High and low art share gallery space in museums that long segregated works

~ Museums' once-rigid restrictions on displaying art are being dissolved.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The exam breezed by, but now Catherine Futter was stumped. The artist was Rembrandt; the question was the classification he fit. Futter kept thinking the 17th-century master's work could not be defined.

The answer -- Baroque -- hit her and has served as a lesson she has carried throughout her curatorial career, on the interconnectedness of art regardless of its form.

"You think of them as icons, but they're all part of a continuum," says Futter, curator of decorative art at this city's revered Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is undergoing a huge expansion. "Very little art is created in a vacuum."

Those lessons are on display -- though subtly -- as the Nelson, like other museums nationwide, reinstalls galleries and opens new ones. Different media once segregated by form -- sculpture, painting, decorative arts -- are being integrated in the same rooms as museums' once-rigid restrictions on displaying art are dissolved and curators look for ways to present easier-to-understand themes and attract new visitors.

"We said, 'Let's look at the art and let's look at how it's talking to each other and how it's communicating with each other and let's let it dictate what we should do,"' she says.

Labels aren't needed

The result may be tough for a visitor to discern, though Futter and others say it often plays a key role in their understanding and their experience.

A late gothic gallery at the Nelson, just sculpture before, has added paintings. In a decorative arts gallery awaiting completion, items once organized by material (glass, pottery and the like) are now in more thematic groups (objects with political ties, cups used in centuries-old drinking games, pottery influenced by textile patterns, etc.). And among a collection of Baroque works, a Rembrandt oil painting hangs near a 17th-century carved French cabinet that is set near a jug in the shape of an owl.

"You don't need to read a label," Futter says, "you get it when you walk into this gallery."

Across the country, museum officials say they are finding the same to be true.

At the Menil Collection in Houston, objects spanning centuries are displayed together, from 19th-century surgical tools to surrealist works of art. A special exhibit pairs African art with pieces in the permanent collection by Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol and others.

At the Miami Art Museum, gearing up for a planned 2010 rebirth in a new building, contemporary galleries will put photography, sculpture and painting side by side.

Success in Cincinnati

And at the Cincinnati Art Museum, a new wing opened in 2003 -- where cross-media installations are grouped by themes -- was so successful, other reinstalled galleries will follow its lead and better integrate their works.

"It's just like the facets of a diamond," chief curator Anita Ellis says. "Separate them out, you get a flash. But put them together and the sum total becomes greater."

Not everyone agrees. While some galleries are taking this approach, many others reject it. David Sokol, who has been curator at several museums and consultant to numerous others, says it's dividing the art world.

"There's a part that says the traditional painting hanging on a wall with a little plaque next to it is not getting them through the door," says Sokol, who directs the museum studies program at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "And there's a powerful, powerful curatorial lobby saying that's the only way to do it."

David Carrier, who authored "Museum Skepticism" on the evolution of public art museums since the late 1700s, says the idea of mixing the high arts (painting and sculpture) with decorative arts (furniture, vases, etc.) can be jarring for some curators.

"It's a real reorientation in our way of thinking," he says.

Even those who champion the approach say there are limitations. Terrence Riley, director of the Miami Art Museum, who helped integrate objects during his 14 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, says it works best when dealing with art from a time when there was a great deal of creative fusion.

"In some periods it works, in other periods it doesn't," he says.

Ellis says the new approach is necessary to connect with new audiences.

"We want everybody from a trucker to a billionaire to visit," she says. "If you can tell a story -- and one that relates to them today in some way -- they remember that."