Met fills Bauhaus jewel with modern works, to complement New York’s incredibly rich art scene
Director says new venue will not compete with existing galleries but instead will contextualise modern and contemporary art, beginning with its opening exhibitions
New York is adding to its glittering portfolio of art museums with a new gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art – The Met Breuer, which opens with a retrospective of a little-known Indian artist.
The gallery is housed in the modernist icon that Hungarian-born Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer built in 1966 on Madison Avenue for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which last year moved downtown to a new site.
When the Breuer (it rhymes with “coyer”) opens to the public next Friday, it will become the third site for the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art – the city’s most visited museum. Last year it welcomed a record 6.3 million visitors to its Fifth Avenue address and Cloisters celebrating Medieval art in northern Manhattan.
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“This is a masterpiece of mid-century architecture and we are going to be reactivating it with a new curatorial spirit,” says Met director Thomas Campbell, calling it a “significant moment for the city”.
The project is the brainchild of billionaire philanthropist Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics legend Estée, who has endowed the Met with millions of dollars to further its modern and contemporary art and scholarship.
His gifts plug a gap in the Met’s otherwise rich 5,000-year history of art, even if America’s cultural capital is already heaving with contemporary and modern art. Besides the Whitney and a host of smaller galleries, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim have some of the finest collections in the world.
“What our peers do is show modern and contemporary art in the context of the modern and contemporary. What the Met does, uniquely, is that we have the historical traditions that modern and contemporary artists are either embracing or reacting against,” says Campbell. It’s “a different experience”, he adds.