Atlanta’s High Museum, Looking Good and On the Move

Sculptures so conservative, they’re radical, alongside extraordinary photography and decorative-arts collections

E arlier this summer, I was in Atlanta visiting family and able to get to the High Museum. I’d been before, but these were rushed visits, so I felt I was seeing it for the first time. I went two afternoons in a row, one of which was a free, or no-admission, Sunday, and the place was packed with happy, inquiring people. It was a joy.

What Is Left Unspoken, Love was the big exhibition on view. It was a show organized by the High. It looked good and wasn’t inept. Malignant it was, alas, and opportunistic, naïve, and overwrought. Bon Jovi foretold this moment when he sang, “You Give Love a Bad Name.” The show doesn’t intentionally pimp race grievance, and it’s really not about love. Rather, the museum’s director and its contemporary-art curator seem to have overdosed on Joy Reid. “We love you if you hew to the party line,” it tells us. “Otherwise, we hate you.” I’ll review the show this weekend.

What a good permanent collection, though. I started in the contemporary art galleries in the Piano building from 2005 simply because I wanted to see the system of ceiling scoops that filter natural light over spacious, various galleries.

Anticipating the Piano wing, the museum went on a spree in the late ’90s and Aughts, acquiring big, handsome, wall-filling work by Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Sol Lewitt, and Anish Kapoor. Alex Katz’s 20-foot wide Meadow, from 1997, is a crowd-pleaser. There’s a Basquiat painting the museum bought in 1993 before his work hit eight figures. Benny Andrews’s Revival Meeting is fantastic.

Like many museums in the South, the High has a very serious decorative-arts collection and mission. Tejo Remy’s “You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory” Chest of Drawers, made in 2008, is a sculpture composed of drawers the artist found, piled asymmetrically and strapped together. It’s a work commissioned especially for the High. Joris Laarman’s Bone Armchair, also from 2008, isn’t made of bone but is based on car-industry research on bone and tree-branch structure. I don’t think Fred Wilson is much of an artist, but his black Murano-glass chandelier, Speak of Me as I Am, from 2003, commands a space. Wilson did it for the Venice Biennale’s American pavilion that year.

A skyway leads to another Piano wing and the High’s galleries for contemporary sculpture, folk art, and self-taught artists. The High did something very smart in the ’70s. Its Old Master collection isn’t great. It has some gifts from the Kress Collection, among them a Bellini, and it has Girodet’s Entombment of Atala, from 1811. It’s a delectably weird picture about a half-Native, half-European young woman who falls in love with a Natchez Indian. She vowed to her dying mother that she’d live a life of chastity. She fell so madly in love with her Natchez hunk that she killed herself rather than break her vow. Love makes people do crazy things.

The museum owns a great Monet Parliament-in-fog scene, which is definitive Impressionism and bought in 1960. Last year, the museum got a breathtaking collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art from Doris and Shouky Shaheen, a local couple. On Old Masters, the museum made the good call that it wasn’t going to use its money to chase art in an expensive, international market. It wasn’t going to be an Old Master heavyweight.

Instead, the High was among the first American museums to purchase treasure shows from high-end European museums such as the Louvre. Louvre Atlanta was a three-year collaboration launched in 2006. The Louvre sent seven exhibitions to the High from its collection. It drew big crowds, and I assume that the Louvre made a lot of money, as did the High through admission fees. I saw the Louvre drawings show when it was at the High.

There were lots of good things in the show, but it was diffuse. People paid for the word “Louvre,” and though the drawings on view were rarely displayed, the show didn’t add much to scholarship. When it comes to paintings, the big European museums doing these kinds of treasures shows send mostly their second-tier things, the vault dwellers, with a few heavy hitters.

I think the High was still in an era of profile-building and attention-getting. There was some compensation happening, too, for a spotty Old Master collection. It’s past all of this, though. It’s got lots of masterpieces, except in other areas that make it unique.

Priced out of high-flying markets, the High in the ’70s and ’80s focused on folk art. There’s so much good art in these galleries. Nellie Mae Rowe, a Georgia artist who died in 1982, painted buoyant, colorful, untutored work. There’s a Howard Finster gallery. He’s another Georgia artist, a minister, and a mix of Bernard Langlais, the Maine artist whose sculpture preserve I reviewed two weeks ago, and Joseph Cornell. He merges religion and patriotism. I felt as if I was at a Methodist camp meeting.

I spent lots of time in the American 19th-century spaces since that’s my specialty. It’s a very nice, idiosyncratic collection. The High got a gift in 2010 of startlingly good American marble sculpture by William Wetmore Story, Randolph Rogers, and Hiram Powers. Cleopatra, Medea, Pocahontas, Undine rising from the waters, and Jerusalem despairing are dramatic, dogmatic, and, I guess, today, pedantic, but they’re wonderful and, big, white whales that they are, change a museum. They’re so conservative that they’re outré.

I saw a late John Marin seascape from 1948. Marin said that, when he painted, he moved his hand the way waves moved. There’s a perfect, small John La Farge snow scene and an exquisite Catskills sunset by Frederic Church, also small but divine, and a John Henry Twachtman snow scene from 1889 that’s as abstract as he gets. The Blue Mandarin Coat (The Blue Kimono), by Joseph Rodefer DeCamp, from 1922, is a genius acquisition. DeCamp was a Boston artist whose work isn’t well known, but it’s exotic and reserved in the distinctly Boston Brahmin taste of his clientele.

These and other acquisitions, some from these early High donors but mostly recent, show the best taste and an eye for the extraordinary, which often is counterintuitive and inexpensive. The High’s photography collection, built starting in the ’70s, shows the same adventurous spirit.

Lacking the Old Master stars that the big museums of the Northeast got early, the museum moved to a field that museums in New York and New England looked at with indifference, if not scorn. Today, the High has a collection of America’s Old Masters and new masters among photographers. Its Picturing the South initiative, now 25 years old, has helped build the collection by showing contemporary work focusing on the South. I think the High’s collection in this niche is the best in the country.

The High has a big, welcoming entrance courtyard. Some of the American neoclassical sculpture is against the wall. These things are meant to be seen in the round. On both days I was there, ugly, vinyl, people-moving guardrails marred the courtyard. It looked like an airport security area decorated by the TSA. I don’t know why they’re there. I visited on a Saturday afternoon when visitorship wasn’t overwhelming the admission desk, so there wasn’t a need to corral people. The next day, the museum was free.

The barriers? Ditch ’em. It’s a sleek, elegant space the high point of which is a brilliant Ellsworth Kelly painting. Let people move freely and drink it all in. Together, the Piano and Meier buildings make one of the great museum campuses in the country. Policing the accrual of visitor-service apparatus is a job unto itself.

The High’s a great place that emerged, in part, from a disaster, and I would be remiss not to write about it. June 3, 1962, was the day that Atlanta, a city on the move and the New South’s beacon, stood dark, silent, and bereft. Then, a chartered plane carrying 132 crashed on takeoff at Orly Airport in Paris, killing all but two flight attendants. On the plane were 106 top patrons of the Atlanta Art Association. They had been on an art tour of Europe and were on their way home. The group consisted of much of Atlanta’s base of art collectors and culture-organization trustees and donors.

Atlanta, like almost all Southern cities, started late in the museum game, but start it had. Atlanta’s businessmen might not have appreciated art on its merits, but their wives, mothers, and daughters had drilled into them all that a thriving culture sector would attract prestige, families, and creative minds. The High already had a modern, though too small, building rather than its original home, founder Harriet High’s house. Atlanta’s symphony, art school, and theater company, though itinerant and poor, at least had a pulse.

In a flash, with the plane crash, Atlanta’s momentum stopped. After it, France sent Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, or Whistler’s portrait of his mother, to Atlanta for a long visit in memory of the dead. The French also donated a big, stunning Rodin cast of The Shade, displayed on the High’s grounds.

The crash, up to then civilian aviation’s biggest single-jet catastrophe, inspired Andy Warhol to paint 129 Die in Jet!, his first disaster picture. Malcolm X, then heading the Nation of Islam, called the crash “a very beautiful thing.” God, he said, “dropped an airplane out of the sky with 130 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye.” Nice way of lookin’ at it, pal.

The disaster hit the High collector and donor class, of course, and most museum people believe that it paralyzed the High. I don’t think this is true. The crash catalyzed City Hall and the business community to make high-end culture an even bigger priority. Soon after the crash, a bond issue to build a culture center went on the ballot but lost.

It was Robert Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola, who intervened after that with what became $50 million in his own philanthropy for what’s now the Woodruff Center. The museum, symphony, and main theater are here. In 1983, the Meier building opened. The Orly disaster devastated the Atlanta Art Association, to be sure. Woodruff’s money and leadership as well as Mayor Ivan Allen got the art establishment back on track. Most of the curator jobs at the High are endowed today. The region has great collectors. It’s rich. Lots of good things are coming to the High collection. The Shaheen gift is an example.

The High didn’t start as a neoclassical pile. It’s entirely fresh and modern. Atlanta wasn’t an old Southern port city like New Orleans, Charleston, or Savannah, with roots going back to the start of the country and a local aristocracy. It’s a boom town that came alive with the birth of the railroad.

The High shows this spirit. It’s a museum on the move.