Mayor John O. Norquist, architect David Kahler and other local celebrities were on hand for the grand reopening of the expanded Milwaukee Art Museum Friday, but when the doors opened at noon, it was Santiago Calatrava's striking expansion and the artwork inside that were the real stars.
MAM employees were estimating that nearly 1,000 people bore the brunt of the less-than-cooperative weather to be among the first to enter the new building. About 2,000 museum members toured the expansion project last week at a special invite-only preview.
Some of the shivering crowd that lined up under the cloudy sky came from as far away as southern California and Canada to be part of an historic occasion in Milwaukee's art world.
Almost to a person, everyone who entered could be heard gasping in awe as they rounded the corner from the small entryway into the bright (even on a dreary day) space, which echoed the buzz.
"This is a monumental project," says museum director Russell Bowman, "encompassing an exceptional architectural and engineering masterpiece, dramatic new gallery space, expanded facilities and visitor amenities and elegant public gardens."
Light streams in through broad, angled windows in the outer walls and flits through the repeating structural ribs, creating a vibrant, welcoming space. The long, white marble floors and the perspective of the ribs repetitively advancing into the distance pull one forward.
Further light dips down through curvaceous ceiling apertures that hug the length of the inner walls, which close off the gallery spaces that run along the center of the long building.
Outside the galleries are the West Promenade, which looks out over the future site of the Dan Kiley-designed public garden, expected to be completed in October, and the East Promenade, which offers stunning views of Lake Michigan and a selection of works by Jacques Lipschitz, Henry Moore, Fernand Leger, Auguste Rodin and others from MAM's sculpture collection.
At one end is the unfinished Quadracci Pavilion -- also slated for September completion -- and at the other are the older art museum galleries, which have undergone a complete makeover. (Click here to read that story).
The new building has added tens of thousands of sq. ft. of gallery space to the museum. In addition to 12,000 sq. ft. of galleries in the Calatrava structure, areas in the older buildings that once housed the shop, the large East Entrance and the MAM eatery have been converted to art spaces. In all, there is now roughly 30 percent more gallery space than before.
One striking example is the intimate new gallery that holds "From Generation to Generation: Milton Rogovin Photographs" -- an exhibition of engrossing photographic triptychs that trace a series of Buffalo, NY families over the course of 20 years. This gallery was once a storage closet.
Two of the three new galleries are open. One hosts "Collecting for the Millennium," which shows off some of the museum's recently-acquired treasures in many media, including a lovely Cezanne large plate color lithograph of "The Bathers" (1896-'97) and German Expression Paula Modersohn-Becker's portrait, "Brother and Sister" (1906), which renders a pair of siblings with Modigliani-esque simplicity of form and an earthy Morandi-an palette.
Other gems in a show that is bubbling over with fine works are a large chiaroscuro canvas, "Christ Before the High Priest," by Matthias Stom(er), painted in 1633, and a large, engaging Andreas Gursky photograph, "San Francisco" (1998).
The largest gallery, however, is given over to an exhaustive exhibition of works by Sun Prairie-born artist Georgia O'Keeffe.
"O'Keeffe's O'Keeffe's: The Artist's Collection," curated by Barbara Buhler Lynes of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum with MAM's own Russell Bowman, is the first to collect and show O'Keeffe's works from her own collection. It also seeks to explore how the management of her collection shaped the way in which we think about O'Keeffe and her works.
When she died in 1986, at age 98, O'Keeffe owned more than half of her more than 2,000 known works.
What we discover is that O'Keeffe was a much more complex artist, with a wide-ranging sense of experimentation than is often thought. While reproductions of her "western" paintings of cattle bones and pretty blossoms are icons of modern Western art, O'Keeffe began as one of the earliest American abstractionists.
So, in addition to the expected detailed paintings of colorful flowers and leaves and organic paintings of animal skulls in the desert southwest, we see flat, simple landscapes rendered in warm colors, a New York cityscape constructed of basic shapes and figurative paintings that appear at first glance to be abstractions.
We also are treated to a number of O'Keeffe's playful, almost childlike watercolors, like "Chicken in Sunrise" (1917) with its vivid colors and primitively drafted bird. There is also a pair of hazy still life paintings of apples on a table that strongly recall similar, more famous works by Paul Cezanne.
"Patio Door with Green Leaf" (1956) appears to flirt with surrealism and also shares the haunted quality of DiChirico's unpopulated piazze.
Early photographs of O'Keeffe, taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz and portraits of the artist in her twilight years bookend the collection.
MAM has published a handsome catalog of the exhibition and a free audio guide -- which utilizes mp3 technology and comes in an extremely user-friendly package: small and easy to use -- leads visitors through the exhibition. Another audio guide, aimed at families, discusses highlights of the Milwaukee Art Museum's permanent collection.
Outside the galleries, the museum gift shop also has a stunning new home thanks to the expansion. The formerly stifling and crowded shop has a breathtakingly high ceiling, plenty of elbow room and striking serpentine, elevated showcases.
"O'Keeffe's O'Keefes" opens with a wall-sized quote by the artist that could also serve as a good description of the building in which the exhibition is hung...
"I said to myself, 'I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me...I decided to start anew to strip away what I had been taught."
So, too, has Santiago Calatrava tossed aside accepted shapes and norms to create a living, breathing organism of a building that not only serves extremely well the art is holds, but also gives the city of Milwaukee a work of art and beauty to enhance our urban landscape.
"Rather than just add something to the existing buildings, I also wanted to add something to the lakefront," the Spanish-born, Swiss-based architect has said. And, at this, he has most certainly succeeded, creating one of the world's most instantly-recognizable museum buildings.
Here are a few interesting facts and stats about the building that has come to be known as "The Calatrava":
--There are approximately 915 separate panes of glass in the building, but fewer than 6 percent are "standard-orientation," that is to say completely vertical. The rest are either tilted or curved, or both.
{INSERT_RELATED}--Approximately 2,100 tons of steel reinforcing bar has been used in the concrete. Using an average diameter of 7/8 inch, that steel, laid end to end, would stretch from Milwaukee to the Twin Cities.
--The building's structural mast is 198 ft. tall, 13 ft. taller than the leaning tower of Pisa. However, while the Pisan tower leans at an angle of 5.25 degrees, the MAM mast leans at a 41.64 degree angle.
--One acre of marble from Carrara (the area in northern Italy where Michelangelo got the marble for his sculptures) was used for the floor.
--While it took aqbout 300 years to build the Louvre, in Paris, projected construction time on the Calatrava building is three years.
--The wingspan of the brise soleil (not yet installed) is 217 ft. The wingspan of a Boeing 747-400 is 211 ft.
--The building is the first by acclaimed architect Santiago Calatrava to be built in the United States.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
