Marble Palaces, Temples of Art: Art Museums, Architecture, and American Culture, 1890-1930. - Brief Article - Review - book reviews

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Franz Schulze

Newhouse never shrinks from judgment. She heaps approval on several searching, quite exceptional projects by Frank Stella (none of them built, save for a portion of one that Philip Johnson has appropriated for a structure raised on his New Canaan, Conn., estate); offers qualified praise to Peter Zumthor's chastely elegant Kunsthaus in Bregenz; and leaves no doubt about her distaste for most of the recent additions to already existing museums. "Wings That Don't Fly," she calls the latter projects, in a bit of wordplay that is also a nifty variation on Le Corbusier's famous indictment of his contemporaries, "Eyes which do not see," the title of a section of his famous book of 1923, Towards a New Architecture, which Newhouse acknowledges as having inspired her own volume's title.

Near the end of her study, Newhouse reflects on the conditions that define the ideal new museum, a genre that must attempt "to make art once again a vibrant part of life and a powerful aesthetic experience rather than a didactic tool or a remote object of veneration." In this regard, she sees visitors as playing a vital role in the symbiotic museum experience. Her comments on the "interactive" exchanges between artist and viewer--or coparticipant--are accompanied by ruminations about a later time, in which society may learn to regard both art and museums as human creations beyond physical bounds. As the Internet's special capacity for communication takes command, she says, "the future may see the disappearance of original art objects altogether."

Throughout her examination, Newhouse devotes more attention to museums as buildings than she does to the intrinsic merit of the art contained within them. "Whereas museums," she writes, "have always identified with their collections--the Louvre is the Mona Lisa, MoMA is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon--the new museum is identified with its architecture; the dominant image is the container rather than the contents." While she makes a strong case for that position, one is still moved to observe that the quality of a museum qua museum, old or new, nevertheless depends ineluctably on its contents. Professionals and laymen alike are drawn to Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates' Sainsbury Wing of the London National Gallery by the superlative collection of Early Renaissance art housed there. Such an attraction is a major, if not primary, element in most people's museum-going experience.

Franz Schulze is a professor of art at Lake Forest College. His books include Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985) and Philip Johnson: Life and Work (1994).