A Haven for Modern Art in Buffalo Returns, Doubling in Size and Ambition

Sometimes, all you need to thrive as an institution is a good permanent collection hang, no special exhibitions necessary. The Albright-Knox Gallery, now reopened as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum after a four-year closure, stands as proof.

Rather than kicking things off with a blockbuster, the museum is counting on its treasure-filled holdings to lure visitors. Those holdings are rich in modern and postwar art, and have now been filled in with contemporary jewels too. The permanent collection accounts for almost all the 400-plus works currently on view at the museum, which has doubled in size, thanks to a new building for art of the past seven or so decades.

The AKG has almost always exhibited a select few works from its holdings, among them Pablo Picasso’s La Toilette (1906), a painting featuring a nude woman before a mirror held by a clothed servant. (The museum’s board ejected its first director, A. Conger Goodyear, for acquiring the work in 1926; Goodyear went on to help found the Museum of Modern Art a few years later.) But, for the most part, while special exhibitions went on display, the AKG’s masterpieces languished in storage, despite a number of them occupying outsize art-historical importance.

Now, it is the opposite. Joan Mitchell’s George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold (1956), a gem of Abstract Expressionism that she described painting in a famed Irving Sandler essay, rubs shoulders with key works by Jackson Pollock and the like. A splendid Frida Kahlo self-portrait is here too, as are well-known pieces by Paul Gauguin, Giacomo Balla, and Georges Seurat. A whole floor of the museum’s expansion is devoted to all 33 Clyfford Still paintings in the collection, many of which look better than ever here.

OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu was put in charge of the project, the latest in a series of architectural developments across the AKG’s 161-year history. The museum retains its Neoclassical facade from 1905, courtesy Edward Broadhead Green, and its modernist addition from the ’60s, courtesy Gordon Bunshaft. The 1905 building has been given new life. Its original staircase out front, removed during the Bunshaft project, is now back—a gesture that renews the building’s majesty—and the galleries have been given fresh wood floors.

To all this, Shigematsu has also added another three-story structure, bringing the total exhibition space to 50,000 square feet—the same area on offer at the Whitney Museum in New York. This new building is glassy and boxy, a sharp clash with the Green building that’s fascinating to admire from the outside. But, as of press time, it was far from finished on the inside.

The Shigematsu structure, formally named the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building after a local collector and donor, was still under construction when it was revealed to the press last week. In remarks to journalists, AKG director Janne Sirén claimed the building was 90 percent done, but the true number seemed far less than that.

A gorgeous, spiraling staircase that hugs the building’s exterior before closing in on a central column was peopled mainly by workers who were busily adding rails. A gallery devoted to Nordic art—the first of its kind in a North American museum, according to AKG leaders—held no art to speak of. A Lap-See Lam moving-image work debuting in a black-box space set aside for media art didn’t make it on view either. Dust covered many surfaces outside the galleries, the bathrooms weren’t open, and seating hadn’t been installed.

The good news is that the Lam work is expected to open in mid-July, along with the rest of the 30,000-square-foot Gundlach Building, which will welcome the public briefly this month before closing again until its official inauguration. The bad news is that the delay has caused some unwanted interruptions within the galleries.

There is now, for example, a sleek bridge winding around some trees that connects the Gundlach Building to the main building. But journalists weren’t allowed to walk across it, and in an otherwise elegant gallery filled with standout works by postwar giants, there was a wooden protrusion that closed off one side of the bridge. A sign promised that the overpass was coming soon.

It’s difficult, then, to fully assess Shigematsu’s Gundlach Building in its current, still incomplete state. What can be said, however, is that its galleries, which appear to be mostly done, look great. They’re big, airy, and luminous, the kind of grand spaces that make abstractions like the Still paintings pop. They’re flattering too, for less sizable works.

The Shigematsu structure’s glass exterior finds its parallel inside the main building, where there’s now a permanent Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann installation called Common Sky. The work features a flurry of mirrored triangles that form a canopy. They’re assembled in such a way that they appear to be getting sucked into, or to be emanating from, a hole in the floor—a neat allusion to the spot where a tree once stood in a courtyard from Bunshaft’s addition. Eliasson and Behmann’s gleaming triangles offer plenty for contemplators and selfie-takers alike.

So too, does a Lucas Samaras mirrored cube from the permanent collection that sits toward the entrance. You can enter it, perambulate around a glass table and chair, and see your image double and redouble. It’s in a dedicated space that charges no admission fees. A word to the wise: if the queues outside David Zwirner’s Yayoi Kusama show are a preview, expect lengthy lines to form for the Samaras piece upon the AKG’s reopening.

Inside the galleries, the first work viewers see is one of the first pieces that the AKG ever acquired: an 1859 Albert Bierstadt painting showing sailors manning boats on the choppy waters of Capri. Pre-modern art has long been a sore point for the AKG, which in 2007 faced a mass outcry for selling off its valuable Renaissance art. Much of the hang is still modern and contemporary art, but a good deal of space is given to art from the 18th and 19th centuries too, suggesting that in its newest iteration, the AKG is trying harder to strike the right balance with its collection. For the most part, it succeeds.

There’s much to admire by William Hogarth, Jacques-Louis David, Honoré Daumier, and many other 18th- and 19th century artists of note. I’ll admit I’m partial to an ominous Gustave Courbet, Le Source de la Loue (ca. 1864), that depicts a gaping black hole opening onto the sea, the surf rendered in thick white paint applied with a palette knife. But it’s also worth lingering over some lesser-known oddities from the era, like the bizarre Jehan Georges Vibert painting The Marvelous Sauce (ca. 1890), a send-up of the Catholic Church’s corruption set entirely in a kitchen.

This is a conservative hang, in that it follows the commonly understood art-historical progression of European avant-gardes: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Suprematism, Surrealism, and so on, with a few offshoots in between. That lineage is what museums like MoMA were built on, but the AKG curators wisely don’t make too much of it. There’s no wall text elucidating the -isms and few explanatory captions about most works altogether. If you know, you know. If you don’t, there’s still plenty to enjoy.

Curatorially, this hang is not hugely revisionary, although if you look carefully, there are some small tweaks—a mention, for example, that Gauguin was “a much older white man in a position to take advantage of his subject” in a painting of a nude Tahitian 13-year-old girl. The more obvious change is the welcome inclusion of women artists from the modern and postwar eras.

Alongside an experiment in abstraction by Francis Picabia, there’s a Sonia Delaunay work, made in collaboration with the poet Blaise Cendrars, that features a long, folded piece of paper, one side of it lined with curlicuing shapes. Magda Cordell McHale, a Hungarian-born artist associated with the British Pop movement, is here represented by a discomfiting painting of a red-brown form recalling a bloodied carcass; her painting neatly recalls a Chaim Soutine painting showing a cut of beef that’s also on view here.

Verena Loewensberg, a Swedish painter new to me, outshines all the other male Op artists on view with a white canvas accompanied by sharply colored frames that intersect, causing the work to appear to twist before your eyes. Marisol—the AKG owns hundreds of works by her, and is now readying a retrospective—is literally placed at the center of the Pop gallery, where works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein seem to orbit around her sculpture of a stubby figure, along with a chair that mysteriously has a sculpted hand atop it.

Things get more interesting in the Gundlach Building, where the hang will change more frequently. It’s here that the museum has put its more recent acquisitions, including a standout painting by the Niagara Falls–based Jay Carrier, The Hand of the Devil Was Warm in the Night (1985), which features part of that text scrawled above a person in the skin of a fox. This image bewitches as it melts into abstraction, and it rhymes nicely with works by more well-known names from the era, like Martin Wong, Louise Bourgeois, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There are also world-class rarities here, like a Simone Forti hologram that shows the artist dancing across a warped plane.

The third floor, which is largely free of any walls at all, is where the AKG is showing off some of its shiniest new works, including a giant tire ensconced in chains by Arthur Jafa, and a Simone Leigh sculpture depicting an armless Black female figure whose skirt is formed from raffia. This is a telling of recent art history formed by artists who cross cultural borders, an effect driven home by Tiffany Chung’s reconstructing an exodus history: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases (2017), an embroidered map of the world in which lines of string connect the United States to Asia.

But it is the awe-inducing Still show on the first floor, curated by Cathleen Chaffee, that shows the Shigematsu building’s full promise. Across these 33 paintings, one can trace Still’s evolution from an able maker of chunky abstractions to a master of Abstract Expressionism. 1951-E, one of the works from his career’s apex, is a field of mustard yellow interrupted by a thin red slit, like an incision in jaundiced flesh. It occupies a full to wall to itself, a luxury Still paintings are rarely afforded.

The galleries here are cathedral-like, with tons of unobstructed floor from which to contemplate these gigantic paintings from afar. When sun pours in from the outside, these spaces live up to their promise of offering something akin to a spiritual experience. Few will regret making the pilgrimage.