A superbly mounted ever-growing, free-admission collection with many masterworks
Written: May 04 '05 (Updated May 05 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great art well-displayed
Cons: ?
The Bottom Line: Relatively unknown museum with especially strong and unique Chinese and Japanese collections.
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts |
The jewel of the Minneaolis (ice princess's ?) culture crown is not the Guthrie Theater or the Walker Art Museum, but the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The collections are outstanding and both the permanent collection and special exhibits are beautifully and informatively displayed.
Eastern Art
There is a representative high quality survey of Indian, Islamic, Himalayan, Southeast Asian art, and more substantial collections of Korean Tibetan art (including a sand mandala that was made by visiting monks and preserved with 3-M technology rather than dispersed as sand paintings normally are).
What is most unique is the collection of carved jade mountainscapes collected by the founder of the Walker Museum (which deaccessioned them as not fitting with its focus on contemporary art). There are quite a few of them, most of which were not on display when I visited last week. The biggest one is far away the largest hunk of jade I've ever seen and has a large number of building and figures carved from its edges. There is nothing approaching it even in the Chinese imperial collection that is housed in the Palace Museum in Taipei, or in any of the American or European collections I have seen. There are also some other astoundingly fine jade carvings on display.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art also includes a large and heavily furnished Ming-dynasty reception hall and an 18th-century (Q'ing) library from Suchou that overlooks an exquisite rock garden (inside the museum building, as is the ceremonial gate to the garden, also from Suchou). The chair at the desk looked to me impossible to sit in and write at the desk. Reading the labels, I discovered it is called a "drunken lord's chair." That is, it was for passing out in, not for producing fine calligraphy.
There is also a Japanese tea-house (including the "backstage" preparation area) with another rock garden, and an elegantly austere reception hall with gilded scrolls of Buddhist immortals.
There is a major collection of 17th- and 18th-century Chinese furniture, an extensive collection of Japanese wood blocks (with different ones on display each time I have visited the museum), and some beautiful Chinese and Japanese paintings.
What I like best are the wooden Buddhist sculptures, the Japanese ones mostly of Buddha himself, the Chinese ones mostly of bodhisattvas, especially Guanyin (Kannon in Japanese) from 900 years ago, when Guanyin was the god of mercy before being transformed into the goddess of mercy (in China, but not Japan). I especially admire the two carvings of seated Guanyins (both gifts of Ruth and Bruce Dayton, as are the rooms from Suchou and many other highlights of the collection that continues to grow with new gifts by the Daytons on display each time I've been there).
Western Art
The Minneapolis Institute of Art seems to have one work each by most of the late-19th, early 20th-century masters, including a particularly interesting Seurat Normandy landscape, and two very great Gaugains. Matisse's 1907 "Boy with a butterfly net" particularly amuses me. The other Matisse painting(s?) and the Picasso paintings do nothing for me, but there are some interesting Derains, a large (and in other ways also great) Schiele portrait of a friend, very lush Vuillards, and the best painting by Rufino Tamayo I have ever seen (and I have been to the Tamayo Museum). The other 20th-century Mexican painters (Rivera, Orozco, Kahlo) are missing, as is Klimt, and the collection does not include a first-rate Van Gogh. There is one of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings that I suspect of being self-parody, but also a superb nightscape of the canyon of Manhattan.
As for the "Old Masters," well, American collectors were late on the scene, and not even the Getty money can build a collection that can compete with The Metropolitan Museum of Art or Vienna's Kûnsthistoriche Museum (which has the worst-displayed collection of great art I have encountered). Poussin’s Death of Germanicus 7, and Rembrandt’s Lucretia are the highlights of the pre-impressionist collection, along with Delacroix’s "The Fanatics of Tangier" (which, several years ago, I happened to see in the James J. Hill house on Summit Avenue in St. Paul: that is another place worth visiting while in the Twin Cities).
Other collections
Many museums have ancient Egyptian mummy cases. Besides the standard Egyptian stuff, the Minneapolis Institute of Art has stuff (now "art") from ancient Nubian. It also has some excellent carvings from the rest of the African continent and from New Guinea. Plus Native North American and Mexican artifacts. I don't recall Central Asian artifacts other than those from Tibet or anything Polynesian, but I tend to spend most of my visits looking at Japanese and Chinese paintings and wooden sculptures (as one could guess from this epinion).
There are usually very interesting photography exhibits, though between construction of additional gallery space and the Art in Bloom extravaganza I did not find where the photography space is on my most recent visit.
A virtual tour of the collections can be entered at http://www.artsmia.org/collection/
Logistics
Museum admission,and its parking ramp and lot (onopposite sides of 3rd Avenue between 26th and 25th Streets) are free. (Parking on the street is also readily available.) On occasion there are special exhibitions with entrance fees for nonmembers.
I had never felt the Institute was crowded, but on my recent visit (the last week of April) there was a big "Art in Bloom" event with elaborate flower arrangements throughout the museum and special tours of the flower arrangements. Other visits, even on weekends, the galleries of been uncrowded.
(There is currently a delightful (and free) exhibit of Japanese paintings of tigers, an animal species not indigenous to the Japanese archipelago. Some are very stylized, those on two large screens astonishingly realistic for Japanese painting. There is also an illustrated Bible exhibit that has a separate admission.)
It is closed on Mondays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and July 4.
The address is 2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis. Although Minneapolis was laid out on a grid, navigating where Interstate 35 has cut through it can be confusing. Directions are available on the institute's quite elaborate website:
www.artsmia.org
There is free parking in a lot just south of the Children's Theater (which shares a lobby with the art institute) and a free parking lot across Third Avenue from the parking lot. (If you park in the lot, ask inside the museum for the day's exit code.)
Washburn Fair Oaks Park is just across 24th Street from the museum, and visible from the coffeeshop and elsewhere. Crab apple trees were in bloom there last week.
Do I need to add that there is a gift shop? and a restaurant... But I keep returning whenever I'm in Minnesota for the art.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Anytime
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