The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art for February 1971 [antikvár]

The Year in Review for 1970 This now traditional visual report on the Museum's acquisitive efforts of the past year is surely dominated by the one object not in the galleries containing the review—the new Education Wing. We so habitually deal with the contents of our buildings we can forget that architecture is a major art and that an art museum ignores its importance only at severe loss to its own integrity. Admittedly any building designed by a professional architect and builder can be a useful and workable entity, but the boundary between building and architecture exists and varying levels of quality or excellence can be discerned within the perimeters of good architecture. It may seem that economic rationalizations justify the usually unimaginative and visually impoverished facades and contents of commercial buildings, but surely such arguments are inadmissible if one considers a building designed to house objects and activities associated with concepts involving standards of quality and—forgotten word—beauty. I believe we can without reservation propose the new wing as one of the most important and beautiful acquisitions in the history of the Museum. Indeed the first major acquisition of the Museum in 1916 was the remarkable white marble building designed by Hubbell and Benes, to my taste the most refined and justly proportioned of the classical-style museums built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new Education Wing by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith is not only a beautiful, powerful, and rational architectural statement, but is also a creative part of the main line of progressive architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Designed by the last surviving master of the Bauhaus, it takes an honored place in the later development of this most fruitful modern architectural tradition. Logical, precise, and uncompromising in its consistency and integrity of detail, sensitive yet vigorous in its proportions, textures, and mass-space relationships, it provides both human and larger-than-life environments for the Museum's educational activities, particularly in those areas devoted to public assembly—the special exhibition galleries, the auditorium, and the main lobby. We must consider modern architecture in any adequate educational program. We can now demonstrate the qualities of the modern idiom from an original and important visible work of art to be seen and used by all who care to do so. Still, this great acquisition should not obscure the very real richness and variety to be found among the numerous acquisitions made during 1970 for the permanent collections. We started relatively late in the game compared to our older peers in Boston, New York, and Chicago, and there is still much required to strengthen our collection's full capacity to provide meaning 23