Point of view: the atrium that ate the Morgan

Renzo Piano's gloriously light-filled and complexly layered atrium for the reconfigured Morgan Library and Museum, which opened Apr. 29, easily outdoes New York's other new museum "wow" space--the clunkily massive mega-space designed by Yoshio Taniguchi for the Museum of Modern Art. There's just one problem: Piano has taken Morgan out of the Morgan.

Part of the mystique of any house museum is the spirit of the master of the house. But now J.P. Morgan's outsize ego has been supplanted by Piano's beautiful but discordantly sleek addition. New Yorkers, especially, will love the way this gorgeous space accessions the whole city into the Morgan's collection--a complex architectural collage viewed through glass walls. But the insular old-world ambience of the robber baron's luxurious lair is upstaged by this upstart, with its modern glass-and-steel pizzazz.

Yes, you can still ogle the old man's study and library, with the added delight--thanks to heightened, if invisible, security---of actually being able to walk among the study's furnishings, instead of peering at them from a distance, behind ropes. The desire to get up-close and personal with the Memlings can at last be realized. But these rooms now feel like a minor diversion from the main architectural event.

Also somewhat slighted by the new layout are the main-floor galleries for viewing the Morgan's drawings, manuscripts and other treasures, to which visitors at the old Morgan naturally gravitated after walking into the library's old side-street entrance. True, the galleries are also near Piano's new entrance on Madison Avenue. But most visitors will first be drawn deep inside by the allure of the new atrium and, for them, the galleries will be hard to find. They are hidden in a distant corner, closeted behind a door marked with unhelpfully inconspicuous signage.

This brings to mind a comment made a few years ago in a public forum in Los Angeles by the late Kirk Varnedoe, after he had left his post as chief curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA. Taking a dim view of the new fashion for "the big 'wow' space" in museums, he observed: "You've got to tuck the art in the corner and then you've got huge problems." The problem is that the art seems marginalized by the architecture.

So dazzling is the effect of the light in Piano's astonishing atrium that it seems to have blinded even the Morgan's own director to the experience of the galleries themselves: "Now in beautiful light-filled spaces, you can encounter some of the great artistic icons of Western civilization," intoned Charles Pierce, Jr., in radio ads for the opening. But manuscripts, prints and drawings are never displayed in "light-filled spaces" The illumination, all artificial, must be carefully controlled to prevent fading and discoloration. Unfortunately, at least during the press preview, the lights in the drawings gallery intermittently flickered, a perplexing glitch that a curator promised would soon be fixed.

The most prominent, easy-to-find gallery in the Modern Morgan is Piano's 20-foot cube housing the museum's iconic medieval treasures. The goal is to foster intimacy with the objects. But the intimacy is more likely to be with hordes of visitors cramming this too-tight space and clamoring to get in. A number of these works have been restored, most notably the 12th-century Stavelot Triptych, which was given "a new look" a few months ago, according to William Voelkle, head of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The velvet that covered the center of the triptych since the late 19th century was removed, and a new coating of gilded brass was applied. The original surface, Voelkle said, would have been solid gold leaf, studded with gems.

The top-floor scholars' reading room and the new concert hall on the lower level are both suavely elegant, and the underground storage vaults, off-limits to the public, are state-of-the-art. The literary, historic and musical manuscripts and the prints and drawings, arrayed in a "greatest hits" exhibition, "Masterworks from the Morgan" [to Nov. 12], are as engrossing as always, with about double the gallery space. And, as if to signal a new effort to be egalitarian instead of esoteric, upcoming special exhibitions will be devoted to Saul Steinberg and Bob Dylan.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning