Heights of the Himalayas

When the Rubin Museum of Art opens its doors this fall, visitors will have a choice: Start at the bottom and ascend chronologically through eight centuries of Himalayan art. Or take the elevator to the top and descend the grand spiral staircase -- just like the old days, when the building housed Barneys clothing store.

Either way, veteran shoppers who frequented the firm’s former emporium in Chelsea will note that the lingerie department, with its natural light and high ceiling, is now a particularly dramatic showcase for artworks meant to nourish spirits and inspire faith.

Goodbye, panties, bras and nightgowns. Hello, buddhas, monks and saints.

Or as museum founders Donald and Shelley Rubin might put it, goodbye, shmattes for the ego; hello, art for the heart. Above all, the New York collectors who have spent $60 million to create the museum, including $22 million to buy the building, want their guests to fall in love with Himalayan art, just as they did when they bought their first Tibetan painting.

Thirty years later, they have amassed what’s said to be the world’s largest collection of tangkas -- Tibetan icons painted on fabric so that they can be easily rolled up and moved -- amid a broad survey of Himalayan paintings, sculptures and decorative objects representing the vast region that stretches from Pakistan to China. About 1,000 of these artworks have been transferred to the museum; hundreds of others remain in the Rubins’ private collection.

“We made some sort of connection with the art that is not explicable,” Shelley Rubin says. “No one could have imagined that we would become one of the world’s largest collectors of Himalayan art.”

The museum -- to be launched Oct. 2 -- is an improbable institution. And the handsomely refurbished 70,000-square-foot building at the corner of 17th Street and 7th Avenue isn’t the half of it. Despite its mandala-like floor plan and symbolic detailing, including a bronze cloud-motif mural in the lobby and metal door fittings inspired by Himalayan iconography, the museum is more than a spectacular packaging job.

“This is probably the first museum in the Western world devoted entirely to the art of the Himalayas,” says Pratapaditya Pal, a leading authority on Himalayan art who led the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s department of Indian and Southeast Asian art for 25 years and recently cataloged the Norton Simon Museum’s Asian art collection. “There’s no question that the museum will be a very significant contribution.”

It began with a 19th century Tibetan painting of a female deity that caught the couple’s attention at the Navin Kumar Gallery. Aimless window-shoppers on Madison Avenue, they went home with a $1,500 painting and a depleted savings account. MultiPlan Inc., the managed health-care network that would make a fortune for them, was a fledgling enterprise at that point.

“We hung the painting in our bedroom and it really began to radiate,” Donald Rubin says. “When you meet someone you love, you don’t look for a resume or a recommendation. We didn’t know anything about Tibet or Buddhism, but the painting grew on us. We were very connected to the imagery, the beauty, the dynamism. Six months later, we bought another one.”

Those two purchases led to many more as the Rubins acquired more disposable income. Art filled the walls of their home and MultiPlan’s offices. As the company prospered and required more office space, additional walls were available.

They had wandered into a sphere of precisely coded, intricately detailed art that serves spiritual, educational and social needs. Populated by a cast of characters representing opposing forces, the artworks function as intermediaries between deities and humans who struggle to deal with their desires and find more meaning in their lives.

“The whole thing sort of exploded,” Shelley Rubin says. “Donald is an obsessive collector.”

To art professionals, he seemed to come out of nowhere, says Pal, who got a memorable introduction to the collection in the late 1980s.

“Even for someone who had devoted his whole career to Himalayan art, it was a shock to visit the office,” Pal says. “All the walls and partitions were lined with tangkas, more than a Tibetan monastery would show. I was totally overwhelmed.”

By then, the Rubins had learned a lot about Himalayan art while buying at auction and from dealers all over the world. They still make no claims of expertise and defer to their staff on specifics of art history and iconography, but they have developed a passionate, humanistic view of the art they collect.

“People do art,” Shelley Rubin says. “It’s part of just being alive. We all, in our various ways throughout time and around the world, use art to express our hopes, our questions, our fears. Himalayan art is wide and deep. It’s iconographically driven, it’s story-driven, it’s deliberately done to transmit the culture, the religion, the history, the stories of people. Because of that, it’s a very rich tapestry on which to bring people together.”

Their first means of spreading the word was a website: himalayanart.org. Funded by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, it was established in 1996 to create a comprehensive database. Currently exhibiting about 20,000 images from a global array of sources, it’s housed on lower Fifth Avenue with a related but independent nonprofit organization: the Tibetan Buddhist Research Center, which maintains an encyclopedic database of Himalayan literature and history on its website, tbrc.org.

But even as the virtual museum grew on the Internet, the Rubins began to toy with the idea of a real museum.

“We amassed a large collection purely out of love and not out of economic consideration,” Donald Rubin says. “And then we got to a stage of life when we began to think about what to do with it. We talked about giving it to an existing museum, but we never had a serious discussion with anyone because we knew it would be buried in storage.”

The solution, they thought, was to establish their own museum, so they began looking for a building. The first contenders didn’t work out, but in summer 1998, when Donald was on his way to meet Shelley at Lincoln Center, he saw a bankruptcy sale sign on Barneys.

“I called the real estate agent and went to see it about two weeks later,” he says. “When I walked down that spiral marble staircase, I decided to bid on the building at auction and turn it into a museum. It took another 10 days to get my wife into the building, but when she saw it, she said, ‘Go for it.’ ”

“We both felt that it was meant to be a museum and that this was the right moment,” Shelley Rubin says. “In terms of interest in Asia and spirituality and people who would like to bring the world together as opposed to ripping it apart, it was the right time.”

But their vision turned into a six-year project.

“My thought was to have this open in two years,” Donald Rubin says. “I looked at it as a businessman rather than someone who knew anything. I didn’t realize that it takes two years for the architects to come up with the first drawings.”

The architect is Richard Blinder of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP, the New York firm that transformed a series of six-story brownstone apartments into Barneys in the mid-1980s and renovated Grand Central Station in 1998. While converting the defunct clothing store into a museum, Blinder preserved the glass-front atrium with its hallmark staircase, conceived by French designer Andree Putman. In collaboration with the museum design team Imrey Culbert and graphic designer Milton Glaser, Blinder created an elegant ambience with accents of cherry and mahogany throughout the galleries and a red, yellow, green and blue color scheme inspired by art in the collection.

The first floor of the museum is a colonnaded hall with vaulted ceilings that accommodates a cafe, shop and visitor services. Most of the galleries fan out from the staircase on upper floors. The lower level contains a photography gallery, a lounge, a classroom and a multipurpose performance space. The museum also maintains a library, in its office complex.

Soon after buying the building, the Rubins hired Lisa Schubert, a veteran administrator at the Museum of Modern Art, to oversee the project and direct programs and external affairs. Caron Smith, an Asian art specialist and former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Asia Society in New York and the San Diego Museum of Art, joined the staff last May as the Rubin Museum’s director and chief curator.

Schubert, who had developed a keen interest in Tibetan art and Buddhism, says she was attracted to the challenge of getting things off the ground at a start-up institution. The museum will explore an aesthetic world that is mysterious to many Americans, but she and Smith hope to make it accessible through a lively program of exhibitions and educational outreach.

“There’s a fear of not knowing, a reticence that people have,” Smith says, “so we want to make it as comfortable and easy as possible to find your way into these paintings and sculptures. We’ll have a map that shows people where the Himalayas are and help people make connections between different cultures and religious traditions.”

As the museum becomes part of Chelsea’s booming art scene, not far from dozens of contemporary art galleries, it will add something new to the New York area’s mix of Asian art. The Newark Museum of Art, in nearby New Jersey, has a long tradition of collecting and showing Tibetan art and ethnographic material. In Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art claims the region’s best collection of pre-16th century Tibetan art. Asia Society, a nonprofit educational institution, presents a variety of exhibitions with an emphasis on contemporary art.

In official terms, the Rubin Museum of Art aims to collect, preserve, study and display the ancient art of the Himalayas and explore its relation to the art of other cultures. It will also help people deal with their inner demons, Donald Rubin says, as they confront a metaphoric mirror of humanity packed with wrathful and peaceful beings.

One thing the museum will not do is focus on the politics of Tibet and its subjugation by China.

“We are building an art museum,” Donald Rubin says. “That’s our mission. Although many of us have our own opinions, that’s not what the museum is about. People are no better than the culture they have, and preserving that culture is very important.”