, Ettore Sottsass, and Kenneth Noland.
The photography galleries, and the MFA’s collection is one of the finest, is anchored by big-format photographs by Laurie Simmons and Stan Douglas, with a straightforward selection of greatest hits by Edward Steichen, Holland Day, Carleton Watkins, Le Gray, and Julia Margaret Cameron, finished with a group from Robert Frank’s Americans. Again, the curators achieved that elusive balance of great intelligence and sensual appeal as well as equipoise between big and small works.
The early Modernist galleries startled me. The curators cleverly and seamlessly placed art by Stuart Davis, Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, and the great but unrecognized Helen Torr and Elsie Driggs, all Americans, with work by Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian while proving that the Americans make sense in the equation and can actually look good and strong. The curators have a magic touch to teach through looking. Miró, Picasso, and Leger mix with Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, and de Kooning in confident conversation.
The spark I felt in every gallery made me think of something Marcel Duchamp said, and this helped me understand why the mix of American and European Modernism worked so well. Duchamp said that an artist might finish a painting, but that’s not the end of the creative act. It’s only the beginning. “The viewer brings the work into the external world by deciphering it,” he said. The American work — which Americans naturally, instinctively understand since it’s the art of our country — informs how we look at the European Modernists. It becomes an aesthetic experience among equals. The curators allowed this to happen.
The Kinder project was a profile in courage — but not because donors were difficult or stingy. Houston philanthropists are probably the most generous in the world as well as the nicest. They’re rich, but they’re not masters of the universe, bores, or churls. They see philanthropy in terms of civic pride, giving back, and continuing education for themselves. They delight in learning.
Hurricane Harvey is what I mean when I write “profile in courage.” Harvey was a disaster in Houston, and it came as the Kinder construction site was about to launch. Damage was immense and, as the director, Gary Tinterow, told me, “you don’t get this stuff at Home Depot.” Chinese, German, and Canadian price-rigging provoked American tariffs, which led to retaliatory tariffs, and this made materials more expensive. All of this delayed and complicated the project, but it’s done, open, and glorious, which makes for a happy ending.
