Smartly renovated Princeton University Art Museum reopens; it was worth the five-year wait

RICHARD BARNES

The northwest facade of The Princeton University Art Museum.

On one wall hangs hundreds of ceramic squares, each about as big as the palm of a human hand. Each one is slightly different, pressed and patted into its shape through gentle applications of manual force. Just across from this display is a stark photograph: a torn landscape dotted with ghost lights. They are very different pieces in different mediums, created in different places and different times.

But from the moment you step between them, they begin to talk. They speak as works of art do, sharing implications and resonances, humming on a frequency band that appears on no radio. They amplify each others’ transmissions of anguish and hope. They seem to exist in the eerie aftermath of some monstrous act of violence. And they would, I believe, make these feelings palpable even if we did not learn from the curator’s notes that the ceramic work is a memorial to those killed by Mexican drug cartels, and the photograph captures the battlefield at Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day in American history.

RICHARD BARNES

A display case at The Princeton University Art Museum.

This dialogue happens in one of the many handsome hallways at the Princeton University Art Museum, which reopens with a 24-hour open house on Oct. 31. (It closed during the pandemic, and remained closed for renovations, until now.) The building, designed by David Adjaye and lead architect Cooper Robertson, is stunning. Its outstanding sight lines, ample light and gray stone walls may remind you of the grandeur of New York’s Breuer Building, which has been home to The Whitney, The Met and The Frick. PUAM could get by on its beauty, just as the richness of the collection that hangs on its walls — Monet!, Warhol!, Leonora Carrington!, Chinese landscapes by the peerless Shitao! — would make the 146,000-square-foot museum a must to visit for any art lover.

But beautiful as it is, the new PUAM is not built for sensation alone. It is made for conversation. Princeton University has made a space where works of art can answer each other.

Other institutions around the country have tried to do this. Those efforts have mostly flopped. Shuffling permanent collections to generate ironic juxtapositions often feels cheeky and ahistorical. Invitations to visiting artists to rearrange staid galleries and slap works in proximity that don’t ordinarily go together have led to shows that are provocative but obvious. PUAM curator Juliana Ochs Dweck has dodged those snares by carefully modulating each departure from expectation and thinking, hard, about the placement and significance of every piece and the total impression given by each vista.

If that sounds academic … oh boy, it is. The sheer force of the brain waves you will feel as you wander around these galleries may knock you back on your heels. But I have heard a rumor that some pedagogy is done at Princeton. In a time of crisis for higher education, the museum reflects that bold commitment to the value of knowledge — and the value of thinking. Dweck and her team have reminded us what a great university museum should be: smart, perturbing, rigorous, fire-starting. Unlike other institutional museums that prefer crowd-pleasing gestures, PUAM assumes it has plenty to teach us.

Sometimes the lesson comes through subtle immersion. The European galleries seem at first like any other collection of masterpieces and near-masterpieces you would find in a great museum. But they have been arranged to maximize crosstalk and push, sometimes gently and sometimes firmly, against each other. The curators want you to think about power and how it is exerted, containment and taming of the land through representation of it, and the reverberations from the encounters between nation and nation, and continent and continent.

Johann Friedrich Waldeck’s “The Artist Carried by a Sillero Over the Chiapas from Palenque to Ocosingo, Mexico.”

A piece as straightforward as Henry Cleenewerck’s pretty, superficially placid 1864 landscape of Santiago de Cuba is given a fresh context when hung next to Johann Friedrich Waldeck’s hair-raising 1833 oil “The Artist Carried by a Sillero Over the Chiapas from Palenque to Ocosingo, Mexico.” In Waldeck’s painting, a muscular brown-skinned man, aided only by a walking stick, ascends a steep incline with an occupied chair on his back. The porter is barefoot; the passenger wears smart leather shoes. He is comfortable, but also utterly dependent on the native carrying him, and he is in a position of great precariousness. Should the man doing the hard work falter, they are both tumbling down the rock face together.

Many other pieces ask similar questions, examining interdependence between societies, and connections across time, miles and states of mind. Michael Menchaca’s thrilling “La Raza Cósmica 20XX” is impossible to miss: it is a sequential grid of colorful square screen prints, heavy with ancient symbolism and spiritual overtones, tucked into frames busy with emojis. His scenes pair astonished European settlers with half-human, half-animal figures and bipedal beasts that have stepped straight out of indigenous American cosmology. As the series progresses, intermixing between Menchaca’s characters lead to ever more outrageous fusions. Cellphones and corporate logos infiltrate the landscape, and patterns associated with native dress become screensavers.

You don’t need to know that Menchaca is sending up the colonial-era casta paintings that classified humans by race, because the reverberations of this piece go way beyond satire. He is asking questions about how we can manage to live together and learn from each other, and about the complicated ways we may be carrying the sins of the past into the digital future.

RICHARD BARNES

Hugh Hayden’s “America,” at The Princeton University Art Museum.

At PUAM, parts of the modern museum that feel decorative are stirred up. Everybody who has bought a ticket to The Met and similar institutions has walked (sometimes briskly) through the galleries showcasing antique furniture. Princeton gives visitors to their version of that gallery a reason to get stuck — perhaps literally. Hugh Hayden’s “America” is a life-sized mesquite dining room set covered with vicious thorns. They poke out from the table and the backs of the chairs like shark fins severing the surface of the sea. This strikes me as a harsh but fair reflection of the nation’s present attitude, and our disinclination to welcome strangers to our kitchens and living rooms.

In the shadow of “America,” the varnished chests of drawers and chairs begin to feel forbidding, too. We don’t always need barbs on park benches to dissuade our neighbors from getting comfortable. Sometimes a cold, shiny surface and obvious markers of elevated social class will do the trick just as well.

Even the eternal Greco-Roman urn doesn’t get away without comment. In a classical gallery that features pieces from millennia ago, there is a newcomer with attitude to burn. Roberto Lugo’s “The Man Who Carried the Ice Box on His Back Up the Mountain: Alberto Ayala” is a freshly minted amphora with colors and contours similar to those on containers unearthed by archaeologists. The images painted on the urn’s surface, however, wouldn’t have been recognizable to a Spartan: fire hydrants, power lines, a graffiti-covered wall, an ambulance, and Afro picks. Lugo’s urban amphora stares down its classical predecessor from the opposite side of the room. The ceramicist’s struggle is not the same as that of the spear-carrying warriors of antiquity. But his characters have their own fierce nobility. They are engaged in quotidian drama that merits enshrinement.

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU

Toshiko Takaezu’s “Sunrise Egg.”

Of course, it is easier to come up with startling combinations when you have an enormous permanent collection to draw from. PUAM is loaded with artifacts, and the curators and designers aren’t shy about that. “Princeton Collects,” one of two inaugural temporary exhibitions at the museum, is an unrepentant flex: the show spotlights 150 of 2,000 first-rate artworks donated on the occasion of the announcement of the new museum. (The other one, “Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay,” is a beautiful, preternaturally balanced ceramics show that deserves a review of its own.)

The “Collects” show spills out from the spacious special exhibition gallery to a chamber nearby, and struts its stuff at every turn, flashing a gorgeous Richard Diebenkorn portrait of a young woman at us, inviting us to bask in sumptuous abstract works by John Marin and others, and showing its Jersey colors with a breathtaking George Inness painting of a moonrise over a lake.

Those who remember the old Princeton University Art Museum may wonder how much of an improvement this facility could be. The former Museum was pretty nice, wasn’t it? It was. Thus it should be significant when I assure you that the new PUAM leaves it in the dust. It is the difference between a chamber ensemble and a symphony: Where once there were several strong voices in concert, now there is room for a multitude. Almost all of the art at PUAM is on a single floor, but a big, broad, generous floor it is, with plenty of interesting alleys and angles to explore. Each chamber has a distinct personality, even as every curator and sub-curator has stayed true to the mission of placing pieces in dialogue. The Asian art rooms, in particular, have no parallel in the Garden State: Nowhere else can you see 19th century inked masterpieces like Tatsunobu’s “Beautiful Scenes of the Four Seasons at a Glance.”

The confidence and intellectual swagger exuded by this museum’s design would be unbearable if it didn’t have the goods. Because it backs up its implicit boasts with first-rate curatorial excellence and brilliant art, PUAM takes its place at the very front rank of art institutions in New Jersey. Best of all, there will be no charges of elitism here: This treasure house is completely free to the public.

You’re welcome to go to school. This time, you’re going to want to stay. You may even be moved to join the discussion.

For information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.

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