Improvements to the four-story, red granite Manton building are the capstone to the Clark Art Institute’s $170 million expansion program, highlighted by the 2-year-old Clark Center designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando. That building provides 11,000 square feet of additional gallery space and is complemented by a one-acre, three-tier reflecting pool.
During a recent press reception in Williamstown, reporters met for a tour in the interior courtyard of the renovated Manton Research Center. Closed to the public for the past 18 months, institute staff provided a walkabout to show its reconfigured interior. It now features a ground floor reading room, a modern viewing area for artworks on paper, a mezzanine filled with books and a state-of-the-art auditorium.
“The opening of the Manton Research Center is, I will say, not more important than the opening of the Ando building, but as important,” the institute’s new director, Olivier Meslay, said. The 60-year-old Moroccan is the Clark’s fifth director, appointed by the board of trustees following the retirement of Michael Conforti. Meslay served in various positions during a 17-year period at the Louvre and more recently was a senior curator for the Dallas Museum of Art.
“The heart of the Clark is here,” he said of the building. “The blood pulsing around the body of the Clark is coming from here. Not just daily, but long-term.”
In 2007, the building designed by the Italian architect Pietro Bellushi was named after Sir Edwin Manton
(1909–2005), a wealthy businessman who was among the developers of the American International Group. An avid art collector and philanthropist, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his donation, by one account, of more than 12 million British pounds to London’s Tate Gallery.
Two years after his death, the Manton Foundation donated $50 million in fellowship funding to the institute’s research and academic program (RAP), as well as more than 200 British artworks to the Clark. The collection, valued at $40 million, significantly enhanced the institute’s holdings of works by J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. Manton was a particular fan of Constable, having been raised within 20 miles of the painter’s Essex home. In 1987, he was among a group of financial donors who successfully sought to keep a monumental Constable painting, “The Opening of Waterloo Bridge,” from leaving England.
The Manton building itself was described by a Wall Street Journal writer as an “incompatible bedfellow to the original (marble) building’s well-mannered domesticity.”
It’s a great example of “brutalist” architecture, a popular movement that peppered America generations ago with cold, impersonal buildings. Other brash examples can be found no farther away than the University of Massachusetts at Amherst campus, highlighted by designer Marcel Breuer’s Campus Center.
Meslay explained that the Manton building houses some 270,000 volumes of art books, 1,000 significant photographs, another 7,000 “works on paper,” as well as a trove of 19th century oil paintings. It’s the epicenter of a Williams College graduate program, as well as the RAP program.
That organization invites scholars from around the world with a supporting fellowship and has hosted some 300 people from 30 countries since its inception. It attracts academics and museum professionals who create traveling lectures, workshops and intensive studies of artistic culture. It has a global reach. Meslay referred to the program, which both he and his wife attended, as inspiring similar fellowships at Washington’s National Museum and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
“This program is bringing to the Clark, bringing to Williamstown and to the students, among the best scholars in the world,” he said. “All these people are nourishing our community.”
Meslay spoke while in the building’s interior courtyard. Those familiar with the center will recall that the first floor room formerly featured a gift shop and a snack bar. It’s now a reading room, and on sunny days it’s illuminated from a skylight 40 feet overhead. The drama of the room is created by a central mezzanine displaying some 10,000 books, a gift from the widow of the artist Allan Sekula (1951–2015), who was an instructor at the California Institute of the Arts and created works in film, photography and print.
There were more than 5,000 other books owned by Sekula and donated, which librarian Susan Roeper described as “a very rare, eclectic collection.” The largesse was winnowed to the most relevant publications on art and photographic histories.
Those volumes not in demand serve to colorfully fill the shelves of the mezzanine.
“It was serendipitous,” Roeper said. “I think it looks fabulous, and I think by having the library of an artist and a scholar, it helps us communicate the research mission of our institute.”
Adjacent to the courtyard is the works-on-paper gallery, freed from the Siberian wilds of the third floor.
“It was literally hard to find,” the department’s curator Jay Clarke said. It’s now located where the summer café and kitchen had resided.
She explained that the indirect light of the room, emanating from a north-facing window, was “perfect.”
She pointed out a well-known Winslow Homer watercolor “A Good Pool,” with a salmon the prominent image. The colors remain as robust as painted 121 years ago.
“As some of you may know, watercolors can fade very quickly,” Clarke said. “Blues, reds and purples can fade faster than any others. These watercolors are carefully protected here, and we’re very careful about how we show them.”
Here you will find works from a “who’s who” of artists ranging from Durer, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec to Rembrandt.
Clarke emphasized that the art, with a pre-arranged appointment, “is available for everyone …
It’s not just highfalutin scholars who can come in here and look at our drawings, arts and photographs … We’ll welcome them, however, even grammar school students can come in here.”
Nearby, a redesigned gallery is now home to rotating exhibits of the institute’s photography collection and much of it dates to the birth of the medium.
Through Feb. 5, you can view mid-19th century and early 20th century images capturing all points of the compass. Among the photographs are those by Dr. John Murray, a Scotsman working in India in the mid-1800s. A waxed paper negative of the Taj Mahal is a reversal of tones and provides a spectral, elegant study of the site.
“In early photography, they often had to doctor their negatives to get the effects they wanted,” Clarke said. In Murray’s case, he’d used saffron and other dyes to highlight landscapes.
Egg whites were used to give cotton paper prints a gloss, and some of the albumen images on display sharply define Paris as it was in the 1800s.
There are even obscure photographers of note. Charles Jones was a British gardener who created portraits of vegetables and flowers. He was virtually unknown until, by accident, a suitcase containing hundreds of his photos was opened during an antiques show in 1981. One book of his work has since been published, and his photographs have been displayed at leading museums.
An adjacent gallery remains familiar as a room devoted to the oils of British artists, such as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.
During the building’s renovation, it was hoped that the round corners of this room could be changed, allowing paintings to be hung more easily.
The Clark’s Director of Collections and Exhibitions Kathleen Morris said that workmen, however, discovered a surprise beneath the stucco walls.
“We found that there are (rounded) concrete blocks all the way around, so we’ve had to learn to love them,” she said.
All of the interior renovations were designed by New York architect Annabelle Selldorf. She was also responsible for the interior redesign of the marble museum, which increased exhibition space, brought vivid colors and better lighting to new walls and a resurfacing of the quarter-sawn oak floors.
The Clark Center can now accommodate painting exhibits previously unavailable because of strict humidity and temperature requirements mandated by lending institutions. The Manton’s renovated 285-seat auditorium, maintaining a schedule of live Metropolitan opera broadcasts in high definition, now boasts state-of-the-art projection and sound systems. It was found that original white walls visually conflicted with high-definition screen images and have been repainted a neutral gray. The floor carpeting, previously a highly regrettable green, is now a warm beige. The seats are of a mohair fabric and wheelchair accessibility has been markedly improved.
Summing up the dramatic leap, the institute has taken with a building and renovation program first envisioned some 15 years ago, Morris was succinct.
“The Clark has never wanted to be a repository for the past,” she said. “It’s always been a focus of the Clark to take the Clark forward.”
The institute is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $20; free for people under the age of 18 and students with identification. Closed Christmas and New Year’s Day. Directions: Take Route 2 to Williamstown. The institute is a half-mile south from the rotary intersection of Routes 2 and 7, just past the college.