Lauren’s post last week on the digital mock-ups for our upcoming Old Masters exhibition prompted an excellent question in the post’s comments section. So excellent in fact, that I decided to get an answer on from our director, Matthias Waschek, and make it today’s blog post! Here’s what she asked:

“I appreciate the digital mock-ups for the Old Masters Installation & the exhibit itself. However, I would like to know why? It seems rather anti-Pulitzer to mount an Old Masters exhibit at an art museum where the building itself is a masterpiece of modern architecture. I am an art professional, have taught many students about modern and contemporary art and have a background in western art. We see references to, merges with and criticism about Old Master artworks, but I cannot recall placing OM in Modernity & Post-Modernity- one complementing the other, juxtaposing, or offering a fresh, new view on OM. This upcoming exhibit does not seem to complement nor extend past Pulitzer exhibits. Please explain. Thanks.”

Here’s Matthias’s reply:

Although the Pulitzer’s main focus is Modernism, we have a track record of showing artworks from other periods and cultures, as demonstrated in our exhibition Exploring Ando’s Space: Art and the Spiritual. Those who had a chance to see it remember juxtapositions of Asmat Ancestor Poles from Papua New Guinea with Kelly’s Blue Black, Durer’s Apocalypse with Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios and Pierre Raymond’s 16th century enamels with Beckmann’s Christ and the Adulterous Women. The installations shots are archived on our web catalogue (click here).

However, as opposed to a Kunsthalle where everything can be on view, our exhibitions are co-determined by the building. The exhibition Water was inspired by our watercourt, Portrait/Homage/Embodiment was inspired by two Serra works that were already reacting to the building (Joplin and Joe), etc.

The upcoming exhibition, Ideal (Dis-) Placements: Old Masters at the Pulitzer, is based on a fewideas relating to the Ando building. The building lets in different degrees of natural light, which corresponds to the way these works were originally viewed. The specific placement of the artworks transforms the modernist galleries into abstracted dark Roman side-chapels from the 16th century, light princely galleries from the 18th, obscured medieval churches, and so on.

Due to construction on both of their buildings, the opportunity came up to show Old Masters from the collections of the Harvard Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum.  The Pulitzer is both a laboratory and a sanctuary, and this was a chance to explore what Ando’s architecture can do to revitalize this legacy.  It allows us to think about a mutually beneficial relationship between the contemporary and the old, which might be of interest for future expansions for museums in the country and beyond.

I disagree that Modernism and the legacy of Old Masters cannot interact. On the contrary, a lot of attempts have been made to reconcile both. Particularly in the 1960s, various initiatives were presented to ‘re-actualize’ Old Masters via contemporary architecture. The two most prominent examples are the Goulbenkian’s brutalism-building in Lisbon and Scarpa’s addition to the Museo del Castelvecchio in Verona. In the first case, works were isolated in such a way that 18th century cabinets, 16th century paintings or Egyptian funeral gifts alike could be enjoyed and studied for their material and formal qualities, in the second case the use of concrete highlighted the medieval stonework – even translated it into modernity – and therefore contextualized the Old Master paintings in a old/new language. The Libon example might appear dated to our postmodern eyes, the Verona example is likely to still “work”, as it is about contextualization and not its opposite. So, in a way, Scarpa is the big master behind our thinking of Old Masters at the Pulitzer.