Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
March 5, 2019
A museum brazenly steals the show from it’s world class contents…
Wow…I stopped in my tracks. My feet were on the ground. I felt like I just walked into a transparent cumulous cloud.
That’s a likely universal reaction to a first timer’s foray into the Quincy Street entrance to the Harvard Art Museums. Every visitor I watched enter did the same thing – stood transfixed a few feet inside, eyes involuntarily trained upward, gazing to the glass vaulted ceiling five stories above.
A sunny day, blue sky looking like a freshly painted fresco visible through the pyramid of glass atop the five story structure, this moment is an affirmation of brilliant design. Rapture is not too strong a word to describe what I felt. When’s the last time you could say that upon entering a museum?
https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/mission
The Harvard Art Museums are what happens when an institution thinks big, has the dough to shoot for the stars, and hires rpbw architect Renzo Piano, whose bloodlines channel Leonardo de Vinci, to imagine the form and function of a museum of the 21st century. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/history-and-the-three-museums
Beginning in 2008, the university closed the ancient Fogg Museum (1895) and the staid Busch-Reisinger Museum behind it and took a bold step that reinterpreted what a museum's purpose could be. For the next 6 years, a chunk of the block between Quincy Street and Prescott Street was a construction site; entire walls were removed, cranes resembling prehistoric birds hovered and built a glass nest three stories high high over the Fogg Museum. The 1991 building that had housed the Busch-Reisinger Museum, located right behind the Fogg, was demolished. The Quincy Street exterior facade remains untouched. The Prescott Street entrance looks as different as the two sides of a coin. The inside…well, it was reassembled with the inter-connectedness of a Rubik's cube.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/01/with-opening-expanded-harvard-art-museums-complex-patience-rewarded/DGhCKlNLxmBqwlvB3ZatMK/story.html
The Harvard Art Museums are the equivalent of a world-class teaching hospital. Its patients are historic artifacts and priceless art from a millennium or so. Its doctors are directors, curators, and faculty. Its interns are students and scholars from around the world who preserve and document and study the collection in their care.
Areas for study, preservation, scholarly work and teaching surround the atrium on the top three floors - all visible through glass doors with huge glass panes admitting from outside. On any given day, the space looks like an inside out beehive, students, scholars and conservators visible as they work in offices on the perimeter of the glorious atrium. The building has loads of 21st century green technology but none of it can match the generative smack of natural light that imbues the glass bubble with the sense that its floating in an architectural amniotic fluid filled with creative ions that charge the animate and inanimate forms inside.
The Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, Sackler) each have their own philosophies and guiding principles. Miraculously, they retain their identities, bonded together by the diffusion of natural light and visitor friendly flow design and signage.
One of my favorite museums, the Fogg fell off my radar when it closed in 2008. Eleven years later, I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I strolled inside after such a long hiatus. I came to the museum to see the Bauhaus Show that my architect friends and scholars wanted to see. The Bauhaus Show was mesmerizing but honest to goodness, in this first visit, the design and architecture of the Harvard Art Museums were the stars of the show.
Photos...
The original brick exterior structure of The Fogg Museum remains intact. The glass pyramid centered across the top of the structure is visible in the first photograph.
Toggle through the photos...
The blinds and shades are in a constant state of flux according to the needs of the researchers, students, scholars in the offices that surround the atrium on the third and fourth floors.
The old Busch-Reisinger Museum was demolished and replaced by the addition to the museum with an entrance on Prescott Street. Note the brick exterior to the Fogg Museum behind the newer cement and steel addition.
No detail left without natural light, even the Gift Shop...
Terrific guide to help plan your visit...
Visit the tiny Jenny's Cafe, eat in a cozy seating area or saunter out find a table in the original atrium under the pyramid of glass five stories above.
Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
Samurai! Armor of Beauty and Brutality
Samurai!”
Forget Ironman. The sight of a Samurai warrior would scare the bejaysus out of a peasant in feudal Japan. And if they happened to come along on horseback, peasants’ heart palpitations would be detectable with a seismograph.















Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
April 13- August 4, 2013
Ann and Graham Gund Gallery
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/samurai
By the 1700s the Samurai were more of an elite social class rather than warriors, their clout more political than lethal. The population may have been under their thumbs but nevertheless revered them as part of Japanese glorious history dating back to the 12th century.
The exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is stunning – a collection of over 100 artifacts spread imaginatively throughout the rooms of the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.
The exhibit has hit a nerve with Bostonians that a Renoir or Monet exhibit will never touch. Last Saturday, the gallery was packed with as diverse a crowd as I’ve ever seen at the MFA. I mean a veritable pageant of Asian, white, black, Hispanic visitors, ranging from whole families, to seniors and teenagers. You might see such diversity when a circus comes to town but in MFA? I don’t think so.
Actually, I had as much fun watching the visitors as taking in the handsomely displayed lacquered metal helmets, suits of intricately fabricated armor, weapons, horse armor (including stirrups, saddles, and metal masks and frontispieces to protect horses’ chests) used in warfare or later for ceremonial occasions.
We know that the improbably impenetrable cinema armor of Ironman and a host of action heroes and villains is fantasy. Back in the day, there was nothing fictional about a Samurai warrior. He meant business. And when he was done serving his feudal boss, there would be blood (or townspeople) running in the streets.
My guess is this is why the exhibit is so popular. The Samurai warriors were real, they lived and died for their masters. Their armor preceded that of King Arthur and the fictional Knights of the Round Table. And their armor was breathtakingly beautiful, even if its wearers could be death machines to civilians or other opposing warriors. The paradox of the beauty and supreme craftsmanship of the armor and accouterments and the brutality its wearers could inflict is extraordinarily powerful.
The last room of the exhibit, with one platform of several Samurai warriors advancing and another platform of Samurai warriors approaching them on horseback will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. Even after centuries of absence from Japanese society, the sight is totally intimidating.
The exhibit is informative without being overwhelming.
Even the horse armor looks scary.
Of course there's plenty of merchandise to tempt you as you leave the gallery.
Photos by Paul A, Tamburello, Jr.
July 25, 2013 in Art/Gallery reviews, Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (2)