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 make opened Apr. 29, easily outdoes of recent origin York's other new museum "wow" space--the clunkily massive mega-space designed by means of Yoshio Taniguchi for the Museum of fresh Art. There's just one problem: Piano has taken Morgan without of the Morgan.

Part of the mystique of any house museum is the spirit of the master of the house. on the other hand now J.P. Morgan's outsize subject has been supplanted by Piano's beautiful on the contrary discordantly sleek addition. New Yorkers, especially, will have affection for the way this gorgeous space accessions the whole city into the Morgan's collection--a composed of several elements architectural collage viewed through glass walls. on the other hand the insular old-world ambience of the robber baron's luxurious lair is upstaged by dint of this upstart, with its late glass-and-steel pizzazz.

Ye you can still leer 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 draw as by a ropes The desire to get up-close and personal with the Memlings can at last be realized. on the other hand these rooms now feel like a minor diversion from the main architectural event

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

This brings to mind a remark made a few years ago in a public forum in beholds Angeles by the late Kirk Varnedoe, after he had left his column as chief curator of painting and statuary at MOMA. Taking a dim view of the novel fashion for "the big 'wow' space" in museums, he observed: "You've got to rapier the art in the corner and then you've got immense problems." The problem is that the art strike one as beings marginalized by the architecture.

in like manner dazzling is the effect of the light in Piano's astonishing atrium that it strike one as beings to have blinded even the Morgan's have director to the experience of the galleries themselves: "Now in beautiful light-filled spaces, you can collision some of the great artistic icons of Western civilization," intoned Charles Pierce, Jr in radio ads for the opening. on the other hand manuscripts, prints and drawings are not at any time displayed in "light-filled spaces" The illumination, all artificial, must be carefully controll to obviate fading and discoloration. Unfortunately, at least during the pres preview, the lights in the drawings gallery intermittently flickered, a perplexing glitch that a curator promised would before long be fixed.

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

The top-floor scholars' reading latitude and the new concert hall upon the lower level are the one and the other suavely elegant, and the subterranean 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 fresh effort to be egalitarian instead of esoteric, upcoming special exhibitions will be devot to Saul Steinberg and move with a jerk Dylan.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group