Why Buffalo AKG Art Museum is New York’s next cultural destination

As a Manhattan girl, I’ve harboured a life-long ignorance of my native state, an expanse the size of England that always struck me as more remote and foreign than most of western Europe. Determined to correct that embarrassing parochialism, my husband and I set out on a 2,000-mile road trip that took us from the carefully tended wilderness of Adirondack Park (which covers one-fifth of the entire state), through wine country, lake country, horse country and Nascar country to the roughened diamond that is Buffalo.

New York State’s second-largest city, once an industrial behemoth guarding the western end of the Erie Canal, long ago became an emblem of urban decline. Unemployment, segregation and ruinous renewal schemes all contributed to the decay; its population today is roughly half what it was in 1950. Intermittent interest from politicians and a flood/drought cycle of public funding helped perpetuate its troubles.

But the shine may finally be back on this rustbelt jewel, or portions of it at least. The former Albright-Knox Art Gallery, always an artistic centre of distinction, has been ravishingly restored and rebranded as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum at a cost of $230mn, helping to establish the city as a cultural destination. This triumph of preservation and expansion, designed by architectural firms OMA and Cooper Robertson, offers a newly burnished home for the museum’s bountiful collection of 19th- and 20th-century art.

The core of the permanent collection occupies the neoclassical main building, conceived for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 but completed four years too late. And the art looks resplendent, with each Gauguin, Hartley, Brancusi and Eakins getting the space it needs to breathe — but not so much that it feels adrift.

The new installation does justice to a collection that includes so many of the best artists’ best works. The curatorial team, led by Cathleen Chaffee and Holly Hughes, preserve a chronological narrative, divided into the usual aesthetic and geographical groupings, yet also punctuate it with startling harmonies. Chaïm Soutine’s brilliantly bloody “Carcass of Beef” (1925), for instance, nicely sets up Magda Cordell McHale’s 1958 “Figure 59”, a virtuosic elevation of gore into quasi-abstraction.

It’s satisfying to come across one of the museum’s signature possessions, Giacomo Balla’s “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash” (1912), a motion study of a dachshund furiously churning its short legs in counterpoint with its human companion’s leather-clad paws. A bit later, you encounter the surprise companion piece: Francis Bacon’s 1953 “Man with Dog”, a blue-grey study of similar elements — pooch, legs, sidewalk — that yields a far gloomier, even ominous scene.

Such visual rhyming abounds, not for the sake of mere cleverness, but to point out how certain poetic techniques survive across time and medium. The sublime black cavern at the centre of Courbet’s 1864 painting “The Source of the Loue” starts a conversation about metaphorical voids and inviolable depths with Lee Bontecou’s untitled wall sculpture from 1960, which revolves around a gaping hole. Move a little further along the timeline and you find another untitled three-dimensional work protruding from the wall, this one by Anish Kapoor, dated 2011. That hungry red concavity strongly suggests that voids may be terrifying and mysterious, but they are also sexual and seductive.

Some juxtapositions slyly guide the eye through histories of colour and line. Arshile Gorky’s masterpiece “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944) hints at observed reality without ever copying it, tucking coded references beneath shimmering layers of scarlet, copper and gold. That lavish symphony leads towards AKG’s stellar holdings of postwar American art: the breathtaking splatters of Pollock’s “Convergence” (1952); de Kooning’s sensually creamy, syncopated “Gotham News” (1955); Rothko’s astonishing “Orange and Yellow” (1956), which glows on a wall of its own. Rothko predicted that the painting would launch viewers on to an extreme emotional plane where “tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on” dwell. The curators have prepared the way for such communion.

The museum’s core is flanked by a spare 1962 lightbox by Gordon Bunshaft (the mid-century modernist wizard of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) and the shiny new Gundlach Building designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu. Both wings float clear of the original building, and much of the complex’s architectural drama lies in the linkage between them.

Bunshaft walled in an open courtyard that was always unworkable in a city with an annual snowfall that can top 10ft. As part of the renovation, Ólafur Elíasson and Sebastian Behmann covered the cloister with an exuberant canopy. “Common Sky” is an inviting architectural-scale artwork, a kind of permanent circus tent spangled with triangles of clear and mirrored glass that fetch daylight from outside and toss it into the welcoming space, mixing it with fragmented reflections.

Across the campus, the three-storey glass coffer of the Gundlach Building is linked to the Greek-revival mothership by a snaking glass ramp that gives visitors disorienting glimpses out to Frederick Law Olmsted’s Delaware Park. The new extension extends the art historical narrative into the present, its galleries stuffed with everything from a stack of Donald Judd boxes to a rhinestone-studded interior by Mickalene Thomas.

But the truly transformative feature of the new building is a dedicated space for temporary exhibitions, now taken over by a Marisol retrospective that, all by itself, supplies reason enough for a trip to Buffalo. (Or to Dallas, where it moves next year.) The cosmopolitan superstar had a surprisingly strong bond with AKG, the first institution to buy one of her sculptures: “The Generals” in 1962. When she died 54 years later, she left her entire estate to the museum.

That relationship yields an exhibition that should rescue her from decades of nostalgic tokenism. The enigmatic, beguilingly beautiful and periodically reclusive artist had several bursts of fame — her work appeared on a fistful of Time magazine covers — that sputtered out. Every now and then, a sculpture or two gets trotted out for a Pop art survey, then disappears back into the vaults. This show, which Chaffee curated, finally delivers the deeper exploration the artist deserves.

Marisol’s groupings seem funny at first, with their blunt satire of lives organised around consumerism and class. The mass media that adored her also peddled images of perfect children as beatific (white) cogs in the machine of (white) upward mobility. She responded with a pair of giant wooden siblings, “Baby Boy” and “Baby Girl”, carved with deceptive crudeness. When they debuted at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1964, unnerved critics described them as “cloying but malevolent monsters” and “giant babies of abysmal brutality”. In the exhibition catalogue, art historian Delia Solomons calls them “eerie baby gargantua”. Today, they loom as mockeries of an American ideal that endures, even as the reality of family life has been utterly transformed.

With its army of sculpted figures, supplemented by works on paper, sketches, and archival press materials, this show emphasises the darker side of Marisol — the shadow that her name denies. (“Mar y sol” means “sea and sun”.) The more time you spend with her work, the more it seems aligned with Surrealism’s nightmares rather than Pop’s sleek cheer. The globe-trotting child of a Venezuelan oil heir and a mother who died by suicide when she was 11, the artist grew up into a glamorous, taciturn and deeply unconventional person who walked away from success as soon as she had earned it.

With so many people looking at her, Marisol decided to join the gazers and use herself as a principal subject. She assembled found objects and painted wood into grotesque bodies and finished them with plaster and rubber casts of her face, hands and feet. “The Party” (1965-66) assembles 15 figures in gowns and gloves, like guests at Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball. The party people are all variations on Marisol herself: even as she withdrew, she was desperate not to vanish. She can rest easy about that now.

‘Marisol: A Retrospective’, to January 6, buffaloakg.org

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