Renovated Louis Kahn building presents new installation of Gallery's stellar collection

Recent acquisitions, new attributions, and favorite treasures
are among highlights

 

The Yale University Art Gallery’s renovated Louis Kahn building, which recently reopened to the public, offers visitors a dramatically improved experience of the Gallery’s extraordinary collection. Significant recent acquisitions—evidence of the vigorous acquisitions program that the Gallery has pursued in recent years—are on view for the first time, along with many of the treasures that have long drawn scholars, students, and the public to the museum.

An internationally recognized landmark of modernist architecture, the 1953 Louis Kahn building is the Gallery’s main facility (one of two contiguous buildings), named after its celebrated architect. Over the years, the building’s expansive, open spaces were diminished as they were divided into smaller galleries, classrooms, offices, and study rooms. The renovation, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, has restored Kahn’s design to its original purity and integrity while introducing up-to-date building systems to ensure the proper display and preservation of the Gallery’s encyclopedic collection.

The first floor of the renovated Gallery features 3,500 square feet of space designated for temporary exhibitions, as well as a welcoming lobby area where visitors can learn about the Gallery’s resources, browse through publications, or meet with friends and colleagues. The lobby also features a media lounge, where video and new-media screenings and programming take place. The Gallery’s upper floors are devoted primarily to the display of objects from the permanent collection. Additionally, a study and research center for works on paper, located on the fourth floor, enhances the Gallery’s integral role in the academic life of the Yale community and in international scholarship.

The numerous recent acquisitions that are now on view throughout the Gallery include selections from one of the largest and most significant single gifts of art in the Gallery’s history—the exceptional Charles B. Benenson collection of African art. This gift, totaling 586 objects, has nearly tripled the Gallery’s holdings in this area, transforming what was once a modest teaching installation into one of the premier university collections of African art in the nation.

Other important recent acquisitions on view in the renovated Gallery include such individual objects as a fourteenth-century Japanese hanging scroll, a painting by the Italian Mannerist Pontormo, and contemporary works by artists such as Janine Antoni, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, and Do-Ho Suh, highlighting the Gallery’s revitalized focus on current art.

In addition, the installation now features many extraordinary works from the collection that have rarely, if ever, been displayed, providing visitors with a much broader view of the breadth and depth of the Gallery’s holdings. Numbering more than 185,000 objects and ranging from Neolithic times to the present, the collection is considered among the finest and most comprehensive of any university museum in the country. It is particularly renowned for its strengths in American and early Italian art, as well as for numerous individual masterworks, and it is now greatly enriched by the Benenson collection.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, states, “The outstanding renovation of the Louis Kahn building, as well as recent acquisitions and fresh scholarship, have given the Gallery the time and impetus to rethink the display of its collection. This has resulted in an installation that serves students, faculty, and the public equally well. Visitors to the renovated Gallery will find a mix of surprises and longtime treasures, a presentation in which new works are on view and previously exhibited works look new. Moreover, the Gallery is now not only a superb place for the display and study of art, but also, with its redesigned lobby and its media lounge, a place to meet friends and colleagues.”

The collection reinstallation reflects the Gallery’s focus on teaching and making works of art accessible to Yale students and faculty, as well as teachers in the community, while providing a welcoming and engaging environment for all visitors.

The galleries of African, Asian, early European, and modern and contemporary art, along with prints, drawings, and photographs, are all located in the Kahn building, where they have been installed to take full advantage of the building’s larger, more open spaces and increased natural light. The collections of American art, ancient art, and art of the ancient Americas remain in the Gallery’s adjoining Swartwout building, which is scheduled to undergo renovation beginning in 2008.