Since the Louvre, Museums Cut Art Off From Life, But Getty . . .

During the Getty Center’s 13-year incubation, the most damning prognoses likened it to an elitist acropolis far removed from the general public. Reminiscent of an Italian hilltop town, the 11-unit complex designed by Richard Meier has, in fact, altered all expectations: With a million visitors in its first six months, the Getty Museum promises to be among Los Angeles’ most popular attractions. Far from secluding art in an ivory tower, the Getty offers it as one of many enticements--food, shopping and spectacular views are all part of an experience that has been called more urban than Los Angeles itself. Like many new museums, the Getty melds art and life in new ways.

The problem of relating art and life has plagued public museums throughout their 200-year history. Inspirational art, meant to be seen in churches or in public buildings, was suddenly presented in an artificial environment, in spaces dedicated solely to the exhibition of art. Compare, for example, experiencing Giotto’s frescoes in the soaring, light-filled aisle of St. Francesco at Assisi (before its recent earthquake damage) with viewing similar work in a museum gallery. Not only does the museum rule out the unique conditions of light and space for which the art was created, but it excludes other sensations--sound, smell, tactility--to create a purely visual phenomenon. This problem also applies to some periods of modern art, for which settings bathed in natural light (Impressionism, for example) and views to the outside world (Pop Art, among others) are usually lacking.

It all began with the Louvre. For all its undeniable splendor as a former palace, the Louvre in Paris had no sooner opened its doors in 1793 than artists and critics alike attacked the new institution’s separation of art and life.

Early in the 19th century, the first buildings designed and built specifically as museums carried the separation even farther: They were placed in parks or on vast esplanades, far removed from the bustle of city life, with their main rooms sealed from views of the world around them. The Metropolitan Museum in New York’s Central Park and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum are prime examples of the tendency to treat art as a secular religion, presented in secluded temples of culture. In the same way that a church’s sacred space excludes exterior distractions to focus on worship, art was shown in its own secularized sacred spaces, protected from worldly intrusions. (The exception were homes turned into museums, such as the Sir John Soane in London and, later, the Frick Collection in New York.)

The 20th century took this reverential attitude to its extreme. The very elements that provided some context for the art in converted palaces and beaux-arts museums were now reduced or even eliminated: natural-light galleries with moldings, cornices and colored walls were all banished. Instead, the modern museum featured artificial light and open spaces with blank white partitions. At the time of its inauguration in 1939, the Museum of Modern Art’s new building by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone accommodated the needs of this century’s new art, but its gradual divorce of art from life was part of the move toward mausoleum-like exhibition spaces.

Conversely, many of today’s museums invite the everyday world into what are, in fact, the social centerpieces of their communities. The complex forms of some museums mirror the fragmentation of today’s society. The best example is probably Frank Gehry’s new Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. But now, the way the Getty brings art and life together approaches a theme-park formula and, as such, is uniquely suited to Los Angeles.

Hollywood represents the dominant symbol of a culture that has a pervasive need to entertain and be entertained. For Hollywood, and by extension Los Angeles, reality is entertainment. (USC is currently contemplating a program that will analyze what it perceives as the entertainment value of all contemporary culture.) By capturing the regional identity of nearby Disneyland in its tram ride and free-standing pavilions, the Getty effectively unites art and life in this particular place. Similarly, having visitors pass from one pavilion to another through glazed passageways or covered outdoor walkways incorporates Southern California’s temperate climate and natural beauty into the museum experience. Within, daylight, and even occasional glimpses of the sky, enliven the painting galleries, while the kitsch make-believe of period rooms continues the local tradition of entertainment fantasy.

Ironically, even though it sits smack in the middle of downtown Los Angeles (as many felt the Getty should have), the Museum of Contemporary Art’s plain, windowless, white galleries are far more like a secluded sacred space than the museum on the hill. What saves MOCA from the mausoleum syndrome is the skillful way its Japanese architect, Arata Izosaki, has animated galleries with different kinds of natural light and varied the spaces by proportioning them differently. In its reinvention of abstract modern galleries, the building provides an appropriate setting for the modern masters of this collection of art from 1940 to the present.

More attuned, however, to the enormous scale and unconventional mediums of much contemporary art--such as site-specific installations and earthworks--are two commercial sheds renovated by Gehry for MOCA’s additional galleries nearby. Created as temporary exhibition space, the now permanent Geffen Contemporary has been remarkably successful due, in large part, to its gritty, real-life quality. The sheds’ generous proportions and industrial materials are similar to the spaces in which many artists live and work. Indeed, for centuries artists have shown work in their studios--Peter Paul Rubens is reputed to have done so with particular elegance. The studio is an optimum place to view art in because it provides the same light in which the object was created and offers some evidence of the creative process.

For the current installation at the Geffen of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures (one piece alone weighs over 200 tons), the sculptor is able to work just as he does outdoors. MOCA director Richard Koshalek explains, “This is a building that almost doesn’t exist because of its complete openness of access.” For this coming show, which opens in September, a 30-by-30-foot hole was easily cut in one wall to allow trucks and cranes to drive in, a dramatic acknowledgment of the realities of today’s art.

Gehry’s recent restructuring of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena doesn’t achieve that kind of flexibility, nor is it meant to, for an extraordinary collection of Eastern art and of Western art from the early Renaissance through the modern period. What it has produced is a more lifelike setting, akin to the conditions for which these objects were created. Using relatively modest means, Gehry has installed skylights to enhance paintings meant to be seen in natural illumination. He has replaced undifferentiated corridor-like spaces with intimate rooms painted different colors, he has lightened floor colors and added rugs to end galleries which now punctuate the museum’s narrative. Unfortunately, Gehry’s wish to introduce more of the world--by adding views to the exterior--was rejected.

In New York, life is less about entertainment than it is in Los Angeles, and more about communication and movement. An architecture student graduating from the City College of New York this spring neatly caught that spirit with a proposal for an Andy Warhol Museum that would be integrated with Manhattan’s Astor Place subway station. The underground origins of Pop Art prompted Ghiora Aharoni’s prize-winning design that pulls visitors three levels below the street, allowing them views of moving subway cars, while riders in turn are offered glimpses into the museum. Tall, narrow spaces (with exposed ductwork) encourage people to move with the same alacrity with which the art was created.

By making many of the galleries visible from the exterior, Aharoni feels he has brought Warhol’s art back to the street, from which the artist originally drew his inspiration. At the same time, Aharoni is subverting the idea of the museum as an impenetrable treasure house. So this proposed rough, subterranean Warhol Museum and the refined hilltop Getty Museum, each in its own way, are bringing art and life together again.