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High art in Atlanta

The city's High Museum, whose recent addition more than doubled its size, will soon add items from the Louvre's collection to its premier offerings.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published April 16, 2006

[Times photos: Bob Croslin]

A visitor takes in “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” exhibit, running through June 18. With their brilliant colors and improvised forms, the 60 quilts resemble abstract paintings.

With a new $109-million addition that opened in November, more than doubling its size, the icon is flourishing.

Louvre Atlanta, the museum's ambitious three-year partnership with the Musee du Louvre in Paris, will open its first three exhibitions in October. The project will bring paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt, Velasquez and other masters to Atlanta, some for their first appearance in the United States, along with hundreds of drawings and decorative objects from the collections of the French kings.

There's plenty of room for them in the expanded museum, set in the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta's Midtown.

The High's home since 1983 has been the coolly modern building designed by acclaimed architect Richard Meier, who also created other well-known structures such as the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

The award-winning building was updated in 2003 and is now the museum's 135,000-square-foot Stent Family Wing.

Two new wings, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, added 177,000 square feet of space. Sheathed in white aluminum panels, the new wings marry gracefully with the distinctive enamel exterior of the Meier building.

Piano's design of the Wieland Pavilion and the Anne Cox Chambers Wing includes glass skywalks to connect the wings and 1,000 light scoops on the roof to capture northern light and direct it to the galleries.

The scoops and a plethora of windows produce a wonderful ambient light in the spacious galleries, whose high walls and polished wood floors put all the focus on the artwork.

The High's permanent collection includes extensive holdings of 19th and 20th century American art, European paintings, African-American art, folk art, Southern art, modern and contemporary art and photography.

Two exhibits, both continuing through June 18, feature diverse artists, yet reveal a common thread of creative variations on a traditional theme.

"Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005" includes 14 major paintings by the influential figurative artist, as well as drawings, prints, large-format Polaroids and works in paper pulp. It's a fascinating examination of Close's artistic process, starting with his Big Self Portrait 1967-68.

"The Quilts of Gee's Bend" was assembled at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston and has been touring, to critical acclaim, for several years.

The 60 quilts were created between 1920 and 2000 by 45 women in the tiny, geographically isolated, historically black town of Gee's Bend, Ala.

There is not one orderly, geometric, pastel bedcover in the bunch. The quilts, alive with brilliant, rich colors, look more like abstract paintings.

The quiltmakers had to work with worn-out work clothes and fabric scraps, but they transformed them into something glorious.

Not all the art is in the High's galleries. The expansion last year also included a new restaurant, Table 1280, on the piazza outside the museum.

A glass-and-white-aluminum cube, it's as beautifully designed inside as out, with two airy dining rooms and an inviting tapas lounge.

The seasonal menu continues that refinement, with such dishes as chilled Vidalia onion soup, buttermilk fried free-range chicken and sheep's milk ricotta ravioli with morel mushrooms.

The Woodruff Arts Center campus is also home to the Atlanta College of Art, the Alliance Theatre, the 14th Street Playhouse and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In fact, it's so determinedly artistic that it plays jazz over speakers in the parking garage.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 16, 2006, 08:12:36]