This is a letter I wrote to Mark Byrnes, who wrote an interesting article in CityLab, which criticizes the plans for the expansion of Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. I don’t know Mr. Byrnes, but admire the range of his interests in architecture and urban design issues and the passion with which he writes about everything. I haven’t heard back from Mr.Byrnes (don’t expect to) and as a courtesy I sent a copy to the museum’s Director, Janne Sirén. I thought it might be interesting to post here because this is likely to be an ongoing discussion between and among preservationists and lots of others.
June 12, 2017
Mr. Byrnes:
I don’t entirely agree with everything you write about the AKAG plans, etc., but I really enjoyed the scope and span of your article! I’m hopeful that, as happens now and again, the discussions generated by the [perhaps premature?] release of the architectural plans, will lead to a more felicitous solution.
For some time I resented the Albright Art Gallery (as it was when I grew up nearby) for having torn down the greenhouse that once stood where the Bunshaft building now stands. Lots of happy memories of childhood visits with my mother, who taught me how to nick bits of plants which we could then root in little clay pots at home.
Then came change. While I loved the Bunshaft building when it opened with Seymour Knox’s name attached (his family had a long history of support for the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy anyway), I soon realized that its stunning beauty masked its lack of accommodating what had become one of the great collections of post-WWII American art. Those parts of the collection always looked better in the elegant galleries of the old building. I had left Buffalo in 1955, so wasn’t watching all this on a daily basis, but even works that I had loved — e.g., Gauguin’s Yellow Christ, the Delacroix, Courbet, and other seminal works — never looked good in the corridor that surrounded the elegant courtyard. One saw them en passant, as it were. Other favorites of mine — e.g., Hogarth’s The Lady’s Last Stake, Reynolds’ Cupid as a Link Boy, etc., were usually shown in the old galleries, and looked wonderful there, as did the Clyfford Still paintings. The myopia of previous administrations and boards led to misguided deaccessions, but one of my favorites (and the first work of antiquity with which I personally bonded), Artemis and the Stag, now graces the big southern courtyard of the Met, so I get to see it regularly down the street from my home. Nice for me. Not great for Buffalo kids who can no longer bicycle to gawk at a magical bronze while simultaneously leaning about both art and mythology. That’s also now a long-ago change, and even I must face that reality.
While I admire the refinement of the Bunshaft building as an objet Id’art, rethinking the museum’s gallery’s needs has been long in coming. I live in NYC much of the time, and I greatly admire the Lever Building, and am pleased that whoever now owns and/or occupies it hasn’t crapped it up; but Bunshaft designed it as an office building and presumably it is. Even the Albright’s splendid glass box auditorium (replacement for the earlier glass greenhouse) is pretty funny if you stop and consider that a Miesian glass cube needs to have cumbersome curtains to make it functional. Elegance only works when it really works. And perhaps the best Buffalo example of that is Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s still-beautiful Kleinhans Music Hall — another building that shaped me indelibly.
So I’m hoping that your article, and others, will generate the kind of debate that helps the museum’s leadership get it right. In my naive confidence, I want to believe that they will.
Cheers,
Tom (Freudenheim)