Upon returning to campus, the observant among us have likely noticed the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s sudden disappearance from the Prescott Street skyline. Some may just have grumbled as they were funneled into the pedestrian walkway on their way down Quincy Street. Others see the renovation of Harvard Art Museums—encompassing the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and the Fogg Art Museum—as a refreshing change of scenery. “Temporarily removing much of the uppermost part of the Fogg admits far more light into the [Visual and Environmental Studies (VES)] studios,” says VES Professor John R. Stilgoe.

Though spoken in jest, Stilgoe’s response typifies much of the Harvard community’s attitude towards its art museums. They are appreciated as familiar features of the landscape, and for the light they shed on our chosen fields of study, but otherwise largely overlooked. “I think students who have taken History of Art and Architecture (HAA) classes or who have spent time at the museum absolutely appreciate it,” says Alexandra Perloff-Giles ’11, President of the Harvard Art Museum Undergraduate Connection (HAMUC) and a former Crimson arts columnist. “But I think there are many students who don’t know what an amazing resource we have.”

Far more than a physical reorganization, the renovation now in progress aims to combat the lack of recognition identified by Perloff-Giles, along with museum administrators past and present. While many Harvard classes incorporate a token art-viewing ‘field trip’ into their schedules, the museum’s potential as an interdisciplinary resource remains largely untapped. The renovation currently underway looks to reposition Harvard’s art collections within the landscape of the university and within the greater public community—to allow its diverse holdings to illuminate other areas of study, and not just the adjacent buildings.

A SECOND LOOK

Since construction began in 2008, the famed Fogg Art Museum—historically seen as the heart of the HAM complex—has been closed to visitors. Though the Sackler Museum showcases a selection of important works throughout the renovation in an ongoing exhibition entitled “Review,” only this year’s seniors have enjoyed full access to the active Fogg and Busch-Reisinger buildings during their time at Harvard. This inaccessibility may account for the relatively low profile among students of Harvard’s world renowned art collection, the sixth largest in the United States.

Founded in 1895, the Fogg was the first of the Harvard museums. The collection moved from its original location—now the site of Canaday Hall—to the Quincy Street site in 1927. Over the following eighty years, seven additions were built onto and around the Quincy site, including the Fine Arts Library, Werner Otto Hall—formerly home to the Busch-Reisinger Collection—and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. The scattering of new additions made for an increasingly fragmented viewing experience. The collections were rigidly divided along cultural lines—the Sackler holding Asian, the Busch-Reisinger Germanic, and the Fogg predominantly Western art—while the rambling layout impeded easy circulation and study.

Excluding the Sackler, all such later additions have now been demolished with an eye to consolidating their holdings in a sizeable new wing on the back of the Fogg. According to Thomas W. Lentz, Director of HAM, one of the project’s primary objectives is to fuse the disparate collections together within one functional, streamlined space. “Our goal is to consolidate them on one site, under one roof, as one destination,” Lentz says. “What we like about this idea is that it allows us to have a much greater dialogue between those three collections.”

PURE AND SIMPLE

In order to draw the attention of passers-by, HAM has enlisted internationally-renowned architect Renzo Piano and local design group Payette associates to craft a museum fit for the twenty-first century. Still, according to HAM’s Director of Facilities and Capital Planning Peter J. Atkinson, “there aren’t a lot of bells and whistles. It’ll be simple in many ways.” The choice of simplicity is both an aesthetic and strategic decision. “[Renzo’s] architecture doesn’t dominate the art,” Atkinson says. “[He] quietly has built buildings that are spectacular.”

Both Atkinson and Lentz stressed that though the museum’s design will be cutting-edge, functionality and navigability are its main priorities. Atkinson anticipates a finished product that maximizes natural light and takes the Fogg’s surroundings into consideration; “Renzo Piano is giving us a rationalized, transparent and flexible building, ” Lentz says. Architectural flourishes and attention-grabbers may be unnecessary, given the museum’s advantageous location within the University. “We actually fit right in middle of a visual arts cortex, right in between the Graduate School of Design and the Carpenter Center, right on the edge of Harvard yard,” Lentz says. “We [are] very well positioned as a kind of hub and connector.”

The building’s stylish yet functional aesthetic will be achieved through environmentally sustainable construction techniques. The project is angling for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification from the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), the second highest rating on their scale. Over the course of two years spent emptying the Fogg’s galleries and offices, HAM reached out to two dozen local organizations that claimed and reused 30 tons of material—from office furniture to exhibit cases, from easels to teak flooring.

CLIMATE CHANGE

HAM decided not to aim for USGBC’s highest rating in order to maintain an art-friendly climate around the clock. Atkinson concedes that this pursuit inevitably requires high energy expenditures, but it serves an important purpose. “We always say, ‘The art never goes home’,” he says. “While most people live in a building during the day or they live there at night, the art is in the building 24/7. And that’s why we’re using a lot of energy: we’re building for the art and we want it to feel comfy all day long.”

High standards in climate control are vital to HAM’s position in the artistic community. Opened in 1927, the original Fogg lacked even the most basic technologies necessary to safely house and preserve works of art. As researchers discovered the detrimental effects of certain temperatures and levels of humidity on works of art, unequipped museums like the Fogg lost the ability to borrow works from other institutions. This meant that temporary exhibitions were far less frequent—an unfortunate development in light of the fact that the museum had previously secured the work of William Blake in 1920, Fra Angelico in 1930, and Paul Gaugin in 1936. For two weeks in 1941, Pablo Picasso’s famed “Guernica” hung in the Fogg’s Warburg Hall; as a point of pride, the hook on which it hung was symbolically in the wall until the museum was dismantled. With a new facility that meets modern standards of art conservation, HAM may again borrow pieces of similar magnitude for display and study.

WEATHERING THE STORM

Even though current economic conditions pose a challenge to funding, HAM has garnered enough financial support to preserve the integrity of the original plans for renovation. While the cost of the new museum was previously projected at $350 million, the renovation is fortunately the only building project currently underway at Harvard. According to Lentz, HAM has raised between 81 and 82 percent of the target amount, largely thanks to a strong belief among donors and university administrators that renovation is imperative. “The financial downturn has not helped,” Lentz says. “But I think when you have a good plan, when you have a real need and you can articulate that effectively, I think people want to be a part of it.”

Similarly, Eugene Y. Wang, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in the HAA department, believes that caring for the museum and its collections is a worthwhile investment at any cost. “When people come to visit Harvard, the art museum is where almost all people make a stop,” he says. “[It] is the highlight of the campus, so… financial difficulties shouldn’t hold this back.”

When a large-scale renovation was first conceived in 1956, disagreements between the museum and the university over budget delayed the project’s implementation. “The [Harvard]Corporation did not have a vision for the museums, and the museum people had a vision,” says HAA Professor John M. Rosenfield, who served as Curator of Oriental Art at the Fogg from 1964 to 1991 and Acting Director of the museums from 1982 to 1985. For reasons Rosenfield did not detail, the university was unable to allocate the funds that museum officials required to carry out the necessary transformation. However, Rosenfield expresses optimism about the collaboration between today’s HAM and the current university administrators, who seem far more supportive.  “In my years in the operations of the museum I always felt that… the museum’s development and the plans of the corporation were not closely coordinated,” says Rosenfield. “But… in recent years, the coordination seems to have become more advanced.”

REDRAWING BOUNDARIES

Fifty years after these initial squabbles, HAM can begin to realize its vision. However, due to constantly evolving notions regarding how museums should function, the new plans differ significantly from the originals. Though the Fogg’s brick façade has been carefully preserved, in the future it will encompass a interior space that differs dramatically from the original in both architectural and conceptual ways.

The museum’s original central courtyard and the basic layout of galleries will remain, but visitor circulation and arrangement of research spaces will be significantly re-orchestrated. The new wing on Prescott Street, which will house the Busch-Reisinger and Sackler collections, will finally consolidate all the collections.

The long-anticipated integration of the museum’s culturally diverse holdings comes in response to modern conceptions about the study and practice of art history.  “Our notion of art history is changing,” says Professor Wang. “We are thinking of art objects in a more global context. I want to see this global sense being emphasized, in a space that will make it easier to cross [over] from different parts of the world.”

Lentz anticipates that the museum’s physical reorganization will spark a conceptual reconsideration in visitors. “In the past, the way we were physically configured, we weren’t able to make the historical and visual linkages we wanted to make between those three collections,” he says. The renovators hope that within a spatially integrated setting, viewers will more easily identify the continuity between the many traditions, cultures, and eras represented in the collections.

VISUAL AID

The new museum also hopes to emphasize community outreach. The arena of engagement with the broader public is a relatively new one for HAM, which has traditionally given academic pursuits priority. “There was outreach, but that was never the main purpose,” says Rosenthal of his time at the museum. “The main purpose was to promote scholarship.” Previously, the enormous amount of space allocated to the university left little room for the public, and practical considerations thwarted attempts at community outreach before they began. “It’s difficult to have a broad public outreach program if there’s nowhere to park the buses,” Rosenthal says.

However, the museum’s decision to hire a full-time educational staff signals a shift in values, and the new building’s design will take these into consideration. “The spaces will be bigger—more art to be seen, more connections to be made,” says Ray Williams, HAM’s first Director of Education. With innovative educational facilities, such as the study rooms, the museum staff can turn to previously unaddressed questions. “What educators think about is ‘Who could these collections matter for?’ ‘How can we spread the word?’” Williams says.

In the past year, Harvard museums have worked with over 4,000 public school students and 7,000 university students in the Boston area. They have also brought students from Harvard Medical School into galleries for workshops on self-care, and placed an emphasis on reaching out to the local Brazilian community.

E PLURIBUS UNUM

Though display space will be dramatically reconfigured, Lentz estimates that the design team has spent more time laying out non-public space for study and research than on gallery floor plans. “What we want above all is a highly functional building that allows for high-level research,” says Lentz. “Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is reposition the art museum within Harvard’s mission statement, having in place a physical model that allows students and faculty to work collaboratively.”

In keeping with these goals, the new building will allocate over 5,000 square feet of space for temporary and curricular use. Harvard’s Strauss Center for Conservation, the first art conservation lab in the United States, will be relocated to the top floor of the new building while a complex of study centers will occupy the floor below. Through the study centers, Harvard affiliates and other community members can request supervised access to pieces not on display in the museum. The centers are part of a larger effort to make works of art more accessible. “We want to put the collection to work for all students and all faculty, and the community,” says Lentz, “not simply for the specialists we always have had and always will train.”

HAM’s educational division has continued to facilitate and encourage use of original art objects as a medium for instruction within the university. Historically, the museum and the HAA department were very closely related, to the extent that most faculty members also served as curators. “The museum and the department of art history were in one building and very much imbricated into one another,” says Henri Zerner, a professor in the HAA department since 1972. “The office of the director and the office of the department chair were not only adjacent, but they had a door in between and they also had a bathroom that they shared. This is symbolically very important because it meant that the faculty and the institution were... communicating on a daily basis.”

Though HAM will continue its commitment to supporting scholarship in HAA, it also hopes to work with faculty across a broad range of disciplines in the coming years. The HAA department office complex, currently located in the Sackler, will not move back into the Fogg upon the building’s completion. Instead, the museum will act as an autonomous and central entity at the disposal of students in all concentrations.

While students acknowledge the unfortunate inaccessibility of the museums, there is a widespread agreement that renovation is necessary. Aside from a single teaching gallery on the fouth floor of the Sackler, and a few niches with rotating artworks, temporary exhibitions have been put on hold. However, in the fall of 2011 the Sackler will house a show entitled “Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” while groups like HAMUC help to maintain the connection between students and the art still available to them. Perloff-Giles maintains that the long-term benefits outweigh the temporary loss. “When Renzo Piano surveyed the grounds, he said the Sackler didn’t look like a museum,” she says. “The new Fogg will definitely look like a museum.”

In the end, Perloff-Giles adds, even the simple fact of renovation will help to attract attention to the museum. “If our goal... is to increase visibility, the new building will start to do that just with its physical presence.”

—Staff writer Sally K. Scopa can be reached at sscopa@college.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections:

CORRECTIONS: September 22, 2010

An earlier version of the Sept. 21 arts article "Fogg of the Future" incorrectly referred to the Harvard Art Museums as the Harvard University Art Museums.

The article also reported that the exhibition "Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" will be showing at the Sackler in fall 2010. The correct time is fall 2011.