There's more to appreciate at Currier
Addition and redesign allow for exhibition of new acquisitions
MANCHESTER, N.H. - The Currier Museum of Art has been growing like a snail shell, expanding outward. A 1982 addition to the original 1929 building put pavilions on the east and west, bracketing the museum's entrance. Last weekend, the Currier reopened after nearly two years of construction with new, welcoming north and south sides.
The crisp, elegant addition and redesign by Ann Beha Architects of Boston fosters many changes, but they all make the Currier even more the Currier. The 33,000 new square feet (bringing the museum to nearly 90,000 square feet) include several new galleries to show off the museum's collection, which is particularly strong in American and New England art. The opening exhibitions all showcase the collection, which promises to get even stronger, thanks to a 2001 bequest of $43 million from longtime benefactor Henry Melville Fuller.
Some of those funds went to commission the new "Wall Drawing #1255: Whirls and twirls (Currier)," a fizzy Sol LeWitt diptych that flanks the entrance to the new Winter Garden cafe in the museum's center. It spins with sunny-toned, swerving rectangles, coming together like giant, intersecting eddies of confetti. LeWitt designed it shortly before his death a year ago.
Across the cafe, now at the very heart of the museum, stands the 1929 entryway, with stately columns and bright mosaic murals. Long out of use because it isn't handicapped accessible, the entryway has been repurposed as an artwork. The mosaic, with its bright tiles depicting the evolution of art history, makes a strong counterpoint to the LeWitt diptych across the way.
The airy, glass-fronted lobby looks out on a courtyard where another new, monumental acquisition greets visitors: Mark di Suvero's 36-foot-tall "Origins," crafted from steel beams and scrap metal. A red-orange base looks like a letter K fanning in two directions and knotted in the middle; looping black circles swivel atop its spine, riding the wind.
This witty conflation of industrial and ethereal has some sweet echoes inside the building, where Alexander Calder's 1967 mobile "Petit Disque Jaune" also features bold forms spinning on a breeze, and Theodore Roszak's more ruggedly finished steel sculpture "Cradle Song" sports its own curls and prongs.
Calder and Roszak have work in the new south-facing galleries, capping off a tour of the west flank of the museum, which spotlights American art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Other delights in these galleries include two new acquisitions. Marisol Escobar made her Pop Art piece "The Family" (1963), from found boxes and a baby carriage; Time Magazine featured it on the cover for a story on the crisis of the American family in 1970. James Rosenquist's gorgeous 1989 collaged print "House of Fire," sports giant lipsticks protruding from the right like a cannonade toward a central, fiery window.
The museum feels much more navigable than it used to, with glass partitions between many galleries to help situate viewers. Each generation of the museum building is progressively more open and light, with higher walls and more room for the art.
Chief Curator Andrew Spahr has jumped on the opportunity to show off hidden gems from the collection, such as "Madonna and Child," Antonio Rossellino's painted terra cotta devotional from about 1475, which the Currier acquired in 1941.
"It may never have been on view," Spahr concedes, and that's partly because museum staff suspected it might be a fake. The piece was recently conserved, and a pigment analysis revealed it's authentic, right down to its remarkable worm-eaten wooden frame, and one of only three such works by Rossellino known to exist.
It hangs in the European gallery near a lush new addition, Hendrick Goltzius's "Helen of Troy" (1615). The golden apple on the table before the woman symbolizes the beauty Helen. Otherwise, the subject, perhaps a wealthy woman whose husband commissioned this painting, gives no indication of being Trojan. She's richly clad in 17th-century dress and jewels, with a remarkable headpiece that makes her blond hair vault off the back of her head.
A stunningly ornate cupboard made of oak and maple highlights the decorative arts galleries upstairs. The so-called Weare cupboard, made in Newburyport, dates to 1680-85, and although it has been in the collection since 1943, Spahr says it has almost never been on view. It's a feat of artistry. Stacked drawers of different sizes give the cupboard's lower half a stepped hourglass shape. Finials frame an interior compartment at the top, beneath the upper molding. Parts of the piece were likely altered in the 19th century: Federal-style drawers replaced carved ones, and gothic arched windows replaced one cabinet door.
Nearby, also crafted in 1680, sits a silver sugar box by Boston silversmith John Coney. Silver boxes were rare in Colonial America, and this one is a masterpiece, with a baroque design of undulating lobes across the surface.
The Currier's deep local focus is its best asset; there's plenty of great art in New England, and perhaps even more great decorative art, like the staggering craftsmanship that went into Coney's sugar box and the Weare cupboard. Downstairs, one of the galleries is devoted to contemporary New Hampshire artists, and the Currier has a treasure trove of graceful, lean ceramics by Granite Staters Mary and Edwin Scheier.
Thanks to Fuller's gift, the museum continues to bulk up its strengths. That's a wise choice, because the Currier can be a resource for institutions and scholars, and a source of pride for New Hampshire. And if it has a few unexpected treasures in its other departments, such as "Helen of Troy," well, that's a frothy dessert after a nourishing meal.
