New York news: a curatorial revolution is allowing museum visitors to see every object in the collection—all thanks to a publishing magnate of the 1920s and 30s. Louise Nicholson inspects the lines of shelves

Apollo, March, 2005 by Louise Nicholson

Say the name Henry R. Luce to most New Yorkers and pat comes the response: founder of Time magazine in 1923, aged just twenty five. Some add that he also founded Fortune (1929), Life (1986) and Sports/frustrated (1954). Few, however, mention that this hero created the Henry Luce Foundation in 1936 in homage to his parents, who were educators and missionaries in China. Its initial three programmes were, suitably, theology, education and Asian-American understanding. Later, the founder's son, Henry Luce ill, known affectionately as Hank, added the American Art Programme expressly to fill an art-historical void by funding research and development in American--meaning specifically us--art history.

To date, this programme has made more than $100 million of grants. The most wide-reaching are to three New York institutions with strong American collections. They all concern a recent museum buzz-word, 'visible storage'. This is when museum objects otherwise in store are put on permanent public view, using simple displays and minimal labelling. For information, visitors use the on-line catalogue stations, the technological advance that makes the whole project viable.

These grandly titled 'Henry R. Luce Centers for the Study of American Art' are progressively pushing back the boundaries of museum technology and public interaction. The first was installed in 1988 in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sandwiched between the two floors of display galleries, its format is a traditional vast storage room filled with identical cases. For some, it could be daunting: rows of silver teapots, dozens of period wineglasses, tables of all shapes, chairs that run chronologically from the seventeenth century to Frank Lloyd Wright, an army of portraits of America's great and good. In fact, it is great fun to try to hunt out a Sargent painting by eye rather than rely on labels--indeed, it is more like viewing a classy country house auction than the now expected cosseting modern museum experience.

The second Luce Center opened at the New York Historical Society in 2000, and has a more welcoming layout. More than 40,000 objects fill the previously dilapidated fourth floor, so that a triumphant 75 per cent of the collection is now on permanent view. A measure of its richness is that the mahogany armchair used by George Washington at his inauguration as President is up here, in the nicely named 'relics' section. Founded in 1804, some sixty-six years before the Met, this grandfather of New York museums benefited from major nineteenth-century gifts, including all 430 preparatory watercolours for Audubon's Birds of America (1827-38). The Luce Center includes a dedicated space for a rotating exhibition of them.

Then, on 14 January this year, a third centre opened at the Brooklyn Museum. What it lacks in size--its 5,000 square feet allow for just 1,500 objects--it makes up for in its location right in the middle of the American galleries. The visitor can weave in and out of it, amplifying curiosity stimulated by, say, a star American Pre-Raphaelite painting with a browse through the rich reserve collection of watercolours. Linda Ferber, the Brooklyn's Chair of American Art, believes the Luce Centers form one of the most spectacular contributions to New York's art world, summing up: 'In my opinion Hank Luce walks on water'.

Indeed, they are laudable in every way, from their unpretentious arrangements, to the obligations they put on museums to give general access to their treasures, something that too often is out of balance with their voracious acquisitiveness. The next Luce Center is being prepared in Washington's Smithsonian, to open in 2006.

New Yorkers are mourning the passing of their celebrity architect, Philip Johnson at the ripe age of 98. Johnson lived in style in his competitor Cesar Pelli's Museum Tower, looking down on his own 1950s contributions to MOMA, where he ran the Department of Architecture from 1932. In recent years Johnson held a sort of architectural salon at his regular lunchtime table in the Four Seasons, a restaurant he designed when working on the Seagram Building with his guru Mies van der Rohe. But locals will probably remember him most for his once-controversial 1984 'Chippendale' building on Madison Avenue, named after the broken pediment which crowns it, now owned by Sony.

The Brooklyn's state-of-the-art Luce Center for visible storage is so refined that it resembles a sparkling, contemporary cabinet of curiosities. The floors are terrazzo. The twelve-foot-high display cases are made of brushed aluminium and have slim, adjustable shelves. Attached to their undersides are Elites a mere 1/16th of an inch thick, which exude no damaging heat. Banks of paintings can be pulled out, like stage flats. Light-sensitive works on paper are kept in drawers, ready for inspection. There are also flashlights for spotlighting details.

As in other Luce Centers, the visitor can use the on-line computer stations to be served up the full quota of information. But this will soon be surpassed by the ultimate museum gadget: the hand-held personal museum computer. Every visitor will have one. Simply stay by the chosen object, punch in its accession number and--hey presto!--all the information about it arrives. Barry Harwood, the Brooklyn's Curator of Decorative Arts, describes its significance with boyish glee: 'We are taking one of the first steps into this technique. This is the way of the future. Soon one will go into any museum, have one of these gadgets and access the whole collection.'