Review | The Art Museum in Modern Times: Charles Saumarez Smith’s world tour of ‘new’ institutes that have shaped the art viewing experience
- Architectural historian Smith visits 43 art museums on a mission to understand and interpret their design, right down to the display of individual works
- China’s West Bund Museum and Power Station of Art make ‘new Chinese museums … part of the international art world’, he writes
The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith. Thames & Hudson
M+, in the West Kowloon Cultural District, has missed many boats; here’s another.
Notorious for failing to hit completion deadlines, Hong Kong’s museum of visual art, design and architecture, now set to open at the end of the year, would doubtless have been an automatic choice for author Charles Saumarez Smith.
In The Art Museum in Modern Times, architectural historian Smith – a former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery – undertakes a world tour of new establishments, large and small, public and private, that have had “a clear impact on the way people think about museums and their purposes”.
In his chronological progression the word “new” is elastic, stretching from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which opened in 1939, to the West Bund Museum, in Shanghai (2019).
On his mission to “understand and interpret the design” of 43 institutes and how they have shaped the experience of looking at art, right down to the means of displaying individual works, Smith delivers a detailed but, thankfully, concise report from each location.
