Art in a Proper Setting

Here’s a museum question for the art-interested. (Relax. It’s a no-brainer.) Which would you rather have: (a) a great art collection housed in a lousy museum building, or (b) a lousy art collection housed in a great museum building?

If you answered (b), please call your travel agent and book a flight to Bilbao, Spain, for a visit to its building-rich, art-poor branch of the Guggenheim Museum. For art people, a great art collection is the ideal--even if you need to climb to the bottom of a dank and dingy well to see it.

Now, here’s a second question, which is more nuanced. Which would you rather have: (a) a good art collection housed in a lousy museum building, or (b) a good art collection housed in a great museum building?

Question No. 2 arises because it’s the one to ask when assessing December’s stunning announcement that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will tear down most of its Wilshire Boulevard complex to build an extraordinary new structure designed by celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. Why? Because LACMA’s collection is neither great nor lousy.

In a society besotted with lists of “bests” and “worsts,” A-list celebrity or utter oblivion, it’s easy to forget that most public collections fall between those extremes. LACMA has a good collection housed in a lousy museum building--actually, in several lousy museum buildings--but if all goes as planned, it could have a good collection in a great building.

If you didn’t know that LACMA has a good collection, maybe the present dispiriting architectural mess is part of the reason. A great building can show off a good collection to best advantage; a lousy building can drain its vigor.

Encyclopedic in scope, with holdings from most every time and place in world history, the county museum’s collections of American, ancient, Islamic, European, Far Eastern, Indian, Southeast Asian and Modern art have obvious gaps.

They also boast numerous individual examples that are, quite simply, as good as art gets, from Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus” (circa 1630), which puts the putrid smell of death in a startled viewer’s nostrils, and the archetypal word-image conundrum of Surrealist painting, Rene Magritte’s classic “The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe)” (circa 1928-29) to 9th century BC Assyrian reliefs from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II.

Some concentrated categories, such as German Expressionist painting, sculpture and especially graphics, claim astounding depth. For historical breadth, the Shin’enkan collection of more than 300 prime Japanese scrolls and screen paintings from the Edo period (1615-1868) is unsurpassed in the Western world. European Baroque painting has steadily crept into prominence, while the collection of 18th century costumes and textiles can’t be beat in any American museum.

And so on.

No, LACMA does not rival New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But then, neither does any other encyclopedic American museum. (At this late date in the history of art collecting, where supplies have radically dwindled, none can.) Let’s put it this way: LACMA is the nation’s most impressive encyclopedic art museum west of Chicago--and you can toss in most of the South, to boot.

That’s no mean achievement, especially for a museum that’s only been at it in a serious way for about four decades. Koolhaas’ radically new building could make it clear.

Although charged with proposing a new addition, plus a renovation of the existing buildings, the architect chose instead to rethink the entire physical campus. He took a risk in favor of architectural coherence. The clarity of the sweeping result is powerful.

More important, in the process of rethinking the physical plant, Koolhaas also rethought the social dimension in which an encyclopedic art museum in Los Angeles could function in the 21st century. This is what elevates the design into the realm of potential greatness. His building is a tour de force of conceptual verve, one that’s hard to imagine emerging in any other city in the world. That’s why it should be built.

There are two parts to Koolhaas’ revision. One concerns the public image an encyclopedic art museum projects. The other--intimately related--has to do with its organizational structure.

The current LACMA is a palace in a park--a museum motif that’s as old in America as, well, the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan’s Central Park, or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston’s Fenway (both were founded in 1870). “A palace of art, truly, that sits there on the edge of the Park,” Henry James wrote following a visit to the Met in 1907, and within three years Boston’s museum had moved from its original site at Copley Square to the Fenway. James’ assessment could have been repeated ad infinitum in subsequent decades. Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Cleveland, San Francisco, Washington--the motif characterized most American art museum architecture in the 20th century.

Cracks in the palace-in-a-park motif began to be felt after World War II, especially in new museums devoted mostly to Modern art and contemporary culture. By the 1960s, those cracks had become deep fissures. A tense era of social conflict did not look kindly on the civic museum’s established image.

It’s easy to see why. A palace in a park represented the American art museum’s snobby ancestry in the aristocratic European country house, stuffed to the rafters with cultural booty. These museums’ standard Beaux-Arts design, with its neoclassical, Greco-Roman origins, gave the patrician source a democratic veneer. That image was imperative. Born of 19th and early 20th century industrialization and expansionism, and representing the Hellenic idea of being a haven for all the arts, such museums functioned as civic symbols for the ascendance of American democracy.

Still, the democratic facade of Beaux-Arts design could not completely mask a stark reality. Big American art museums were also a plaything for plutocrats, tempered by an aristocratic aura of noblesse oblige, which compels those of high social rank to behave nobly toward their lesser neighbors. Ditto LACMA, which opened in Hancock Park in 1965.

Certainly its William L. Pereira design differed from all its encyclopedic predecessors. With the exception of LACMA, the nation’s important encyclopedic art museums are almost all found in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. Befitting its unusual position, LACMA was the first such American art museum built in a modern style. At least, it seemed to be modern. Clad in marble chips, set atop a podium and hovering above a pool, its original group of colonnaded pavilions is actually Beaux-Arts Classicism with a Modern veneer.

That tentative, superficial style matched the museum’s provisional aim. LACMA trustees trumpeted their determination to become the West Coast Met. (L.A. had already snagged the Brooklyn Dodgers, and a certain local newspaper had announced its goal was “to knock the New York Times off its perch,” so why not?) Pereira’s work emulated Lincoln Center in New York, which began opening in stages in 1962. The fulsome ache to rival Manhattan, while casting futuristic L.A. in its ill-fitting image, was palpable.

It was also provincial, a backhanded declaration of deep cultural insecurity. Like Gilded Age New Yorkers aping European aristocrats, we couldn’t just be ourselves and be good; we had to mimic the reigning establishment to do it. Artists cringed all over town. Some even made art of it.

Edward Ruscha’s incendiary Pop paintings are the supreme examples. His images of Standard Oil gas stations and Norm’s family restaurants blazingly on fire pictured the avant-garde mandate to wreck entrenched “standards and norms.” Meanwhile, the paintings’ formal resemblance to commercial advertisements embodied that subversive aim in aesthetic terms.

So did his graphic mid-’60s painting “The L.A. County Museum of Art on Fire.” In the city of the perpetual future, the picture coyly recalled the bombastic demand to “set fire to the library shelves ... flood the museums” in Filippo Marinetti’s famous 1912 Futurist Manifesto. And nobody could miss the painting’s comical one-liner, which proposed a simple, combustible solution for LACMA’s spanking new yet widely reviled architectural design.

Who could have imagined, before December 2001, that LACMA’s trustees would finally take Ruscha’s advice--at least metaphorically?

Koolhaas’ design for the new LACMA is not final. But his conceptual diagram--on view in the lobby of LACMA’s Ahmanson Building, with the four other architects’ proposals--fulfills the promise of the failed original: LACMA will be an encyclopedic art museum with an authentically progressive building, not a timid, pretentious pastiche. It reads as a radical reinvention of the old motif of a palace in a park. Koolhaas’ version is appropriate to a technologically driven society and to the particular circumstances of L.A. Best of all, it reflects democratic rather than aristocratic culture.

It starts with a bold stroke. The plan slices off Pereira’s buildings at the existing plaza level. Like a memory of what was, it retains the working foundations of the original structures, where staff offices, carpentry shops and other active work spaces are housed. Change within continuity is incarnate.

On top of that comes a new open-air plaza, an authentic civic space that will be the site for cafes, shops, a reconfigured theater and a large exhibition hall for temporary shows. The open, transparent grid of the plaza’s design is a sharp echo of Mies van der Rohe, the great 20th century architect who was notoriously passed over 40 years ago in favor of Pereira for the original LACMA commission. (Koolhaas has dubbed the plaza the Miesian Court.) Mies here returns to Wilshire Boulevard like a friendly ghost.

Finally, raised high on concrete columns above the civic plaza are the galleries for the museum’s collections. Mostly without ceilings, like the galleries at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s congenial, precedent-setting warehouse space in Little Tokyo, the collection rooms are covered by a vaulting roof of translucent, air-filled Mylar, stretched over steel arches.

The image conveyed by this remarkable roof is two-fold. Partly it’s an airy, rolling landscape, which echoes the hills that surround the L.A. Basin. Partly it’s a light-filled, high-tech tent, suitable to our nomadic age and its avid pursuit of cultural tourism.

Koolhaas anchors his savvy, indoor-outdoor palace squarely in the park--without eating up additional green space in park-poor L.A. The current plan calls for wide staircases to ascend from the existing park level to the new civic plaza, whose general transparency allows one to look right through the space. The Hancock Park site, surrounded by apartment buildings, office towers and stores, becomes an instance of distinctive Angeleno urbanity.

Four long, parallel, horizontal expanses lay out the art of Asia, Europe, the Americas and the modern world, side-by-side. The plan reflects LACMA’s reorganization of its curatorial departments into sections based on neutral continental geography, rather than on shifting, Balkanized, socially volatile political units such as pre-Columbian, American--meaning only the U.S.--or Far Eastern art, which is standard practice for encyclopedic museums. The new format, pioneered a decade ago by the Dallas Museum of Art, finds only its second--and potentially more resonant--example at LACMA.

Even when considered geographically, LACMA’s collections retain their strengths and weaknesses, of course, but this is the most inspired, hopeful feature of the project. A new generation of the same plutocrats that built the old LACMA--and every other encyclopedic museum since the Met--will build the new one; but a different political dimension marks the new design. Emphatically horizontal, the entire scheme erases an image of vertical hierarchy that undergirds an outmoded, paternalistic, European philosophy of noblesse oblige. Instead, global cultures are cross-referenced.

From the landscape form of the high-tech tent above to the underground archaeology of the older buildings below, horizontal layering here implies the packed strata of history, rebuking in built form the pernicious myth that Los Angeles hasn’t any. At the same time, the art collection is held dramatically aloft, above the mundane plane of daily experience.

This is not an encyclopedic art museum tricked out with a moribund building vocabulary of Doric columns and Greek pediments, Postmodern or otherwise. Instead, it physically embodies the distinct condition of art in a democratic society. Quality as an artistic pursuit coincides with equality as a social aim. Think of the plan as a democratic vista in concrete and Mylar--one that celebrates history while working toward vivid social aims.

The genius of Koolhaas’ plan is that it manages to build on two landmarks of museum architecture in an unprecedented way. A cadenced, rectilinear building set atop a podium is itself a classical motif, famously employed by architect and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1820s for his design of Berlin’s Altes Museum. Schinkel’s Greek Revival style set the typological standard for America’s encyclopedic art museums.

Schinkel was pointedly modernized by Mies in the 1960s for the design of Berlin’s New National Gallery--a sleek, Machine Age temple of steel and glass. Although Mies’ crystalline machine is an architectural masterpiece, it’s also a dreadful place to look at art. The collections are hidden downstairs inside the podium. The glass-walled gallery for temporary exhibitions above is one of those flexible, all-purpose spaces that are so accommodating as to be nearly useless.

Koolhaas’ 21st century design puts art back on the pedestal where Schinkel and Mies had rightly exalted it. Yet it also manifests a luminous democratic faith in social equality that eluded them.

The creation of distinctive, cosmopolitan civic space is a worthy goal for any public institution--not least a public institution dedicated to art. But that’s something that has repeatedly eluded LACMA during 40 expensive years of building, renovation and additions. Now, it seems to be within tantalizing reach.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.