It’s been more than10 years ago since the Cincinnati Art Museum announced selection of a Dutch firm, Neutelings Riedijk Architects, to build a 60,000-square-foot, $45 million expansion on its Eden Park campus, in tandem with a renovation of existing buildings. The concept for the new building — an exhibition hall and an almost 200-foot-tall tower with a tulip-like edgy (literally) top — would have made it a radically transformative structure and a major landmark.
But the Great Recession delayed those plans — and the departure of the museum’s director, Aaron Betsky, in 2014 probably ended them. But, both under Betsky and current director Cameron Kitchin, renovations, alterations and updates have continued. Some have been subtle, such as the nighttime illumination of the museum’s old tower-like stone-clad cast-iron chimney. But some have been pronounced.
One such pronounced change has been a $2 million “reinvention” (in Kitchin’s words) of the historic Schmidlapp Gallery, a long corridor connecting the museum’s two central gathering points: the Main Lobby/Main Entrance and the Great Hall. The “topping off” will occur this Friday (Feb. 16), with the return to long-term display of Romania-born New York cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s 75-foot-long “Mural of Cincinnati.” This is the first time since 1982 for this long-term, semi-permanent public display.
Steinberg’s mural was originally commissioned by Thomas Emery’s Sons, Inc. for the Skyline Room restaurant in its modernist Terrace Plaza hotel, which opened in 1948. It was donated to the museum in 1965, when the Hilton chain took the hotel over. It was on and off museum display over the years, but was showcased in a 2007 special exhibit that displayed the results of a restoration funded by a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. But it’s been in storage since then.
The gallery that will host it was built in 1907 as part of the Schmidlapp Wing or Schmidlapp Extension. It was the first expansion beyond the museum’s 1886 original building. The gallery portion has been home to plaster casts of classical sculpture (in the days when those were popular), antiquities displayed in long glass cases and — most recently —a gallery for museum “icons.” That last concept, a Betsky idea, placed a small selection of the museum’s best and most well-known pieces in one compact space.
“This project is one… that’s really been in the making since 1907,” Kitchin says. “The new Schmidlapp Gallery borrows from the best of each of those installations over time. It is a complete rethinking of not just the design, but the purpose of the space — why it exists in the architecture of the building and the pathway of the visitor experience.”
The new gallery debuted in October, but the permanent installation of “Mural of Cincinnati” was delayed so the museum could see if the temperature and humidity levels are conducive to the mural. There was a temporary art installation, consisting of six large Formica laminate mosaics by Curtis Goldstein and Matt Lynch, in the space in the meantime. (They will be part of a larger show of Goldstein’s and Lynch’s work at the Weston Art Gallery, beginning in June.
As redesigned, the Schmidlapp Gallery also has big new windows that look out into the Alice Bimel Courtyard and its 2004 reflecting pool/fountain, which has a lovely Zen garden-like feel. This was meant to be a conspicuous way to bring the outdoors and controlled natural lighting inside. “These windows are startling in their scale, and will change the feel the space gives,” Kitchin says.
The new Schmidlapp also has a “looking lounge” element, just as the icons installation did — a handful of glass-encased objects, mostly three-dimensional, from the collection displayed around seating designed by University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning-trained designer David Dahl to prompt viewer contemplation and discussion.
“We’ll choose each of those objects for their narrative power as well as their historical power, meaning there’s a great story there that a curator can help guide us through and a visitor can discover through that object,” Kitchin says. “This also borrows from the notion of the kunstkammer or the wunderkammer — the early idea of the museum having these great objects of wonder. So rather than seeing (only) the most notable and known objects from the collection, they’re objects that inspire conversation.”
According to the website of the Saul Steinberg Foundation (the artist died in 1999), the Cincinnati mural was his second and consisted of eight oil-on-canvas panels with images stacked vertically on an upright plane to avoid a convention panoramic presentation.
An essay on that website quotes writer Joel Smith as saying the murals “demanded a merger of technical ingenuity and visual invention, as (Steinberg) experimented to fit a page-illuminator’s style to architectural scale.”
After Cincinnati, Steinberg used photographically enlarged drawings for his murals, which was less labor-intensive. In 1949, he created a cityscape mural for a landmark museum show, the Alexander Girard-curated An Exhibition for Modern Living, at Detroit Institute of Arts. It does not survive, although drawings for it were on display last year at suburban Detroit’s Cranbrook Art Museum in the show Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe.
At the time of Cincinnati’s 2007 Steinberg exhibition, CityBeat contributor Jane Durrell recalled just how much the mural had needed the just-completed restoration: “When Hilton took over in 1965, it was transferred to the CAM and mounted by tacks, still bearing the grime and smoke from its years in the restaurant,” she wrote. “Some of us can remember it slowly sagging on the wall, looking very brown.”
Now, Steinberg’s “Mural of Cincinnati” gets its pride-of-place home, along a gallery wall opposite the new windows. It will be near two other Terrace Plaza gifts that have been on permanent display — Joan Miró’s “Mural from the Terrace Plaza Hotel” and Alexander Calder’s mobile made of sheet metal and piano wire, “20 Leaves and an Apple.”
“A single unbroken wall of that length is a rarity,” Kitchin says. “Now we get a chance to bring (the mural) back out in a pristine, conserved state and install it in a tribute to Cincinnati history and to Steinberg and his take on Cincinnati. It’s fanciful and truly wonderful, and a conversation starter as well.”
(This is an updated version of a story that first appeared in CityBeat on Sept. 5, 2017.)
The CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM is located at 953 Eden Park Drive, Mount Adams. More info: cincinnatiartmuseum.org.
This article appears in Sep 6-13, 2017.
