Highs and Lows at Princeton’s New Art Museum

It looks great, but is the curatorial vision awry?

I hadn’t been to Princeton since, I think, 2017 when I saw its art museum’s splendid exhibition of the work of the Berlin Painter, the early fifth-century b.c. Greek vase painter. Whoever he or she was, since we classify vase painters by style, not personality, there’s an artist who brought proportion, reason, dignity, and aplomb to a perfect balance. It was a risky show. Greek pots draw the egghead crowd, but the Berlin Painter’s work is austerity with spice. Those looking for fabulosity might have skipped it. A year or so later, I reviewed Princeton’s Clarence White photography show, also great, but saw it when it traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

I’d been there off and on in the olden days and thought it was the typical academic art museum, quiet and cramped, where time passes at Old World speed, but in the 2010s something happened. It got ambition. Its exhibitions were not only top-notch but national. College and university museums in those days tended to be lazy and chronic navel-gazers. Plans for a new building waxed and waned for years until they could wane no more. And Princeton was, by 2020, seriously rich. When the museum closed during the Covid mass hysteria, the university pulled the trigger and decreed that the museum should build a new home and build big. In late October, the new museum opened. There are things I love and like and things I disdain and a puzzlement here and there, but overall, it’s breathtaking.

Having done one renovation and addition to a small museum and been deeply involved in an addition to a midsize one, I can’t think of much that’s more daunting than building a 146,000-square-foot building from scratch, on a historic, neat-as-a-pin campus, in affluent, twee Princeton, a town where everyone’s a critic. The museum has to serve Princeton’s students but also the community. Everyone in town, I think, loves the museum and takes ownership. And it must feature galleries displaying a high-end encyclopedic collection. Did I mention homes for the university’s art library and for its distinguished archaeology department? Call it a million moving parts, countless balls in the air, and a goal the path to which is packed with land mines.

I’ll mix accolades and quibbles. Certainly, it all works and is a plum for Princeton, town and gown.

The building’s in the center of a campus that’s mostly Gothic Revival and Georgian, so it seems elegant and grand, but Princeton looks more spacious than it is. The museum’s no more than a ten-minute walk from every dormitory and a five-minute walk from Nassau Street and the town’s center, charming but real. The university wanted multiple entrances facing different parts of the campus and the town. Scale was an issue, too. The new museum’s surrounded by historic buildings, some brownstone, some marble, some sparkling schist. It landed on a single, big building composed of nine cubic pavilions subtly separated so the totality seems lighter. Some are elevated, resting on concrete supports, and seem to float. Cast-in-place concrete, honed precast panels, bronze, and glass are the basic exterior materials. A blend of stone aggregate trim reflects the palette of the nearby buildings. Taken together, these features produce a museum that’s distinctive, memorable, and contemporary but that doesn’t quarrel with its neighbors.

Is it a Brutalist building? No. The term comes from “breton brut,” French for raw concrete, and there’s nothing raw about the new museum. Yes, the governing material on the outside is concrete but with elegant ornamentation and, come spring, some lovely, softening landscaping. Pipes, conduits, water tanks, and other innards discreetly hide. I think people accustomed to glass and craving transparency might think it’s massive and forbidding.

When many of my Princeton alumni readers and friends saw the preliminary plans a few years ago, they used words like “behemoth,” “vandalism,” and “carbuncle” to describe them. I didn’t know Princeton’s layout and didn’t know much about the collection aside from its American things. The plan wasn’t ripe yet, either. At some point, I told one friend, we have to trust the judgment of the people involved and watch what develops. I’d known James Steward, the director, for years. He’s an acquaintance, not friend, and he’d likely not be a friend after reading this review. He led the charge in building a new, lovely, and practical museum at the University of Michigan. At Princeton, he’d spearheaded the new exhibition philosophy that led to the Berlin Painter and Clarence White projects, exceptional catalogues, and a radically new — for an Ivy League museum — concern with the public.

Princeton had hired David Adjaye (b. 1966), the Ghanaian-British architect, to design the new museum. I love what he did at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, designing a museum from scratch using Yoruban, Roman, Caribbean, and antebellum South models. In 2023, Adjaye, alas, ran afoul of the Me Too crowd, part-Cheka, part-vigilante, part professional spinster, and part Xianthippe. He’s lost tons of work.

Adjaye wasn’t tied to the NJ Transit Rail tracks, an insult-added-to-injury demise since the ride from Penn Station to Princeton Junction’s gross. His Princeton museum design was done. Princeton shunned him, though, and he wasn’t invited to the opening. It’s his and Steward’s vision. Adjaye conceived the pavilions and massaged the plan to make the new museum look happy to be in the neighborhood. I hope Princeton honors and glorifies him when the Furies are spent.

I don’t like the main entrance. Down the steps we go into a long, wide, dark tunnel that leads to the Grand Hall. We’re not exactly underground, but it feels like it and is unsettlingly urban. How to ease the pain? Nick Cave, an artist I like, made a wall relief covering 2,500 square feet of tunnel wall — mostly a massive glass mosaic with wooden and acrylic projections and lots of color. There’s a huge figure of a man, part princely, part Harlequin, part pied piper. He’s based on Cave’s famous Sound Suits, life-size, exuberant costumes in mixed media that conceal the wearer’s identity but welcome and entertain. Princeton owns one, a feast of sequins, doilies, crochet work, and liturgical vestments, all dressing a mannequin and looking fun and profound. The wall relief, overall, has the look and feel of an Oz with stiff joints.

It’s not a terrible idea but a defective outcome. The problem starts with the space, dark and creepy and the one moment I thought the new museum was indeed forbidding. It’s a transitional space by nature, but this is one I want to exit ASAP. Cave’s wall relief, though, is a big-personality work of art — big, colorful, and intricate. It doesn’t work in the space. Cave’s not good in big formats. I visited the Princeton University Art Museum in December, in the morning, but it was a cold, dreary morning. Will visitors linger when there’s more light and better weather? I doubt it.

All entrances lead to the Grand Hall, whose ceilings, at their highest, are 40 feet high. Call it the Grand Hall, but it’s a soothing, reassuring, welcoming space, multipurpose and lovely. The floors are flat, embedded pebbles. I didn’t think of Brutalism at all but, odd to say, of the Art & Crafts movement. I saw built-ins, or built-in votaries. On the floor, under glass, is an early third-century a.d. Roman mosaic from Antioch depicting Dionysus and Hercules in a drinking contest. It unites Cave’s mosaic with the interior. It recognizes Princeton’s central role in the excavation of Antioch in Syria in the 1930s during a period when many extraordinary finds came to the collection. It’s a tip of the hat to what I’m sure is Princeton’s long history of drinking contests.

Looking up, piercing the aggregate concrete walls is a nice corner view of art history library stacks. Books are things of the mind but things of leather, paper, and cloth, too, and intimate things we hold. A 15th- or 16th-century marble staircase from Mallorca, balustrades and columns, very grand indeed, faces the new museum staircase. There’s a monumental green and pink painting by Frank Stella from the series that first made him famous in 1958, when he was a Princeton senior. It’s installed in another wall, looks great, and tells us Princeton’s no slouch in making artists.

Interior materials are essential to its warm, cozy feel and inviting look. Vermont white oak, blue spruce, terrazzo galore, lots of seating — both curving wood seats with backs and upholstered easy chairs — make for a very inviting space. We like that. The museum serves students and is meant to be a community space where art can be loved, not worshipped.

I adored the small, temporary Toshiko Takaezu exhibition. Takaezu (1922–2011) was a potter, born in Hawaii and whose parents were Japanese. She taught art at Princeton for nearly 30 years. Her ceramic bowls, often shaped as cylinders or spheres, often big, have ethereal glazes and a subdued palette. They seem to grow from the earth, not wild but quietly, patiently cultivated. Takaezu’s work is displayed along with that of her peers and acolytes, most not potters. Helen Frankenthaler’s Belfry from 1979, a gorgeous drip painting in which she let her acrylic drip and soak into the canvas, shows how styles and techniques navigate among media.

All of these things create a buzz but, together with the art, wood, and textured walls, ease from the concrete mass whatever aspirations it had to oppress and overwhelm.

Praise the Lord, the wall text’s English only. I’m so sick of multilingual labels hogging gallery walls and competing with the art. And, let’s face it, 99 percent of the museum’s visitors are either fluent English speakers or, if their English is iffy, their native language is more likely to be Chinese or Arabic.

Hopes high, I took the elevator to the second floor. One of Princeton’s big talking points in promoting the new museum is displaying nearly all the art on view on one floor. Aside from the introductory teasers on the first floor — the Antioch mosaic, the Spanish staircase, and the Stella among them — this is indeed the case. The museum hopes to dismantle hierarchies by medium, period, and geography by displaying almost everything on, so to speak, an even playing field, privileging and denigrating nothing. Not a bad idea. In ye olden times, I knew I’d find the photography galleries in the basement, near the toilets. I think Princeton was more concerned with geography and race — marginalizing African or Native American art — than a medium like photography, which until about 30 or so years ago was fringy and considered by many not to be high art.

The elevator door opened. I faced an odd choice. On my left, I looked down a long, narrow hallway, empty but for a watercooler, in total a deflator after the Grand Hall. Or, to my right, in the distance, a view of undefinable art and a slice of the atrium. After so promising a start, what a downer.

I walked toward the art. I read that the art on the walls circling the atrium comprised both highlights from the 117,000-object-strong collection and a cross section of it. The installation’s called Take a Closer Look. I stopped at Titus Kaphar’s To Be Sold from 2018, the first object by the staircase. Kaphar isn’t a bad artist, but he’s an oppression pimp. To Be Sold starts with a portrait that Kaphar copied depicting Princeton’s fifth president, Samuel Finley, whose estate sold his six slaves in 1766 at an auction on campus. Kaphar painted a copy of the sale advertisement, shredded his painting, and nailed the strips on the Finley copy, falling from his mouth.

Kaphar’s work, commissioned by the school’s Princeton & Slavery Project, critiques Princeton’s and a cadre of Princetonians’ involvement in slaveholding and the slave trade and, since we struggle to read the shreds, the erasure of slave identities. The nails evoke Kongo power figures, African tribal sculptures that were, among other things, “used to enforce communal codes of conduct” within the tribe “and therefore to resist the imposition of colonial practices.” Blah, blah, blah.

The thought bubble in my head, normally as quiet as waves gently washing a sandy beach, roared and wuthered. Get that piece of sh** outta here. Do thought bubbles ever burst? Never, in my memory, did Snoopy’s.

Of course, Kaphar’s work is next to a portrait of George Washington and, in a case, Nancy Grossman’s “A.M.X.” from 1969 or 1970. Grossman’s done a lot of these things. It’s her shtick. It’s a wooden bust, possibly of her head, over which she nailed black leather so the figure’s anonymous, ungendered, and bound. The museum bought it in 1970, buying also Grossman’s interpretation — she oughta know, she’s the artist — that during those tumultuous days, people sought racial, sexual, and social liberation, but the patriarchy, I presume, worked to squash self-expression. More blah, blah, blah.

Is this how the Princeton museum wants to present itself? We all know Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and other Ivies had sticky fingers all over chattel slavery. In the 1850s, over 40 percent of Princeton students came from what would become the Confederacy. Until the 1960s, Princeton was the Ivy League university of choice for affluent Southern men. It’s old news. The museum’s storyline ought to be rebirth, rejuvenation, and revelation. Here, instead, it’s regurgitation. Why pummel your visitors with guilt and anxiety over historical events for which they have no responsibility? Neither Grossman nor Kaphar is an artist who’ll last. Grossman’s sculpture is as trite as trite could be.

I’m puzzled by some of the other choices for this depth, breadth, and quality section, introduced as indicative by director Steward himself. Next to Grossman’s black-leather-wrapped bust are two so-so Alice Neel portraits, a Classic Veracruz ceramic fire god from 600 to 900 a.d., and John Singer Sargent’s splendid portrait of Elizabeth Marquand from 1887. Her son, Allan, was the museum’s first director. Elizabeth’s husband was the second president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It’s the best thing in this freak show. Though married into New York high society, Elizabeth was from Pittsfield in western Massachusetts, from old Puritan stock. She wasn’t about to pose and prance as an aristocrat. Sargent gave her the more subdued Copley treatment, acknowledging her New England roots — and his. Her portrait doesn’t exactly blow everything else out of the water. Suffice to say it makes Kaphar’s picture look like so much trivial thumb-twaddling.

Rande Cook is an Indigenous artist from British Columbia whose 2018 cedar wall sculpture, Our Home, hangs with unease with a Rothko and a Gottlieb to address “the troubling past Canada has imposed upon its Indigenous communities,” “the repercussions of industrial exploitation,” and “near-total deforestation of old red cedars.” There’s a moment for old French stained glass and Death of Socrates, painted after 1787 by Jacques-Louis David and, we’re told, his studio. Why put a studio picture in your highlights section? Then there’s junk by Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962), a British artist whose work on British imperialism I noted at the Baltimore Museum of Art in my review of Black Earth Rising, one of the worst exhibitions I saw last year.

I think Take a Closer Look is an awkward, off moment. Overall, I loved my visit and can’t wait to go back. Next week, I’ll write about the history of the museum, its permanent collection, its unusually good gallery design, my views of Princeton University, the center of town, and the New Jersey rail system, a grotty experience.