YCBA Photo
Dort or Dordrecht.
Look quickly, and there’s nothing revolutionary about the Yale Center for British Art’s reinstalled Turner Bay, a pleasant, sun-soaked gallery that makes little allusion to the painter’s once avant-garde reputation. On one wall, Turner’s celebrated Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort packet-boat from Rotterdam becalmed hangs where it’s always been, a nearby cluster of chairs almost begging the viewer to take a load off and contemplate the gold-flecked clouds, still water, and doughy and animated faces.
But not all is so calm and delightful. Across from Dort or Dordrecht, John Constable’s heroic, ruin-porny and über-Romantic Hadleigh Castle strikes a dissonant note, nearly declaring battle with the room around it. Sparks fly. Heated whispers, once reserved for the cool, echoing chambers of London’s Royal Academy, flit through the air. Suddenly, viewers are privy to an age-old argument about technique, and the merits of breaking with the old guard in favor of the new.
Lucy Gellman Photo
New Havener Cassie Basler before the John Constable.
That central and necessary tension between the old and new, the architecture of the 1970s and conservation efforts of today, the Britain of centuries past and cosmopolitan artists of the present — although Turner and Constable fall squarely in the former category — is a defining feature of the newly conserved Yale Center for British Art.
After a three-phase, eight-year, and $33 million conservation project — for 15 months of which it was closed — the Center is reopening its doors to the New Haven public today.
The efforts to revitalize and conserve the building, architect Louis Kahn’s final conception before his death in 1974, are extensive and palpable from the moment one steps inside. Following a conservation plan published in 2011, the Center and Knight Architecture embarked on a several-year journey to rehabilitate the building in 2013, refurbishing the departments of prints and drawings and rare books and manuscripts, enhancing the Center’s public spaces, and making way-needed tech upgrades. It was time, curator Scott Wilcox recalled at a press preview Tuesday. Carpets were severely worn, walls were collecting dangerous condensation, chairs in the lecture hall were falling apart, and Louis Kahn had never anticipated wiring a building for high-speed internet or video simulcasts of major speeches and events.
Director Amy Meyers.
But if these changes wake the building — a “disarmingly straightforward” and magnificent structure, by architect Knight’s estimation — from its sleepy shell, they are more remarkable for what they allow. Shiny, reinstalled galleries display more works from the collection, and come with much-needed curatorial injections of levity, experiment, and humor. It’s as though the Center has finally caught onto the joke that it’s the Yale University Art Gallery’s bougie great-aunt, and it’s laughing while doing a slow and epic takedown of that very notion.
Changes to how curators are thinking about and interacting with art abound. Sidling up to John Cheere’s Samson Slaying a Philistine, Gavin Turk’s Bin Bag #4 now greets viewers at the center of the light-flooded entrance court, asking them to adjust their aesthetic frame of reference as soon as they step into the space. Up a few sets of stairs, Rachael Whiteread’s exceptional and huge Untitled (Ten Tables) (1966), long left in storage, makes its first gallery appearance in years.
Those are just the tip of the big British iceberg. On the second floor, Jacob Epstein’s enormous, votive-like Venus (1917), on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, opens up conversations about points of artistic reference, cultural appropriation, and ritual depiction of the body that Tilly Kettle and John Singer Sargent (also on loan to the Center, from a private collection) were dealing with years before, when they painted works like Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Oudh (1772) or the Javanese Dancing Girl (1889).
Wilcox.
On the third floor, the concept of British art as old and stodgy explodes entirely with Frank Auerbach’s and Anthony Gormley’s two- and three-dimensional multimedia explorations of the human form. These, which include a series of oil on board portraits painted so thick and violently with bright paint they are half-sculptures, half-bizarre playthings, titillate the senses entirely, driving the viewer on to the building’s other galleries with a rapacious hunger for more.
So too do works in a new exhibition on British-born collector Rhoda Pritzker, whose quirky and wonderful grouping of objects — small, roughly-cast bronze sculptures with still-visible bubbles, bright, angular paintings, and assorted miscellany on cats — adds a new flavor to the collection. Even a new Long Gallery on the fourth floor challenges traditional notions, foregoing strict temporal structure for a thematic grouping of works, hung salon-style from floor to ceiling.
The Long Gallery.
These are just a few of the treasures that await viewers as the Center reopens. These, too, are what will help viewers “fall in love,” in Director Amy Meyers’ words, with the collection all over again. Traditionalists needn’t fret, though. In and outside the Long Gallery, the fourth floor is still dedicated to works stretching centuries back, and packed with vestiges of old British life, class struggle, and imperialist nostalgia. Two roads diverge at the top of the fourth floor staircase. Viewers have the choice of plunging deep into the heart of the 18th century, or taking a right into the 17th, both of which mix and mingle with the European influences that British artists were trading at the time. Elsewhere in the galleries, a student-curated exhibition offers spectacular, sometimes archival views of preindustrial London, taking a hard look at urban renewal across the pond.
Don’t mourn the great pantheon of very dead white dudes yet; It’s not going anywhere. Blessedly, it’s just getting a tiny bit harder to find.