Space City Takes Off - Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Art in America, Oct, 2000 by Frances Colpitt

With the opening of its striking new building, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston doubles its exhibition space, as the city's revitalized art scene sets its sights on the future.

With a marching band, speeches, a ribbon-tying ceremony across Main Street and an art-car parade, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston (MFAH) last March inaugurated its impressive new Audrey Jones Beck Building, which doubles the museum's exhibition space, and makes the MFAH the most visible of Houston's many nonprofit and commercial art venues. On opening day, more than 21,000 visitors crowded into the museum's galleries and two spacious atria, confirming by their presence that the city's art scene is flourishing. Youthful and vibrant, Houston seems well positioned to benefit from the continuing decentralization of the art world as we move into the 21st century.

Director Peter C. Marzio is responsible for the MFAH's recent funding campaign, which raised $126 million for the Beck building. Designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo and named for philanthropist and collector Audrey Jones Beck, the building is a massive, blocky structure of Indiana limestone. A low-slung canopy marks the main entrance, across Main Street from the original museum structure, now called the Caroline Weiss Law building. The Beck's interior atrium soars 80 feet to rooftop lanterns and skylights that also illuminate the second floor galleries. The unrelieved planarity of the building's facade extends to the atrium, which has a tomblike effect not unusual in contemporary museum design. Hailing the entering visitor is a headless Roman bronze, Portrait of a Ruler (200-225 A.D.), bathed in the warm glow of Texas light. Due to lack of space in the Law building, much of the museum's collection has been out of view for years. The Beck now houses European art from antiquity to 1920 and American art before 1945. Special collections include Baroque and Renaissance art from the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and the Hogg Brothers Collection of paintings and sculptures by Frederic Remington, the latter a surprisingly refreshing area of concentration for a major metropolitan museum. The John A. and Audrey Jones Beck Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art is installed in some of the museum's more intimate second-floor galleries, while the high-ceilinged, hall-like spaces were, during the museum's opening, devoted to the traveling exhibition, "Faces of Impressionism: Portraits from American Collections."

Three recently acquired works were featured at the opening of the Beck. David Novros's 1975 Untitled (Pennzoil Fresco), which the museum saved from destruction in Houston's Pennzoil Place building in 1998, is sited in the cafe on the lower level. Enhanced by natural light and hung at a distance that makes it possible to view the 27-foot-wide painting as a whole, the rectangle of cool and painterly blue and green panels is set against a wall and slightly elevated by a granite-and-steel support. Just outside the cafe is the entrance to an underground tunnel connecting the museum's two buildings, a circulation space transformed by James Turrell into an environment titled The Light Inside (1999). Located at either end of the 150-foot, tubular passageway are floor-to-ceiling freestanding panels that don't quite conceal a frame of neon tubing behind their milky glass surfaces. The color of the panels very slowly shifts from blue to pink to crimson, with a strange yellow glow between color changes. Walking around the panels, the visitor travels along a pathway slightly elevated within the tunnel's culvertlike space. Set back several feet from the path to both right and left, the curved "sides" of the passageway are bathed in light whose color changes by increments every 15 minutes, moving through the same blue-to-red cycle as the panels. Since casual or impatient visitors would normally spend only a minute or two walking through the tunnel, the different coloristic effects must be intended for those who return repeatedly to the museum. The light cast on the tunnel's circular inside surface makes an already disorienting space still harder to read, creating an illusion of infinite space that is both seductive and dangerous: one misstep could lead to a spill from the pathway to the tunnel's bottom, several inches below.

Much less dramatically, another commissioned work, the 9 1/2-foot-tall Curtain (1999) by Houston sculptor Joseph Havel, flanks the street-level main entrance to the museum. Resembling full-length curtains of plain cotton duck, the two bronze panels with a white patina appear to have been pushed to either side of the door to allow for the visitor's entrance. Appealingly inconspicuous compared to much public sculpture, the work's homely starkness is also in keeping with the Beck's austere exterior.

The first art museum in Texas, the MFAH has undergone four major building campaigns. The original Neo-Classical building was designed in 1924 by William Ward Watkin. The south facade is marked by Ionic columns and a staircase, establishing a modest but ceremonial entrance. With two later additions by Mies van der Rohe (in 1958 and 1974), the museum's space was expanded and its main entrance moved to the north end, on the ground floor of Mies's 1974 Brown Pavilion. The mezzanine (known as the Upper Brown) was subsequently given over to the museum's historical collection--a pity, since the light-filled steel and glass structure is so well suited to the expansive scale of contemporary art. With the opening of the Beck, however, the Upper Brown Pavilion was rededicated to modern and contemporary art. Cullinan Hall, the first Mies addition, now comprises the middle of the Law building, where it will host traveling exhibitions, such as the startlingly beautiful exhibition on view this spring, "The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People's Republic of China," organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Of the many recent exhibitions of historical Chinese art, "The Golden Age" was the most impressive, despite the limited number of objects included. Beginning with 7,000-year-old ceramic vessels with generous forms decorated by simple patterns, progressing to massive bronzes adorned with intricate lost-wax filigree and concluding with delicately swaying Buddhist figures, the exhibition allowed each object its own quietly magisterial presence.