U.S. National Gallery’s East Building is some extension!

Press, 10 May 1979, Page 17

U.S. National Gallery’s East Building is some extension!

BREI I RILEY, director of the Arts Centre on the old Canterbury I niversity site, recently returned from a two-monlli study tour of overseas arts centres on a Queen Elizabeth If Arts Council grant. As a near neighbour of the Christchurch city gallery, he took the opportunity to visit another art gallery which has solved the extension problem .. .

At a time when Christchurch is once again contemplating an extension to its city art gallery, it may be timely to look at the most fantastic extension to an existing art gallery ever conceived: the recently opened East Building at Washington’s National Gallery of Art. The building has in less than a year become one of America’s most famous, and its best-known feature is unfortunately its price tag of just under SIOO million. Every cent of it was given by Paul Mellon, whose father Andrew picked up the tab for the main building nearly 40 years ago.

Patterned on the National Gallery in London, but bigger, Andrew Mellon’s massive neo-classic American version on Washington’s Mall long ago ran out of space to house its burgeoning collection.

Like our own McDougall, expansion meant treading on the sacrosanct; one does not knock up just anything on the last corner of undeveloped land along the Mall, lined with such notable heavyweights as the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, Smithsonian Institute and, of course, the Capitol building itself. What the National got was not only an extra 106.000 square feet of exhibition space and the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, but the biggest bauble in its collection. The architect I. M. Pei’s simply named East Building (Mellon abjured the use of his name) fairly startles the eye. Great triangular slices of Ten-

nessee marble pie. Knife sharp gleaming wedges so thin one cannot resist touching them. Some elevations so geometrically compound that one cannot grasp them. Other elevations plain faces of pink-white marble. Parts sheer off into apparent lightweight madness. Other parts sit squat and heavy. The whole is a glittering outsized sculpture.

Visitors can enter the East Building either from the wide subterranean link with the old building beneath Fourth Street, or from street level through very pedestrian sized doors beside Henry Moore’s big brass Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece.

Asked about building an art palace during a worldwide swing' away from building forbidding citadels of art, National’s Director J. Carter Brown, chief of the gallery’s 900 staff, replied: “Our doors open easily.” And so they do, into the cavernous Central Court between two of the marble triangles, skylit from 80ft above by 16,000 square feet of glass tetrahedrons. Floating walkways carom high above.

Two objects dominate this space. The first is an untitled Alexander Calder mobile. 76ft across, which initially appears silhouetted against the skylight, and around which you gradually climb in the course of exploring the East Building. The second is a Joan Miro wall hanging, “Woman,” fully three stories high and with a plaque indicating that it is made entirely of New Zealand wool. Sheep, the cornerstone of New Zealand’s

economy, have made wi at is probably New Zealam s major contribution to ti.e big-time international arts scene.

Anything smaller than these vast works Tn such a vast space would be devoured. But did Mellon spend his millions to house a handful of specially commissioned giant art works? The answer is no.

But Pei did not want to create the usual .schoolhouse series of four-walled galleries which take the viewer on a step by step monotonous progression through the collection. In the end the viewer is likely to be numbed and fatigued and quite possibly heading back through the same galleries without knowing it. •

Instead, Pei stuns the visitor right at the door and compels him to explore this incredible space. Along the way the explorer discovers narrow glimpses of Washington, finds relief in the form of very human, intimate galleries with 19th century French little paintings, a Motherwell exhibition, a Matisse collection, a hexago n a 1 amphitheatre filled with Voltri sculptures, a spiral staircase up to the small Tower Gallery, and an Edward Munch exhibition in the basement. There is no direction or order. Each visitor coming through the entrance peels o'ff from the crowd to explore at his own fancy and discover the works in digestible bites. It is an adventureland of the arts, full of little surprises as well as some big ones. Gallery design is in a constant state of profound change. Neutral space for

modern art is generally the order of the day. The great galleries with their colonades and rotundas and fussy symmetrical detailing are today the bane of twentieth century curators who are busy trying to cover it all up. The monumental architecture overwhelms tne

works of art. Generations of viewers, if they had not been frightened away by the inevitably long flights of steps up to the great entrances, have gone through galleries with necks craned at the vaulted ceilings. Modern thought usually suggests that a gallerv should be a neutral and

unadorned space in which the works of art stand by themselves, and not a painfully expensive monument to an architect’s fancy. The National in Washington has bolted from this schol of thought. Its new gleaming, shimmering sculptured palace will attract legions for its own

sake. Once inside, so the thinking goes, the initial awe followed by adventure and surprise will create the right frame of mind to view the works. Perhaps. It is certainly fun. But there is no doubt that the work of art which lingers longest in my mind is that SIOO million bauble itself.