…and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts expands

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1998 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Among the highlights of this ambitious undertaking, which opened to the public late last month, are galleries devoted to cultures heretofore not displayed in their own spaces within the museum. These include the arts of Islam, the Himalayas, India, Southeast Asia, Korea, Judaism, and North Africa.

The new galleries encompass more than forty-six thousand square feet, to which the museum has added five classrooms, a family visitor center, restaurant facilities, and galleries for special exhibitions. During the course of the renovation the McKim, Mead and White skylighted ceiling in the central gallery on the third floor, which had been concealed by a false ceiling, was restored to its original appearance.

Fascinating additions to the museum's collection of Asian art, which has grown considerably in recent years, are two Chinese period rooms - an eighteenth-century scholars study with a rock garden and a Ming dynasty reception hall of about 1600, with a grand ceremonial gate of about 1728.

The American and European galleries have been reordered to enable visitors to progress through the history of Western art in a fluid, chronological fashion. New period rooms in the American galleries include a hallway from Frank Lloyd Wright's Francis W. Little house, called Northome, built between 1912 and 1914 in Deephaven, Minnesota. (The living room from this house is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the library was reconstructed at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania.) The corridor (illustrated above) features stained glass, a window seat with its original upholstery; and lighting devices, all designed by Wright. This room forms a marvelous introduction to a new gallery devoted to the art and architecture of the Prairie school, which is particularly appropriate for this midwestern museum. The living room from the William and Mina Merrill Prindle house of about 1906 in Duluth, Minnesota, includes some twenty-five pieces of Japanesque furniture (including a piano) designed by John S. Bradstreet, an iridescent glass fireplace surround and Favrile glass lighting devices supplied by Tiffany Studios, and a carpet in the art nouveau style that is original to the room. Two period rooms from Connecticut and Rhode Island, which were previously on view in awkward and illogical places, have been moved in order to give them a more advantageous relationship to their adjacent galleries.

While all this would seem quite enough to accomplish in a decade, still to come is the installation of a grand salon from the Hotel de la Bouexiere in Paris. The room, dating from between 1731 and 1733, has its original ornate plasterwork ceiling and gilded boiseries. An early twentieth-century model of the room is currently on view. Also to be installed are two Japanese rooms - a teahouse and a seventeenth-century reception hall. Stay tuned!