Grand Openings
New and remade museums around the world set their sights on a post-pandemic future.
HUMBOLDT FORUM Berlin
Architecture: Franco Stella
Opened: July 2021
Conceived as an interactive center to celebrate world cultures, the Humboldt joins under one roof several museum collections encompassing ethnological, historical, scientific, and societal materials and artworks. The $800 million structure was named for 19th-century naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and his philosopher brother Wilhelm, and built as a reconstruction of the Prussian royal palace that was severely damaged in World War II and demolished by the East German government in 1950. Critics would have preferred a more forward-looking piece of architecture, rather than a neo-imperial showcase for objects whose colonial-era provenance is drawing scrutiny. (In response to calls for repatriation, the city has pledged to return the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria beginning next year.) The institution’s leaders promise to bring an enlightened perspective to their offerings. Ongoing installations examine climate change, Berlin’s cosmopolitan character, and humanity’s tragic use of ivory (through November 28). humboldtforum.org
LUMA ARLES Arles, France
Architecture: Frank Gehry
Opened: June 2021
Swiss pharmaceutical heiress and contemporary art collector Maja Hoffmann via her LUMA Foundation bought a 27-acre former rail yard and converted warehouses into spaces for exhibitions and artist residencies. The capstone of the project is the 184-foot tower by Gehry. One façade is a twisting stack of disjointed stainless steel blocks that Gehry says alludes to the region’s rocky landscape and to Vincent van Gogh’s interest in light (the artist once lived in Arles). The building, whose glazed cylindrical base echoes the city’s Roman amphitheater, contains administrative and event spaces, a café and galleries, and serves as the entryway to the LUMA campus’ landscaped parkland and exhibition venues, where current offerings include work by international stars Urs Fischer, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, John Akomfrah, Anri Sala, and Christian Marclay’s celebrated 24-hour film montage The Clock (2010). luma.org
M+ MUSEUM Hong Kong
Architecture: Herzog & de Meuron
Opens: November 2021
The centerpiece of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a development on a landfill peninsula in Victoria Harbor, M+ aspires to present a new conception of 20th and 21st century visual culture, focusing on Hong Kong, mainland China, and the rest of Asia. Like two perpendicular playing cards, the $760 million waterfront building consists of a vertical tower seemingly balanced in the middle of a flat horizontal base. The latter contains 33 galleries, three cinemas, and a subterranean gallery that surrounds the pre-existing rail tunnel. The tower houses offices, a members’ lounge, the museum’s research center, and restaurants, and its LED-covered façade serves as a giant screen for digital artworks, commissions, moving images, and messages that beam across the harbor.
In less than a decade the institution has amassed 8,000 works, including visual art, design, and architecture (furniture, electronics, textiles, building models), and moving images (animations, films and videos, digital installations, video games, software, web-based art). There are pieces by Huang Yong Ping, Nobuyoshi Araki, Sopheap Pich, Isamu Noguchi, Yang Fudong, and a range of talent less familiar to Westerners. The anchor is nearly 1,500 works of Chinese contemporary art partly donated by Swiss businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg. The survey represents 350 artists who worked from around 1970 to 2012, a crucial period when Chinese contemporary art increased in recognition and value. It remains to be seen if censorious “national security” laws imposed by Beijing will allow the museum to operate with intellectual and aesthetic freedom. mplus.org.hk
MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN ARTS & CRAFTS MOVEMENT Saint Petersburg, Florida
Architecture: Alfonso Architects
Opened: September 2021
The first museum dedicated to the handmade art and design movement that arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution houses the 2,000-item collection amassed by the institution’s founder, local philanthropist Rudy Ciccarello. The five-story building showcases some 800 examples of furniture, jewelry, ceramics, leaded glass, paintings, woodblock prints, and photographs, most created between 1890 and 1930. Artists and companies represented include Gustav Stickley, the Byrdcliffe Colony, Charles Rohlfs, Rookwood Pottery, Tiffany, and Greene and Greene. The inaugural temporary exhibitions look at the Roycroft craftsmen of upstate New York and Pictorialist photography (both through January 9, 2022). museumaacm.org
BOURSE DE COMMERCE–PINAULT COLLECTION Paris
Architecture: Tadao Ando
Opened: May 2021
Luxury-brand billionaire François Pinault leased the city’s 19th-century stock exchange Bourse de Commerce—situated equidistant from the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou—and hired Ando to convert it into a showcase for contemporary art. The Japanese architect, who worked on two Pinault museums in Venice, inserted a 30-foot-tall concrete cylinder to house the main exhibition space beneath the building’s frescoed dome and fitted out surrounding spaces for display of the collector’s post-1960 works—including media stars Damien Hirst, Tadashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons—and for temporary shows of “the art of today.” Inaugural displays (through December 31) include Urs Fischer’s slowly melting wax-candle replica of an Italian Renaissance sculpture, a group show of photographs by Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and others, and a solo show of American artist David Hammons that offers a wry critique of racism in the United States. pinaultcollection.com
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART RENOVATION Philadelphia
Architecture: Frank Gehry
Opened: May 2021
Gehry’s signature metal-clad sculptural forms are nowhere to be seen in his expansion of the museum’s iconic 1928 neo-Greek temple on a hill. All the work took place inside, where he opened up spaces to improve circulation and reclaim space for visitor services and galleries. The key moves were to replace the auditorium with a central atrium connecting the upper and lower floors, and to reopen a magnificent 600-foot-long vaulted corridor on the first floor that had been closed for half a century. The project adds large swaths of public space and galleries for expanded presentations of American, modern, and contemporary art—all without increasing the building’s footprint. The next phase of the expansion will construct a suite of galleries for contemporary art under the plaza atop the Rocky steps. This season the museum hosts half of a Jasper Johns retrospective, the other half of which is on view concurrently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022). philamuseum.org
MUNCH Oslo, Norway
Architecture: Estudio Herreros
Opened: October 2021
Norway’s greatest painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) bequeathed to Oslo his entire estate, including more than 28,000 artworks, letters, photographs, and personal possessions. In 1963 the city built the Edvard Munch Museum, a modest building on the outskirts of town, but the artist’s growing fame demanded a more prominent facility. In response, the institution—renamed simply MUNCH—has built a 13-story tower that overlooks the fjord in the city center, near the National Opera and new Oslo Public Library. The new building quadruples the museum’s previous space and offers a rooftop bar with panoramic views. The expanded survey of Munch’s career features multiple versions of The Scream (1893) and two colossal studies for his mural cycle at the University of Oslo. The museum intends to show how Munch relates to and influences contemporary artists, beginning with a show of British artist Tracey Emin (through January 2, 2022) and followed by a Munch-inspired musical work by Norwegian black metal band Satyricon (March 26–June 19, 2022). munchmuseet.no
THE COURTAULD RENOVATION London
Architecture: Witherford Watson Mann
Opens: November 2021
The great private collection of textile tycoon Samuel Courtauld spans the Middle Ages to the early 20th century and has long been housed at Somerset House, an 18th-century government building facing the Thames. A three-year renovation—funded by French brand LVMH and Ukrainian businessman Leonard Blavatnik—has refreshed the ornate interiors and created modern spaces that improve displays and circulation. The Great Room has been restored and hung with French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, including Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889), a trove of Cézannes, and canvases by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, and Seurat. Old Masters have their own suite of galleries, with works by Botticelli, Cranach, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Rubens of special note. Inaugural shows include British works on paper, a gift of modern drawings (both through January 2022), and photographs of Kurdistan in the 1940s from the Courtauld’s huge image library (through May 2022). courtauld.ac.uk
GRAND EGYPTIAN MUSEUM Cairo
Architecture: Heneghan Peng Architects
Opens: Late 2021
A billion-dollar, state-of-the-art mega-museum will open on the edge of Cairo, about a mile from the Giza pyramids and a short drive from the new Sphinx International Airport. Billed as the largest archaeological museum in the world, the alabaster façade of the trapezoidal slab extends more than .3 miles long, clearly intended to evoke the monumentality of the pyramids themselves. The interior space measures on par with a major airport terminal and houses a 39-foot granite sculpture of Ramses II, presiding over the atrium where a grand staircase lined with pharaonic statues ascends to a dramatic vista of the actual pyramids. On exhibit are more than 100,000 statues, mummies, papyri, regal paraphernalia, and other objects gathered from museums across Egypt. The greatest treasure is the tomb of King Tutankhamun, a cache of 4,549 personal items that includes his gilded chariot and iconic golden funerary mask. Another highlight is the world’s oldest surviving boat, a 4,600-year-old cedar ship unearthed near the Pyramid of Khufu. grandegyptianmuseum.org
KUNSTHAUS ZURICH EXPANSION Zurich
Architecture: David Chipperfield Architects
Opened: October 2021
A freestanding addition to the main building on Heimplatz doubles the museum’s gallery space and enables Switzerland’s largest art museum to present more of its collection of Western art since the Middle Ages. The three-story wing showcases art post-1960, temporary exhibitions, and the long-term loan of around 200 French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works from the collection of Emil Bührle that includes masterpieces by Daumier, Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and others. Bührle was a German-born arms dealer to both the Nazis and Allies who acquired art looted from Jewish owners, making the ethics of presenting his collection controversial. The new building’s public spaces feature a Calder mobile, a large abstract canvas by Robert Delaunay, and a giant painting by Max Ernst in the bar. Planned for 2022 are exhibits of Yoko Ono, Federico Fellini, and the sculptor Aristide Maillol. kunsthaus.ch
GES-2 ART CENTER Moscow
Architecture: Estudio Herreros
Opened: October 2021
Gas billionaire Leonid Mikhelson has established a new contemporary art center in a decommissioned 1907 power plant overlooking the Moskva River. Piano converted the main building into a cavernous skylighted open-plan venue for performances and installations. Adjoining structures include a former vodka warehouse, house artist residencies, galleries, an auditorium, and eateries. The pristine white-brick complex is the latest addition to Moscow’s planned Museum Mile, an urban pathway linking the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, State Tretyakov Gallery, and Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. v-a-c.org
ROYAL TREASURY MUSEUM
Lisbon, Portugal
Architecture: João Carlos Santos
Opens: November 2021
Portugal’s last royal residence, the never-completed neoclassical Ajuda National Palace, has added a modern wing to house the crown jewels of the former monarchy. More than 1,000 items in gold and diamonds represent Portugal’s erstwhile monopolies in Brazil, encompassing the Braganza crown jewels, honorary orders and ritual objects of the monarchy, diplomatic gifts, liturgical objects, and royal coins and medals. The project was partly funded by an insurance payout for jewels stolen while on display in the Netherlands in 2002, and considering the $1 billion heist from Dresden’s Green Vault in 2019, where diamonds are concerned, there is no such thing as too much security. palacioajuda.gov.pt
NEUE NATIONAL GALERIE Berlin
Architecture: David Chipperfield Architects
Reopened: August 2021
The Neue has undergone a six-year renovation of its 1968 building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The glass-and-steel jewel box, located among the cluster of galleries and theaters in the Kulturforum district, displays the city’s renowned collection of European and North American modern art from the 20th century, including masterworks of German Expressionism, and works by Paul Klee, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, and others. Inaugural shows present Alexander Calder (through February 13, 2022) and local cinematic artist Rosa Barba (through January 16, 2022). Eventually, the Neue’s post-1945 art will be housed nearby in the Museum of Modern Art, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and slated to open in 2026. smb.museum
MUSEUM OF ART PUDONG Shanghai
Architecture: Jean Nouvel
Opened: July 2021
Located directly below the iconic Oriental Pearl Tower in a development zone run by State-owned Lujiazui Group, the latest opus of French starchitect Jean Nouvel (Louvre Abu Dhabi, National Museum of Qatar) is a gleaming six-story, white-granite-and-glass structure that looks like a sleek modernist coffee table. Its multi-level window facing the Huangpu River and a rooftop restaurant afford views of the Bund. The kunsthalle will host international and Chinese exhibitions, beginning with Joan Miró, gunpowder drawings by Cai Guo-Qiang, and 100 loans from the Tate in London, which is advising the fledgling museum and promises to mount additional shows for three years. museumofartpd.org.cn
ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES Los Angeles
Architecture: Renzo Piano
Opened: September 2021
It’s hard to believe that Los Angeles has never had a museum about film. The Academy—the organization that hands out Oscars—has corrected course, opening an institution about the history and technology of filmmaking, film culture around the world, and of course, Hollywood. The core exhibition, Stories of Cinema, includes vignettes on Citizen Kane (replete with his sled Rosebud), The Wizard of Oz (featuring Dorothy’s ruby slippers), and sections about Bruce Lee and Spike Lee, among others. Housed in a converted department store next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the museum added a spherical film theater in the back with a rooftop terrace for events. The inaugural temporary show looks at the career of Japanese animated film director Hayao Miyazaki. academymuseum.org
