ART REVIEW : Dallas’ Encyclopedic Museum Not by the Book : An intellectually challenging structure radically alters the traditional curatorial viewpoint.

Several years ago the Dallas Museum of Art was presented with a $20-million gift for an old-fashioned bulldoze-and-build plan to add a new wing. Since the encyclopedic museum houses a decidedly spotty and erratic collection, the hefty chunk of money might have been well spent buying art, rather than building gallery space that would effectively increase the size of the institution by one-third. But the donor was adamant.

So, former DMA Director Rick Bretell used the windfall as an opportunity to radically rethink the curatorial structure of the museum. The DMA’s parking lot isn’t all that was bulldozed to build the new Nancy and Jake Hamon Building. Also plowed under was a traditional curatorial viewpoint, which rules virtually every other encyclopedic museum in the United States.

The DMA is being subdivided into five smaller museums, all under one roof. Four are based on global geographic zones and one on a temporal zone.

Eventually, there will be separate mini-museums for the art of Europe, of Asia and of Africa. A Museum of the Americas, which will be the centerpiece of the institution, opened in September, while a Museum of Contemporary Art had its debut last month.

*

Yes, this museums-within-a-museum structure is a savvy marketing scheme. The DMA has made itself unique.

More significant, though, the structure is also intellectually challenging. The centerpiece Museum of the Americas turns out to be a particularly remarkable accomplishment, revelatory in its simplicity. Swept away is the standard crazy quilt of competing categories: Pre-Columbian art; American art (meaning U.S. art) spanning the 18th to the early-20th centuries; Latin American art; Spanish colonial art; Native American ethnographic art.

Such Balkanized divisions, common to encyclopedic museums, reflect a history of political entities. In their place is a comprehensive display of the artistic production of all the Americas, ancient to early modern.

The galleries begin with a single, small room displaying a dozen distinctive objects, which range in date from 500 BC to the 19th Century, and whose origins span South America to Alaska. Each represents an aspect of an indigenous creation myth.

From there, the galleries follow a loose chronology from south to north, spanning the ancient world to World War II. Displays of vessels, textiles, gold and ritual objects begin with the Central Andes in the millennium before the birth of Christ, move into Lower Central America and Meso-America and reach up into Native North America.

The DMA’s chief glory is its large and magnificent Pre-Columbian collection. Only the finest examples are shown. (Adjacent study-storage galleries are being built to give public access to the collection’s second tier.) The dazzling sequence of rooms conveys a powerful sense of the stunning artistic achievements of diverse, indigenous American cultures.

Next comes a gallery for the Spanish colonies in the Americas, followed by one for the British Colonies. Suddenly we’re in New England, where most encyclopedic museums are just beginning their American surveys. Because we’ve already been through nearly two millennia of astonishing art, the colonial conquest is put into sharp perspective.

The display continues on through 19th-Century painting, sculpture and decorative arts. It concludes with early 20th-Century examples from Canada, the United States and Mexico.

*

The Museum of the Americas effectively erases the standard view of American civilization as a European transplant onto a primitive land with a vague history. Instead it’s shown in a different, fuller light: A hemisphere of diverse cultures with a glorious antiquity has been repeatedly impacted from the outside.

Eye-opening results come from this dramatic reorientation of East/West thinking onto a North/South axis. Take a magnificent, newly acquired Baroque cabinet, which dominates a pivotal moment in the display. The bulky, elaborate, serpentine forms of this tall, broad cupboard are readily identifiable as dating from the end of the 17th Century. So is the double-eagle crest of the Habsburg dynasty, poised like an imperial crown atop the flamboyant piece of furniture.

The cupboard, despite such easily recognized features, doesn’t look like what you’d expect to see in a sumptuous display of German, French or Italian Baroque decorative arts. It’s too eccentric. Built from richly carved mahogany, inlaid with a spectacularly complex marquetry pattern of tortoise shell and mother-of-pearl, and resting atop gilded feet carved to resemble animals that are strangely Indochinese in appearance, it’s plainly not of typical European style.

The reason: The cabinet was made in the Philippines, circa 1680-1700, for the household of the Viceroy of Mexico, representative of the Habsburg dynasty in its far-flung empire. The Philippines, like Mexico, was then a colony of Spain, ruled through Mexico City.

The cabinet, undoubtedly a collaboration between Spanish colonial craftsmen and Asian artisans working in Manila, deftly interweaves Western and Eastern decorative styles. European, Filipino, Indian and Chinese traits were fused into a princely cabinet destined for Mexico. The result was a dazzling symbol, which triumphantly declared to all who saw it the global power of the Habsburg rulers.

In the context of most encyclopedic art museums, this amazing piece of furniture would seem a provincial curiosity. If displayed at all, it would likely be in an ancillary role as a tributary to the mainstream of European Baroque style.

*

At Dallas, it’s a stunning centerpiece. The viceregal cabinet is an object of immense visual interest that speaks eloquently of a complex moment in time. As a work of decorative art, and as an exemplar of cross-currents relevant to the present day, it’s a wondrously resonant object.

The significance of the Museum of the Americas’ scheme can be thrown into high relief by taking a short walk to the other end of the building, where the Museum of Contemporary Art has just opened. Its prominent display of Abstract Expressionist, Pop and Minimalist art from the 1940s through the 1970s claims several outstanding paintings and sculptures by important artists; yet, it feels flat and old-fashioned.

Why? Because almost without exception, the work is confined to the New York School and its local aftermath. Almost nothing in it hails from beyond Manhattan. From our vantage point today, after an awakened sense that the artistic watershed of the 1960s actually spelled the invigorating dawn of multiple centers, from Germany to California to who-knows-where, the exclusive focus on far-away New York makes Dallas seem mired in conservative, provincial envy.

The Museum of Contemporary Art represents a vision of the museum as an imperial office of centralized culture, poised to cover the globe. By stark contrast, the Museum of the Americas establishes itself as a territory of shared culture, in which society’s diverse constituents all have a stake.

The splendid viceregal cabinet even has something important to tell us about the difference between these two viewpoints. Don Melchor Portocarrero, 3rd Count of Monclova, had the chest made as a special place to house and display the most impressive booty he had captured on his imperial conquests in Mexico and South America.

In other words, the cabinet can be thought of as a portable princely museum. Whether at his posts in Mexico or Peru, the Habsburg emissary had his “miniature art museum” at his side, splendidly representing to the viceregal court the imminent global authority of the far-away King of Spain. The cabinet is a model for the old style of museum that the Museum of the Americas so deftly overturns, and for the kind that the Museum of Contemporary Art ironically still champions.