Were the architect prophets of modernism around today, they no doubt would be dismayed to witness the ongoing classical revival, in evidence most recently and significantly in Robert A. M. Stern Architects’ new art museum for the University of Notre Dame. What is far less certain is that they’d be surprised. The Beaux-Arts eclecticism that had become such an irritant for the avant-garde by the beginning of the twentieth century was merely the latest issue of a tradition that had, since the time of Vitruvius, faded and been reborn countless times in the cast of some or other Continental genius. Indeed, if the chief aim of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier had been to stop the wheel of fashion from turning, their successors set it spinning, until the carefully ordered styles of art and design history melded into a colorful blur of possibilities.
Although he’s rarely partaken of his peers’ playful randomness—his Disney Animation Building of 1994 being a noteworthy exception—Robert Stern has always been as comfortable drawing up gingerbread boathouses as high-tech skyscrapers, according to the demands of site and client. Notre Dame’s seventy-thousand-square-foot Raclin Murphy Museum of Art (RMMA), built to replace the campus’s brutalist Snite museum, makes a convincing addition to the current of New Classicism, a style that’s become a veritable institution at Notre Dame and testament to the efforts of late architect and former chair of the school’s architecture department, Thomas Gordon Smith.
After a century of disuse and misuse, belt courses, columns, rondels, quoins, and the like will not make for most visitors an architecture parlante—or “speaking architecture”—though perhaps they can appreciate it as architecture illustrante, a fitting introduction to Notre Dame’s instructive thirty-thousand-piece collection, whose breadth is quite catholic, as well as Catholic. The museum has deep holdings of sacred art from Rembrandt to Rouault, and secular work besides, as well as objects that fall outside Western dichotomies—and beyond the bounds of art proper—from Africa and the pre-contact Americas.
By happenstance, but one that’s nonetheless consonant with the mood of the RMMA’s collection and with architectural revivalism more generally, the building is laid out so that visitors wishing to travel back in time ascend—early Western art and rooms dedicated to the Americas are on the second floor—while those who’d rather stay in the present must descend, to contemporary and modern art galleries located in the basement. The floor that visitors will find themselves on immediately after entering through the museum’s Palladian portico is devoted to European and American art from 1700 to 1900, as well as ritual and workaday objects from Africa. This makes a sensible starting point, encompassing both Notre Dame’s traditional commitments to neoclassicism and nineteenth-century French academicism, and reflecting the varying communities that the museum will serve.
These spacious galleries, many with sixteen-foot ceilings and full-length windows, wheel around a lofty atrium pierced by an oculus. The sky looks down on a terrazzo floor spangled with bronze stars—symbols for the Virgin Mary—sketched, cast, and arranged by Kiki Smith. Smith is just one in a throng of blue-chip contemporary artists who were summoned by the museum’s director, Joseph Becherer, to contribute works to the museum’s collection, and which also includes Maya Lin; the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino, whose mosaic ceiling and stained-glass windows decorate the museum’s Mary, Queen of Families Chapel; and Jenny Holzer, who’s inscribed the North and South facades of the museum with a pair of her signature pronouncements, quotes from Agnes Martin and Louise Bourgeois.
These contemporary art stars have plenty of analogues in the collection. Working backwards, it’s possible to count off William Glackens, Auguste Rodin, George Inness, Frederic Remington, Rosa Bonheur, Jacques-Louis David, Benjamin West, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Rembrandt van Rijn (a fabulous suite of sketches from his fecund third and fifth decades is one of the Notre Dame collection’s most supreme highlights), Jusepe de Ribera, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Memling. Between and amongst them can be found the same clamorous crowd of also-rans that swell any collection: past contenders for the Prix de Rome, a scholarship that allowed French art students to study in Rome; assistants to Renaissance masters whose names history has forgotten; labored but anonymous ritual objects and “little masters.”
But within an embodied anachronism, such as revival architecture always is, visitors’ faith in the unswerving procession of art history may start to shake, and works that diverge from the main line take on renewed meaning. Lesser-known art and artists suffused with the future are easy enough to spot: Parisian Atticists like Jacques Stella, who died ninety years before Jacques-Louis David was born; the broad satire of contemporary painter Peter Saul is evoked by Lawyer’s Office after Marinus van Reymerswaele of the sixteenth century; even embryonic cubism makes an appearance, in a treatment of the annunciation by Giorgio Vasari. And then there are other artists who seem to point outside of history entirely, such as Matteo di Giovanni, whose Madonna and Child from the fifteenth century typifies the Sienese piety that, taking into account the building popularity of traditionalist Catholicism and the enduring potency of the sacred art collected in this museum, seems today somehow less assured of being snuffed out by Florentine humanism than it in fact was.
A familiar face, that of Cindy Sherman in the guise of Hollywood Golden Age actress and comedian Lucille Ball, offers a reminder: that every moment contains within it all possibilities. A positive spin on the most postmodern of sensations—of being a tourist in history, aware that today anything may happen—is summed up by the words on one of the Holzer plaques. A quote from Martin, it could serve as the unofficial motto for the museum, and a sort of hallelujah sung for art appreciation: “We are in the midst of reality responding with joy.”
