Most great art museums have personalities based on the combined effect of their permanent collections and the buildings they occupy and the Cleveland Museum of Art is no exception. The museum's $320 million expansion and renovation project gave the institution a fresh, innovative quality that has gained much attention. And that change, which focuses on social equality, can be summed up in two words: cultural parity.
America's large art museums tend to segregate their collections in self-contained departments, treating art history as a straight-line chronology, grouped by Western notions of scientific and technological progress. They begin with the ancient past and proceed up to the present. At the renovated Cleveland museum, where permanent collection galleries surround a big central atrium, art history now unfolds as a 5,000-year global dialogue among civilizations, without a sense of hierarchy. The museum's new layout emphasizes a sense of balance and connection among global cultures, and especially between Asian and Western art. You can cruise from ancient Greece or medieval France to 16th-century Japan or seventh-century Cambodia with ease, and with the ever-visible atrium in the heart of the museum layout as a useful central point of orientation. The overall message is that all world cultures have something to teach one another. It's a take-away that could be embraced by any lover of art or anyone curious about what it means to be human.
Chronology hasn't vanished, however. Broad sections of the museum, particularly those dealing with Western art inside the museum's renovated 1916 building and its new East Wing, are organized according to both geography and the march of time. But before its renovation and expansion, the museum more or less forced visitors to follow a strict linear framework. Once you started, it was hard to bail out in the middle. Former Director Katharine Lee Reid called the gallery sequence 'the snake', an aptly unattractive description. Cultures or civilizations that fell outside the framework seemed shunted aside. The museum's acclaimed Asian collection, for example, used to occupy galleries on the lower two levels of the 1916 building – areas that felt as if they were cut off in a deep, dark basement.
Today, the ease of moving from one part of the museum to another makes it possible to dip into or out of the flow wherever you like, and to make cross-cultural comparisons. Finding one's way has also been facilitated by the museum's ArtLens mobile app and the 40-foot-long 'Collection Wall', an interactive screen that enables visitors to access audio tours or create their own tour and to transfer the information to their smart phone. By capitalizing on mobile devices, the museum has kept its gallery installations free of explanatory video screens or digital interfaces that would distract from the art on view. The overall philosophy of the museum's gallery installations is to keep things simple, to get out of the way, and to let the art speak for itself.
Designed by architect Rafael Viñoly, the eight-year expansion and renovation increased gallery space by 32 percent, to 133,599 square feet. Roughly the same number of objects are on view now as before the expansion and renovation. The goal of the project was not just to significantly expand the display area within the museum. Jeffrey Strean, the museum's director of design and architecture says, 'We wanted to show approximately the same amount [of art] but give it breathing room.' By virtue of its relatively manageable size and vastly improved interior layout, the Cleveland museum has a clarity and intimacy that might be envied by its larger peers, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The sense of focus in Cleveland stems not just from the museum's new layout but also from the general nature of the permanent collection as an assembly of singular objects selected as examples of their kind. In Cleveland, you can sidle up close to an exquisite fifth-century B.C. Atalanta Lekythos, an ancient Greek olive oil jug that depicts the mythical story of a virgin huntress who promised to marry the man who could outrun her. Display cases at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hold dozens of pieces from the same period as the Cleveland example, but the effect of seeing so many in New York is completely different from seeing a single example, up close, in Cleveland. At a certain point at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhaustion sets in.
Individual galleries within the Cleveland museum all have specific hierarchies which guide how their collection is displayed, based on the comparative significance of the works on view. Virtually every gallery is organized around key works of art displayed in centrally located cases or on walls where there is open space to stand back and see the art. These touchstone artworks include Pablo Picasso's seminal Blue Period depiction of human misery, La Vie, on view in the East Wing modern art galleries. On the opposite side of the museum in the West Wing, there's a monumental seventh-century Cambodian statue of the Hindu god Krishna who saved the Earth from a flood by raising a mountain over his head. The prominence accorded to these and other highlights in the collection reinforces the museum's newfound sense of a more equitable depiction of art through the ages. The message is subtle, pervasive and deeply thought-provoking. And in a melting-pot city composed of scores of ethnic immigrant populations from around the world, the museum's new perspective on ethnic inclusion feels right on target.