When a Museum Building Competes With Art

By RANDY KENNEDY
January 10, 2006

When Marcel Breuer was planning his brooding Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue in the early 1960's, he was adamant about creating a space where art could hold its own. His first priority for the interior, he wrote, was the "simplicity and background-character of the gallery spaces, with the visitors' attention reserved to the exhibits."

But curators and artists have nonetheless sometimes found themselves wrestling with the relentless Brutalist grid of Breuer's ceiling and the grid echoed below by the split-slate floors. One day several months ago, the artist Richard Tuttle and David Kiehl, a Whitney curator, paced around the museum's third floor planning the artist's retrospective, which opened last November. Mr. Tuttle - whose art can seem delicate enough to evaporate under a viewer's gaze - was worried about his work being overpowered by the ceiling and the floor.

"We walked around the space and he talked to me about the floor for three hours," Mr. Kiehl recalled recently, adding with a smile, "Three hours about a floor is actually a pretty normal Richard Tuttle conversation."

Around the same time, one flight up at the museum, two other curators, Donna De Salvo of the Whitney and Linda Norden, of the Harvard University Art Museums, were in the midst of another confrontation between art and architecture. They were trying to come up with a plan for exhibiting Ed Ruscha's series of five pairs of paintings called "Course of Empire," which Ms. Norden and Ms. De Salvo had previously installed at the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The problem was how to hang 10 paintings, most depicting jutting, angular urban buildings, in a huge square gallery without making the pairings seem too literal, too straightforward - in other words, too square.

To the average museumgoer such hand-wringing over the subtleties of hanging art might seem esoteric, a curatorial version of arguing about angels on pinheads. But at least since the late-19th century, when Whistler declared "my rooms are pictures in themselves," exhibition design has become a vital discipline.

And as museums expand, proliferate and compete for visitors, the discipline has taken on increasing importance. For its "Russia!" exhibition, which closes this week, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hired Jacques Grange, the highly sought-after Parisian interior designer. Last year, the American Museum of Natural History created a system by which noted design consultants are continually on call for the museum's needs. Sleek design firms like Ralph Appelbaum Associates, known for eye-catching permanent exhibitions for places like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, are booming. Appelbaum, based in New York, now has branches in London and Beijing.

At the Whitney, the creation of new exhibitions usually begins in a humble setting on the third floor of a creaky brownstone around the corner from the Breuer building, where Mark Steigelman, the museum's design and construction manager, can be found at a drafting table cluttered with tape measures, blueprints and foam-core architectural models.

For both the Ruscha show (on view through Jan. 29) and the Tuttle (through Feb. 5), Mr. Steigelman and the curators had an initial stroke of luck. Although for budgetary reasons the museum sometimes requires that walls from one exhibition be reused by the next, last November, the museum's third and fourth floors were completely cleared, giving the incoming shows a tabula rasa.

The inventive, even daring ways that Mr. Steigelman, the curators and the artists remade those empty spaces have drawn the notice of critics and casual viewers alike. For Mr. Ruscha's paintings, two towering freestanding walls that angle toward one another like asymptotic lines, and for Mr. Tuttle's work, a wonderland of connecting halls and chambers, deceptively complex.

Mr. Steigelman, who came to the Whitney three and a half years ago from the Museum of Modern Art, said he felt that he had been battle-tested in the Whitney Biennial of 2004. "Nothing compares to the biennial," he said recently in his office. "It's horrible. There are so many objects and so many artists who all want to be shown in absolutely the best possible light in the best space, and they're all showing up to make their case."

But Mr. Tuttle's show was almost as much of a challenge. First, it originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it was larger, meaning that the Whitney, where Mr. Tuttle had his first retrospective in 1975, felt it had something to prove. And there were more than 300 pieces to install, of all shapes and sizes, made from things like tissue paper, string, Styrofoam and florist's wire. (Some pieces are so delicate that strollers and backpacks are not allowed in the exhibition.)

To top it off, the symbiotic relationship between art and the space where it is seen has been an essential concern of Mr. Tuttle's from the beginning. "Although he is a maker of discrete objects," Robert Storr, a curator and professor, notes in the show's catalog, "the framework in which they will be placed is of paramount importance."

Mr. Kiehl and Mr. Steigelman were taking no chances. Both flew to San Francisco to shadow viewers making their way through the larger show. Mr. Steigelman drew floor plan after floor plan at Mr. Kiehl's direction, with Mr. Tuttle not far from the action. At one point, Mr. Steigelman even took a laser measuring device to chart - for what he thinks may be the first time at the museum - the detailed dimensions of Breuer's ceiling grid, which he laid atop the floor plans, the better to try to neutralize it.

Mr. Kiehl said his overall goal was to avoid making the space feel mazelike, to create intimate spaces but also unusually long sight lines that would allow viewers to cut visually across and between the periods of Mr. Tuttle's work. "I wanted people to use their eyes," he said. "People today are too used to television directing them how to see."

"I wanted to give them the real sense and thrill of discovering Tuttle," he added, "just the way I did."

The subtle but effective way they and Mr. Tuttle devised finally for dealing with the grid was to run a black strip along the top of the walls where they meet the ceiling. To save money, plain two-inch gaffer's tape - the kind Mr. Tuttle might use in his own work - was used instead of paint. "It cuts your eye off before it gets to the ceiling," Mr. Kiehl said. "It's kind of amazing."

While Mr. Tuttle and Mr. Kiehl had argued strongly that they did not want even labels to accompany the work, Mr. Kiehl said, "some battles you lose." But as just one example of the many competing demands on curators, he described another battle over a series of zigzag walls that would have been used to display drawings in one room. Mr. Kiehl hated the zigzags. So he and Mr. Steigelman simply designed the drawings room to be too narrow to accommodate the walls. He leaned forward during an interview and smiled: "Let's just call what we did creative sabotage."

"Somebody had a bee in their bonnet about them," he said of the walls, elaborating vaguely but conspiratorially. "Someone higher up."

For the Ruscha show, the demands were simpler, but the stakes in many ways were higher. Ms. De Salvo and Ms. Norden had only 10 days from the dismantling of the show in Venice until the work would go on display in New York. So a plan had to be put in place without the paintings.

Both curators felt that the paintings - aggressively angular views of industrial architecture, showing two views of the same location over time - needed a presentation as bold as the work. Putting the paintings on parallel walls would only deaden them. A plan with elliptical walls was considered and discarded, as well as one that would have put the pairs in separate but connected spaces.

They finally came up with the idea of building two walls that did not reach to the ceiling and that angled so that they were closer together by the time the viewer reached the last pair of paintings. The angle - three degrees - emphasizes the sidelong as-seen-from-a-speeding-car feel of Mr. Ruscha's paintings. The walls, which converge toward one of Breuer's signature trapezoidal windows, were also meant to give the impression of continuing to taper right out the window into the real world, where Mr. Ruscha's work is firmly rooted. "I would never install a Pollock in that way," Ms. De Salvo said. "But this needed something different."

There were two problems, though. How do you keep a huge free-standing wall from toppling on Whitney patrons? This is where Mr. Steigelman came in, helping to ensure that the walls were thick enough (30 inches) to be stable, but not so substantial as to look like battlements. The second and most important problem was fear of what Ms. Norden called "the hokey factor."

Ms. De Salvo said the fear was all too real. "What if the paintings came and we got them up and it was just wrong and gimmicky?" she said. "We knew we were taking a big risk. If this didn't work, it would be unforgiving."

It was not until the paintings arrived and were hung that both curators could see that it did, in fact, work. And in the end they felt that even Breuer might have forgiven them for throwing a few angles into his grid.

"It's a tough building," Ms. De Salvo said. "But we gave his window a starring role. I would assume he'd be very happy."