Enough Room to Breathe

“Just like a real museum,” says Hal Nelson, director of the Long Beach Museum of Art, proudly showing off the seaside institution’s sparkling new addition. And indeed it is. Scheduled to open next Sunday, the two-story, glass-front, barn-like structure designed by Santa Monica-based architects Frederick Fisher and Partners boasts clean white galleries, a light-filled atrium, a multipurpose room with a view of the ocean, and facilities for art preparation and storage.

Compared with the spectacular mega-museums that pop up with increasing frequency around the world these days, Long Beach’s new facility is tiny. The entire 12,800-square-foot building--grand staircase, dramatic lobby, ocean-view deck and all--would fit into the lobby of the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London or the largest gallery at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with plenty of room to spare.

Nonetheless, the $6.5-million Long Beach project, which includes the new structure along with an ambitious renovation and reconfiguration of the original buildings and grounds, is a dramatic transformation. Once a quaint old residence struggling to be a proper museum, it’s now a stylish cultural center and showcase for fine and decorative arts.

The new building stands on the former site of the carriage house, just west of the historic residence. The carriage house, which formerly contained offices, a shop and a coffee house, has been moved behind the old house and converted into a children’s education center. The renovated house now has a cafe and shop on the first floor, and offices and a library upstairs. The renovations were also directed by Fisher.

Outside, a fountain made by sculptor Claire Falkenstein has been moved from the side lawn to a central place of honor, where it can be seen through picture windows overlooking the ocean. Overgrown shrubs that once shrouded the house have been replaced with smaller plants. Among more mundane but essential improvements are a 38-space parking lot a half-block west of the museum, and a traffic light and pedestrian walkway, allowing visitors who park on the north side of Ocean Avenue to get to the museum without risking their lives.

All these changes have been a long time coming, and they have occupied much of Nelson’s time since 1989, when he took charge of the museum. A much more ambitious plan, announced in 1991, called for the construction of a $15-million facility downtown on land donated by the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency. When that proved too expensive, the museum developed a $6-million proposal to move into a downtown building formerly occupied by Thrift Village. But many of the museum’s supporters wanted to retain the historic building and grounds.

“After we reviewed other options, we decided that this was home, this was the place where we wanted to stay,” Nelson says. “It’s the heart of the community; some people call it the community’s living room. It’s a comfortable place to come, to be, to look, to learn, to listen to music, so we very much wanted to stay here.”

Despite earlier plans to move, he says he has always considered the Arts and Crafts-style house to be “one of the finest works of art in the museum’s collection.” And now that the new building has freed the house from accommodating almost all of the museum’s programs and operations, the old structure has been conserved “in a way that’s worthy of its beauty and its historical importance.” What’s more, he says, the process of research and renovation not only yielded information about the building itself, but also revealed that the property is an essential component of the city’s history.

The wood and brick house was built in 1912 as the summer residence of Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, a New York-based philanthropist and heir to financier Jeremiah Milbank, who was a founder of both the Borden Co. and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. The architectural firm she chose was the Milwaukee Building Co., which became known as Meyer & Holler and designed several Southern California landmarks, including the Chinese and Egyptian theaters in Hollywood.

Anderson died in 1921, and the property changed hands several times. In 1926, it became Club California Casa Real, Long Beach’s first social, athletic and beach club. Three years later, the club succumbed to the Great Depression and to competition from a new beach club nearby.

Members of several Long Beach women’s organizations then petitioned the city to purchase the facility and turn it into an art museum, but money was not available. The house was sold to Thomas A. O’Donnell, the first chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, who moved in with his family, faced the buildings with red brick and constructed a brick wall around the property. In the early 1940s, when fear of attack during World War II drove some coastal residents further inland, O’Donnell relocated his family and leased the house to the U.S. Navy as its Chief Petty Officers Club.

The city of Long Beach purchased the property for a municipal art center in 1950 and designated it the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1957. The privately funded Long Beach Museum of Art Foundation took over management of the museum in 1983. The city, which still owns works in the permanent collection acquired between 1950 and 1985, currently provides $319,000 annually for the collection’s care and exhibition. The city also donated land for the new parking lot.

*

Although the museum is only 43 years old, Nelson tracks the community’s dream to 1929, when the city first received public requests to purchase the property. But even in recent years, the institution has struggled to survive and to carve out a distinctive niche for itself. Arriving at a viable plan for expansion was even more challenging.

Three years ago, the museum revealed plans for a different version of the new building. Also designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners, it had a more contemporary look and a flat roof with one corner that appeared to be folded down to reflect the old building’s gables. The design was deemed too radical for the historic site by many museum supporters and the flat roof raised concerns about maintenance, so Fisher went back to the drawing board. Revisions include a pitched roof, like that of the house, and an expanded balcony.

Nelson says he is not at all disappointed with the compromise: “I think we have ended up with a building that functions magnificently as exhibition and permanent collection space, with beautiful and well-proportioned galleries. On the exterior, we have a building for the 21st century that is compatible with the existing architecture.”

The balance of old and new particularly pleases Nelson. “Rather than doing a freeze-the-moment approach to architectural preservation, where you try to get it back to the original moment, we restored the building inside and out in a way that reflects the continuous history of its use and changes made along the way,” Nelson says. Windows and fireplaces that had been covered to create more wall space for artworks were uncovered, and paint was removed from mahogany paneling. Some of the tile installed in the carriage house, when it served as changing rooms and showers for the beach club, has been retained in the new education center.

In all three buildings, Fisher has created “a sort of counterpoint between contemporary and traditional design,” Nelson says. Contemporary furnishings are installed in the traditional, mahogany-paneled environment of the cafe, while the contemporary interior of the new building has a mahogany reception desk and columns, and an old-fashioned wood staircase.

*

The museum’s 3,000-piece permanent collection also covers a fairly broad sweep of history. It begins with 18th century American furniture--thanks to a gift from Long Beach collectors Victor Gail and Thomas H. Oxford--and runs through contemporary paintings, sculpture, works on paper and ceramics. In addition, the museum has an important collection of 4,000 video artworks that is in need of conservation and remains mainly in storage in a separate, city-owned annex. After the new building is launched, the museum will seek partners to care for and exhibit the video collection.

The museum, which is supported by a variety of public and private sources, runs on a budget of about $1.2 million to $1.5 million a year. With little or no money for acquisitions, it has always built its collection from gifts. The art holding has “disparate pockets of strength,” as Nelson puts it. But he says they can be interwoven in ways that will enlighten viewers, and that’s exactly what he intends to do in upcoming exhibitions.

The inaugural show, “Rooms With a View,” is drawn from the permanent collection and displays paintings and sculpture with decorative arts and design of the same period. “For example, when you look at paintings by Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg and John McLaughlin, you see them alongside furniture designed by Charles and Ray Eames and ceramics made by Harrison McIntosh,” Nelson says, referring to works by California Modernists. In a gallery of early 20th century European Modernism, paintings by Wassily Kandinsky are shown with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s graphic design and a chair by Gerrit Rietveld.

One gallery is devoted to California ceramics, however, largely because of a recent gift from the estate of Melba and Al Langman. Learning of the museum’s interest in ceramics and plans for the new building, the Langmans’ heirs offered a 40-piece collection of California ceramics from the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, which complements the museum’s holdings from earlier periods.

Attracting gifts is only one benefit of gaining state-of-the-art exhibition space, but it’s a very important asset, Nelson says. And even if the new building is only the beginning of a new chapter in the museum’s life, it marks the realization of a dream. “The community has been thinking about this and working on it for quite a long while, so we are thrilled that it has turned out so beautifully,” he says.

*

“ROOMS WITH A VIEW,” Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Dates: Sept. 24-March 18. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Prices: Adults, $5; seniors and students, $4; children younger than 12, free. Phone: (562) 439-2119.