By the end of the decade, the museum for contemporary art here could be the Art Institute of Chicago. The institute is putting its swelling collection of post-1950 works into a $258 million wing that itself will be far larger than any other art museum in the city.
Yet from the Museum of Contemporary Art, the talk is not of acquiescence but of mutual co-existence — as though there are two art superpowers in town.
“Forty years ago, when the MCA started, the Art Institute wasn’t interested in contemporary art. Thank God, it now is,” said Robert Fitzpatrick, MCA director, during a recent phone call from Venice, there to attend the world’s oldest continuing contemporary art exposition. “It is leaping in. And should there be some competi-tion, I think it is the healthiest thing that has happened to the city.
“It will make the audience for contemporary art explode, and we will both be beneficiaries.”
Fitzpatrick spoke enthusiastically of the prospect of more cooperation between the institutions. “I think now that there is a chance for us both to do exhibitions of contemporary art on a regular basis,” he said.
The two museums have been courting some of the same collectors and artists for two decades, but the competition should intensify with the Art Institute soon to begin constructing its north wing.
Architect Renzo Piano has designed for the institute an airy, 264,000-square-foot building — which is 100,000 square feet larger than the MCA’s stark fortress — and a bridge across Monroe Drive meant to siphon visitors from bustling Millennium Park. (Including the bridge and funds being sought to endow the wing, the project’s tab is $285 million.) Scheduled to open in 2009, the wing will allow the institute to showcase its modern and contemporary collections and bring context to temporary exhibitions through the proximity of 4,000 years of art history represented elsewhere in its complex.
Two can survive
“This is something no other museum in the Chicago region can offer, just as there is no other museum dedicated solely to contemporary art on the scale of the MCA,” said James Cuno, the institute’s president and director. “A city as big and dynamic as Chicago can easily sustain two such institutions, not to mention the great university museums and specialist museums like the Mexican Fine Arts Center.”
But others believe the institute’s advantages can be overwhelming.
“I don’t think any rational person has ever deluded himself into thinking that the Art Institute doesn’t have the resources to outshine any institution in the city,” said Kevin Consey, MCA director from 1989 to 1998. “This Art Institute expansion may hurt the MCA. That’s life. I don’t think it’s directed [at the MCA]. It’s the Art Institute trying to be one of the great synoptic museums in America.”
For benefactors, each institution used to rely on its own crowd, but over the years there has been increasing crossover of donors and board members. By the MCA’s count, nine of its trustees also are voting or non-voting trustees of the Art Institute, and five others have a spouse on the other board.
In the past, such trustees who collected modern and contemporary saw a clearer division between the institutions when deciding to donate a work — say, a Picasso to the institute, a Paschke to the MCA. For contemporary acquisitors, the decision will be more complicated when the north wing opens.
Fitzpatrick said he saw no potential conflict in competing museums sharing board members — a situation that would not be tolerated in corporate boardrooms — but he acknowledged that some board members might give work to the Art Institute that the MCA had coveted.
“That is going to occasionally happen. And sometimes I may shed a tear and say, `Oh damn, that’s really a piece we would have loved to have,'” he said. “But the real reaction is, `It’s great that it is still in Chicago, it didn’t go off to a museum in New York or Washington.’ I don’t think there is a real downside.”
Allen Turner, a trustee and former chairman of the MCA and a member of the Art Institute’s committee on modern and contemporary art, said, “Some of the same people somehow find money for everything.”
But Fitzpatrick’s predecessor, Consey, found sharing board members — with the Art Institute as well as with the contemporary-focused Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago — to be “an enormous irritant in my tenure.” He said it tested loyalties and made business confidences harder to keep.
“It was bothersome in that, very often, strategic information about campaign solicitations or exhibition planning was simply leaked to the other organizations via trustees who were gossiping,” he said.
Consey, now director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, was outspoken about those who “collect trusteeships as they would collect works of art, as something to put on the wall and show off.” Such people, he said, “often appeared to be more interested in themselves than the institutions.”
The MCA didn’t start as a collecting institution. It opened in 1967 in a former bakery as a kunsthalle, an empty “hall for art” that would be filled every month or so with temporary exhibitions. But almost immediately, its trustees yearned for a monument to their collecting, where through permanent display their tastes would be celebrated. Shut out by an Art Institute director with an antipathy to the modern and contemporary, they gradually made the MCA a repository with their donations. This drove the need for a new building — which finally opened in 1996.
When Fitzpatrick arrived in 1998, he made it clear to trustees that he wanted a fund for acquisitions, rather than relying on their largess. A year before, the Los Angeles-based Lannan Foundation gave 85 contemporary works to the MCA and 58 to the Art Institute. But the MCA had no ready funds to buy more; the institute did and acquired 48 more pieces.
That transaction brought into focus the institute’s commitment to contemporary art.
Until then, the widespread perception was that the institute was about history — especially 19th Century French painting — while the MCA was about being nimble, risk-taking and tuned into, as Chicago painter William Conger put it, “the here, now and tomorrow.”
A part of history
“Having a work presented at a major museum such as the Art Institute suggests the artist has somehow been embraced or assigned by history,” he added. “When the same work is at a museum of contemporary art, it suggests the artist is in the crackling present.”
The north wing complicates any easy impression and softens the distinctions between the two museums.
An assumption is that the MCA will have to react to the new building somehow.
“My guess is that, in time, the MCA will deal more and more with the most extreme, boundary-blurring experimental art, while the Art Institute will center on the art-historical connections between the past, modernist and contemporary art,” said Conger, a Northwestern University professor whose abstract works are in the collections of both museums.
“You will probably see the Museum of Contemporary Art revert to its first mission, a kunsthalle, where cutting-edge art will be shown,” said Chicagoan Richard Gray, an international art dealer and institute life trustee.
Fitzpatrick has heard such suggestions from others and rejects them.
“It wouldn’t be fair, it wouldn’t be intelligent,” he said. “And if you look at the depth of our holdings, it would be stupid.”
Consey agreed, saying, “If you announce to people you are a collecting institution and your legacy is safe here, then you change course, you risk breaking faith with them.”
He also noted, “The people who give paintings are the same people who capitalize your institution.” He said a legitimate question from a prospective donor might be, “If you sell my grandfather’s painting, why should I give you money?”
Fitzpatrick said he has told institute directors past and present that the MCA is “a collecting institution, and we are going to be voracious, ferocious, intense and focused — and long live the competition.” He said the MCA will be “relentless in building in the areas where we have strength,” among them photography and works in all media by young and less-known artists. He also wants to expand the MCA’s already considerable performance program.
“The really important aspect of the MCA is the whole programming aspect, which goes far beyond what [the institute] does” in the area of contemporary art, said James Wood, who headed the institute from 1980 to 2004 and initiated the north wing planning.
Will it be a draw?
For the institute, giving over the entire new building to modern and contemporary art carries risks. It remains to be seen whether the casual visitor to Millennium Park will cross a bridge to become acquainted with art of his own time.
Such art demands more rather than less of viewers. Even now, the institute’s 19th Century galleries are filled with young people; 20th Century draws less; contemporary least of all. In 2004, the MCA reported attendance of 213,223 and the Art Institute 1.6 million. But modern and contemporary are thriving elsewhere. The Tate Modern in London draws 4 million visitors a year. The Museum of Modern Art, which opened a building last fall with an emphasis on the contemporary, has drawn 1.48 million in the last six months.
“Nobody would ask in New York, `Well, what happens when you have MOMA and the New Museum and the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Guggenheim and the Met all doing contemporary art?'” said Fitzpatrick. “Everybody says, `Bravo. The more the better.’ I think the same thing is exactly true for Chicago.”
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