The Beautiful Benton Museum

For its new building, Pomona College skipped the starchitects and opted for good sense and grace. The result is a gem.

W hen I was in California this summer I had a sneak preview of the Benton Museum of Art, the new college museum in Claremont serving Pomona College.

The new building, a perfect gem, was finished and arranged with art, but the COVID mass hysteria still gripped California. It still wasn’t open to the general public, and since it was summer, the college decided to wait until the fall, when students returned, to launch it in a celebratory way. This weekend, the place formally opened. I think it will be a big hit for students and faculty and for Claremont, neighboring Pomona, and the other towns in this easternmost slice of Los Angeles County.

A new museum building is not for the faint of heart. Having done an addition and a renovation to a historic building and avidly following museum projects, I can say that much can go wrong and that “what possessed them to do this?” is a sad but common question. The masters of Pomona College and the staff of the museum and its donors did a great job. It’s a $44 million project that triples the size of the old museum, going from about 10,000 square feet to 33,000. Machado Silvetti, Boston architects I like a lot, designed it. I’ve rarely seen a more thoughtful, comprehensive, economically efficient building project except, of course, my own. Janet Inskeep Benton is the anchor donor and, with a $15 million gift, a generous one. She graduated from Pomona in 1979 and has an M.B.A. from Harvard.

I was very curious to see it. I remember the old place, called the Montgomery Art Center, from the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student working on my dissertation at the Huntington in Pasadena. It was small and sleepy. Its collection reflected the eccentricities of Pomona College alumni. There was, at the time, superb first-edition sets of Goya’s anchor print series, given to the museum by Norton Simon. That was, I thought then and believe now, a treasure. Simon had no personal connection to Pomona but was a prolific donor. I would have described the rest of the collection as odds and ends.

The college was already prestigious, the Williams of the West, and was part of a five-college consortium, one college after another in a row, each specialized and, as a concept, dating to the 1880s. These include what is now Claremont McKenna College, once men-only and the one that college jocks attended, and Scripps, the college for women. Harvey Mudd College is a little MIT. Pitzer College is strong in science. The San Gabriel Mountains loom in the distance.

Few arrived in Southern California in wagon trains chased by the natives. In the 1880s and ’90s, they came on the Union Pacific Railroad, middle-class and upper-middle-class transplants from New England and the Upper Midwest, attracted by ideal weather and new beginnings.

These little colleges and Claremont itself, developed with the specific goal of creating a New England college town among the palm trees and orange groves — unfettered by generations of swamp Yankee locals, decrepit factory buildings, grumpy tenured faculty antiques, and drafty Federal Style and Gothic Revival piles. They weren’t particularly experimental, as was, say, Bennington College 50 years later, but the faculty was young and fresh, and the buildings were new.

When I was a young man in graduate school, these colleges were chichi enough but regional. Southern California and, for that matter, west of the Rockies, wasn’t loaded with collectors. Nobody was storing a long-lost Winslow Homer watercolor under the bed or had Copley portraits of Grandpa Ebenezer and Grandma Phoebe in the dining room. You know, she’s the one who saddled Paul Revere’s horse for him.

This has certainly changed. Pomona, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, and Pitzer Colleges are little powerhouses. The five colleges are still small and share things like the library, but admission standards are among the most stringent in America. Both students and alumni are everywhere. We’re as likely to find a Pomona alumni gazillionaire as one from Amherst or Wellesley, and as likely to find discerning collectors. Benton, for instance, the lead donor, lives in Westchester County in New York.

It was time for a new museum.

I tend to focus on a few things in evaluating a new building. The first, of course, is the quality of galleries. I like quick accessibility to art rather than folderol like visitor-welcome spaces, an introductory video space, and a shop before we get to see what we came to see. At the new museum, we’re quickly in beautiful galleries with nice, high ceilings, natural light where it’s appropriate, and flexible spaces. The biggest gallery is 1,500 square feet, so there is a lead space, but there are more intimate spaces, too.

There are two small galleries for art shows focused on specific art-history classes. Ideally, at a college art museum, we want to see art-history classes using art, not slides. A good museum will work harmoniously with the art-history department in organizing topical exhibitions. Now, college museums mount shows for English and history classes, too.

As important is the back-of-house space. Things like storage, art-prep space, and a loading dock often find their way to the chopping block since it’s not glitzy public space, but these things are essential to a good museum. The galleries are so elegant that the college museum will become a magnet for gifts of art. Some of it will need to be stored. At the new museum, there’s abundant space for collection growth. I deplore the movement toward storing museum art off-site. No one ever sees it.

The exterior has a Southern California look with red clay tiles, red cedar, and high-quality bronze finishes. The Pomona campus is a mix of what I call Collegiate Style from the 1910s and ’20s — Hollywood sometimes used the campus for location shots — and sleeker styles from the ’70s into today. As with many colleges, there’s been a building boom. The museum is attractive and welcoming and fits with the rest of the campus. There are three levels, but almost all the public activity is on one floor. It feels domestic, like a big ranch house.

Machado Silvetti did the first-rate renovation to the Getty Villa. I’ve heard good things about its renovation of the 1971 Gio Ponti building at the Denver Art Museum, which just opened. This building is a distinguished one as opposed to the museum’s 2007 Daniel Libeskind–designed building, which is awful, and I don’t mean “filled with awe.” I mean it’s a bad building and a tribute to ego rather than to art. Machado Silvetti is far more sensitive and tasteful than that. Pomona College chose well in hiring the firm.

The inaugural exhibitions are very good. There’s an Alison Saar survey show I liked a lot and a very good Sadie Barnette exhibition, the star of which is her Dear 1968 series. Barnette’s father, a civil-rights-era activist in the ’60s, was long targeted by the FBI for surveillance. He was part of the Black Panther movement, which wasn’t my idea of a good group, but, really, was a 500-page FBI file and years of spying necessary? The younger Barnette got access to his file, reproducing pages from it in big format and pink spray paint, glitter, and rhinestones. She spoofs government-goon intrusion and intimidation. I saw a Barnette at the Guggenheim in a group show a couple of months ago and thought it lacked context, so it was wasted.

The Benton did a good job in gathering a group of things from the series and interpreting them with clarity and, I have to say, urgency, as the FBI is up to its old tricks again and worse, given its immersion in politics rather than law enforcement. An upcoming show of the work of the Bosnian artist Amir Berbic sounds promising. He spent a year with his family in the 1990s living in a refugee camp in Denmark during the Balkans war. It’s not a celebration of illegal immigration but, rather, a probing, cogent look at the upheaval of refugee life.

The Benton has a strong collection of Native American textiles and ceramics. It is also, I was surprised to see, the recipient of Old Masters from the Kress Foundation. In the early 1960s, the foundation placed hundreds of Old Masters collected by Samuel Kress in out-of-the-way museums. I saw a very good martyrdom painting by Neri di Bicci from the 1450s.

My advice to the museum is to become an open, curious place highlighting the best art rather than kooky PC irrelevancies. The art-history department at the college is good.

The department chair specializes in the art of medieval and Renaissance Genoa. The five colleges have, together, a great studio-art program. Victoria Sancho Lobis is the director of the Benton and a professor in the department. She’s a solid, serious scholar. She comes from a print background, specifically Dutch and Flemish prints, and that’s not a field for faddish people. Her taste is catholic, which is a big plus.

One of my pet corns is directors and curators who only want to do exhibitions related to the subjects of their dissertations. How blinkered and boring, and what a disservice to students. The new building, of course, is a tribute to Lobis, too, since, as director, she led the charge.

I think Scripps has a small art collection, too. Women’s schools often have fine collections. Certainly Smith, Vassar, and Mount Holyoke have lovely museums.

In my parents’ era, if a couple collected art, the wife drove the collection. With women usually outliving their husbands, the art often went to the museum at the college the widow attended, unless it was very valuable, in which case Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, or Princeton would likely find a way to hook it and pull it in. Over time, I hope Scripps sends its art to the Benton.

I have high hopes for this new museum. Nothing succeeds like success.