Botta's Building
The largest work of art at the new Bechtler Museum is not the saucy Niki St.Phalle sculpture outside, or the Sol Lewitt mural within, but the building itself. This is by Mario Botta, whose work won international recognition in the 1980's for his combination of monumentalism and fanatic fine tooling. Botta, who designed his first building when he was sixteen, studied with Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Carlo Scarpa, three masters of proportion, gifted with imbuing a small building the heft of a large one. This is a building that I suspect Louis Kahn in particular would have liked, recognizing in its proportions something that goes back to the gates of Ur.
One of the more piquant pleasures of a Botta building – if I may speak from having been in just two of them – is seeing how Botta overcomes the charges of brutalism, implicit in his hulking profiles and truncated masses, with wizardly feats of engineering. Both the Bechtler and the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts are covered with an aluminum grid upon which are suspended a cast concrete or terracotta cladding. These give the buildings a subtle array of surfaces for light and shadow to play upon, so that from certain angles and at certain times of day each building appears to shimmer. The Bechtler will sometimes have the faintest hint of the first wafture of smoke; at other times the look of rusticated stone. It gives this tough little building the quality of hyperbolic buffness. So does the witty, amphora-like quality of the column supporting the fourth floor overlap, like a caryatid who was once a girlfriend of Picasso.
Inside, the entrance feels immense without being intimidating. The masterful use of
natural and artificial light envelopes you – literally – in an atmosphere of grand luxe. The floors are stacked as concisely as origami and as cunningly as a mirror-fugue. The Bechtler has already been referred to as being "crystalline," by which is meant that the four floors reflect, refract, reverse, and reiterate each other. All of the floors above the atrium are visible from it, the second floor wrapping around the first, metamorphosizing at one end into an outdoor sculpture garden above the first floor cafe. From the third floor, the sculpture garden visible at yet another angle, adds a note of intimacy to a view of the atrium which would otherwise sheer into vertigo. (This is a neat vantage to see how the floors "rhyme" with each other.) From the main gallery on the fourth floor the three floors below can be seen as if from the apex of a pyramid. At each stage of a visit, as you move from floor to floor, the building reveals its facets, as if while you move in it, the building moves around you. The San Francisco Museum was written into the history books soon after it opened its doors; this will undoubtedly prove true of the Bechtler.
Botta's building is not in the recent tradition of the museum as a spectacle, like many of the buildings that crashed like visual cymbals following the success of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. There are certain museums which flatten their paintings like mice or cause the viewer to tilt or which become events in themselves. This is not one of them. There’s a congruity in the building and the Legers and Braques within.
The Collection Within
It would be impertinent to say too much about the collection's holdings when roughly
a tenth of it is in view, but the Bechtler collection itself will be best appreciated if some basics are understood. Its greatest concentration is in mid-century European work, with a median age of about fifty years. This is unusual on these shores, where a great many of the abstract painters of Switzerland, France, and Germany were in effect sidelined from history by the postwar triumph of American Abstract Expressionism. It was a period in which American painters professed to find Europeans incapable of abstract painting on a heroic scale. They were considered little masters of the artisanal and European Abstraction treated much like sissy French rock n roll. As a consequence, some very good painters such as the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle aren't often seen on our museum walls. The same goes for Hans Hartung, Karel Appel, and a number of others. In this, paradoxically, a regional museum serves to balance, if not to rectify, a certain New York-y parochialism.
There is also the fact that this is a family collection, with the idiosyncrasies of a family collection. It mixes major work with a number of the souvenirs of friendships of artists, some ephemeral, some powerful but small. This particular family, fortunately, loved Alberto Giacometti a whole lot, and these particular Giacomettis will do until someone hands us a Tintoretto or a Rembrandt. Even the tiniest Giacometti radiates, and will dominate the room. Here is a group of them, along with furniture by Corbusier and Giacometti's brother, Diego, a painting of Alberto Giacometti's wife, Annette, and Annette as a small statue, living at every angle, with the special quality of aesthetic radioactivity which is Giacometti's alone. These have been nicely augmented with drawings and other documentation, including a sketch of Hans Bechtler with almost animated hands.
The fourth, the main floor has a Degas pastel which is a downright turn-on, a Paul Klee watercolor from 1906 like an episode from Strindberg, and two Klees from 1938, one as serene as the play of sunlight on water, the other as disturbing as a ghost. The Jasper Johns suite of four lithographs reminds me that he is the Matisse of the grey-scale. A fresh Sam Francis from 1956 – fresh because it looks as if it has just been set out to dry – testifies to his great love of Bonnard. There is Braque's great, late suite of illustrations on birds to a text by St. John Perse. There is an early de Stael oil which is an homage to Braque, and a later one as grand as Rothko.
There are also some good examples of painters who I don't like very much – file under "maybe revise your opinion" – as well as a few misfires by genuine deities, such as the Picassos. However, the Warhol Marilyn is a Marilyn of the best vintage. The Victor Pasmore relief, the Barbara Hepworth drawing, and the Bridget Riley oil are all works of artists who are most undeservedly underestimated.
Value and Significance
Director John Boyer explained that that the museum staff is still exploring the holdings and finding the relationships among the objects in it. They have already done a nice job; the arrangement of the contents of the main gallery shows a happy sense of relationships, spacing and pacing.
With the opening of the Bechtler, the patient spadework of several decades has paid off, and Charlotte has joined a small constellation of cities with a museum that enunciates a point of view. There are larger museums that do not. The value for regional artists will be inestimable, as they will be able to measure themselves according to international as opposed to local standards. The value for the public will lie in the discovery, and for the scholar, in the re-discovery of mid-century European modernism. It is a genuine achievement and a cause for celebration.
However, locally we still lack exposure to the work of the last forty years. As we are in one of the great periods of art history, where mind-boggling feats of imagination are performed almost casually, this is a major gap. Delighted as I am with the Bechtler Museum, the collection takes us for the most part as far as the mid-fifties. Civically, spiritually, aesthetically, philosophically, it is the building rather than the collection that takes us into the twenty-first.