Pratiksha Shome
Sometimes, all an institution needs to flourish is a strong permanent collection display; no special exhibitions are required. One example is the Albright-Knox Gallery, which has since reopened as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum after having been closed for four years.
The museum is relying on its treasure-filled assets to draw tourists rather than opening with a blockbuster. Those collections are well-stocked with modern and postwar art, and they have recently added contemporary jewels as well. Nearly all of the 400+ works presently on display at the museum, which has more than doubled in size as a result of a new building for artwork from the last roughly seven decades, are from the permanent collection.
The AKG has often only shown a few pieces from its collection, including Pablo Picasso’s La Toilette (1906), a picture of a naked woman in front of a mirror being held by a dressed servant. (The museum’s board fired its first director, A. Conger Goodyear, for purchasing the piece in 1926; Goodyear eventually assisted in the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art.) The AKG’s masterpieces, however, largely remained in storage while special exhibitions were on view, despite the fact that several of them held enormously significant positions in art history.
It is now the exact reverse. Joan Mitchell’s masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1956), which she recounted painting in a renowned Irving Sandler essay, hangs beside important works by Jackson Pollock and others. Additionally, there is a magnificent self-portrait by Frida Kahlo here, along with well-known works by Paul Gauguin, Giacomo Balla, and Georges Seurat. All 33 of the Clyfford Still paintings in the collection have a floor dedicated to them in the museum’s enlargement, and many of them now appear better than ever.
Source: ARTnews
