When the doors to the treasure house are thrown open, discrimination is not a viable option. There is only the slow walk through its many chambers, the visitor stunned at the heaped up glories. And so it is with the Yale University Art Gallery, now reconfigured and expanded on a grand scale. It is a display of understandable, if ferocious, excess. This is, after all, a chance to drag a little less than everything out of the cabinets and storage lockers in which some objects have languished for decades. I myself have once seen, arranged like muskets in an armory, a long rank of 18th century Chippendale furniture pieces in a dimly lit Yale cellar.

Left: View of the Bela  Lyon Pratt Gallery through the wrought iron gates in the Old Yale Art Gallery building (1928). The gallery houses the 100,000 piece coin and medal collection and study room. artes fine arts magazine

There is an art of possession being documented here; see what belongs to us. It is, in a way, the answer to Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, where all that remains of the great king’s works are two stone legs and a damaged portrait head lying in the desert sand. But those fragments, of course, are the stuff of museums. 

Right: View of American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, Yale University Art Gallery. © Elizabeth Felicella, 2012

There are no revelations of masterworks that have not been already on display, though some re-attributions have emerged from recent attentive curating. But it was not as if the museum had been waiting to announce a lost Caravaggio that there had simply never been room for in any previous exhibition. The discovery here is of a scope and depth to the collection that has now been made visible outside of the digital catalogue.

The irony is that the result of the renovation is more of a 19th century museum than it was immediately before, and not just because of the wainscoting and mullioned windows, in what was once the original art school and gallery building which dates from 1866. The entire ensemble of spaces has a transcendent cabinet of curiosities feel to it, given its thoroughgoing integration of various media in every historical period and cultural setting. It is as if a natural history of art is being composed here, heightened by its newly expanded assemblage of African works and its even more recent acquisition of significant Indo-Pacific materials in a gallery all their own.

But the two most compelling installations are the temporary ones. One is the Société Anonyme collection which is mostly settled into an entirely new upper gallery with a billowed skylight which re-imagines the same features of the earliest building. The works gathered here flare through the room like a lit fuse, from Duchamp’s glass machine on the edge of motion to a Brancusi bird at the end of it, and three Piet Mondrian geometries to plot the space between them. The other display, entitled “Once Removed,” in the first floor gallery of the 1953 Louis Kahn building with its windows exposed as they have not been for several previous exhibitions (though their definition of the space was one of the great rediscoveries of the Kahn building restoration that marked the beginning of this expansive project). The objects gathered here push out against the edges of the now visible street, employing new and invigorating ways of realizing dimension and scale and animation.

Left: View of Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Galleries, Yale University Art Gallery. Photograph by Stephen Kobasa 

But while nostalgia over the museum’s previous layout may seem like a quibbling exercise, there are certain losses that deserve noting. One them is of an intimacy of character that set the gallery apart from larger museums. Entire histories found their way into uncrowded smaller rooms, largely as the result of the care in which choices were made. Because of the limited space, what was on view always read as deliberate and precise; the architectural limitations enforced selectivity. Of course, once the lavish exuberance of these opening installations begins to be reduced and balanced, that same quality may well characterize these new, grander spaces as well.

Near right: Robert Mangold, Plana/Figuring Series (double panel), 1993; far right: Judith Shea, (nearest pair) Shock and Awe,( in rear) Twins, mixed media (2010). 

One surprise is how the memorial characteristic common to all such collections comes to the surface in the context of such a grand opening. Major donors receive their justifiable thanks in inscriptions of some prominence. But their are smaller notations, as well. The labels which identify the gifts are also often a catalogue of the dead, graceful remembrances that include the presentation from the gallery’s director, Jock Reynolds, of a 1939 Tiffany compact which belonged to his mother, and there on a lower shelf, a wonderful curiosity of a Victorian napkin ring given by my father in my mother’s memory. She had collected it herself. And it is the pageant of such lives in love with art, recalled in these assembled gifts, that is the real treasure of this place.

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer