the great white hope

Last weekend, the BF and I made a fast appearance in ATL, in town for a meeting about his budding dotcom biz. The trip didn't afford much social or recreation time, but I did make a point of seeing the newly expanded High Museum of Art.
It should be noted here that although I no longer live in ATL, I still feel a great deal of ownership toward the High, which fundamentally changed the way I saw the world as a child. I won't make one of those sweeping statements like, "The High made me an artist," but it certainly provided a fertile creative soil from which many of my adult artistic inspirations sprang. I first toured Richard Meier's sparkling white palace on the hill in 1983, the year of its completion. I didn't know how new it was at the time; I was in third grade.
I returned to the High every couple of years after that, then became a member when I moved to ATL after college. In short, the old High felt like a second home to me.
I knew all too well where the pieces would likely fall in the fourth-floor gallery, always reserved for traveling exhibitions. I could take you straight to the freaky Howard Finster shrine that no one ever talked about, and would even suffer through the endless (and, to my mind, mostly pointless) chambers of decorative arts when friends were in town and seeing it for the first time.
When news came that Renzo Piano had been tapped as the celebrity architect in charge of a $178 million expansion for the museum, I took the news in stride. Change is change; sometimes good, sometimes bad. The erstwhile white box certainly deserved a major makeover for the new millennium.


Touring the expansion last weekend felt like going back to the neighborhood where you grew up, only to find that different people live there. I do admire the new piazza connecting the High with the Memorial Arts Building. JP wisely pointed out that Piano's true success lies in completely erasing what once was there, and he's right: I can scarecely recall the former space. The new public space, albeit a trifle threadbare, does create a wonderful new unity between the various components of the Arts Center.
The piazza reminded me of a mini Lincoln Center, no doubt due to my many recent visits there. I'm not sure what purpose the new Anne Cox Chambers wing serves, but it's pretty to look at. Ditto for the new entrance in the Wieland Pavilion. The space, not quite grand, suceeds at only being open. Perhaps it's a nice change from the claustrophobic ticketing area in the old High, but the new entrance aches for ... something.

Moving the main entrance to the new Wieland Pavillion also makes the still-gorgeous atrium in the old museum something of an afterthought. I kept thinking that the Meier building has been put out to pasture. Poor Howard Finster, now confined to a dark corner upstairs.
The whole fourth floor of the old building will be forever haunted for me. As I walk through, I see ghosts of former exhibitions. Wasn't Picasso's Three Musicians once here? Remember the Rockwells, which I expected to hate but instead relished? Is this the same hallway where we saw The Machine Age?
By contrast, the contemporary galleries at the top of the new Wieland wing do sparkle. The circular skylights made me smile, and I enjoyed the flow of the space — reminiscent of the modern stuff at the Met.
Of course, the paint's still wet on the renovation, and only time will tell how the new building will age. I'd like to see the atrium used for some grand and cutting-edge installation, something on the scale of Matthew Barney climbing the Guggenheim. Ditto for the piazza, which deserves more than a vacuum.

I realize that my assesment of the new High is colored by nostalgia, and probably comes across like an old man bemoaning horse and carriage days. So be it. I'm happy to see the old girl grow. It's different, yes. It's not my High anymore, but then again, it never really was to begin with.