Museum Review: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York is one of the world's great treasures of contemporary art. Located near the campus of the Buffalo State University, the galleries are entered through a glass building reminiscent of the glass pyramid of the Louve. This extensive museum is made up of long hallways surrounding a central sculpture garden. The wide white painted hallways make up most of the gallery space with a few galleries of the side. Also in the museum is a large lecture room where I had the pleasure of attending a talk on typography. The sculpture garden is accessible through a bar and restaurant called muse and there are tables in the sculpture garden for eating and drinking.
The gallery is a teaching museum, the collection is not deep, there is no single gallery containing a quantity of a single artist’s work. Instead the collection is made up of individual works of some of the most significant artists of the late 19th Century, 20th and 21st centuries.
For a museum at a state museum in what is now a depressed area of Northwest New York, the collection is remarkable as it includes works by Miro, Kadinsky, Van Gogh, O’Keefe, Pollack, Johns, Warhol, Man Ray and many, many others. I have never had the experience of seeing so many fine examples from so many break-through visual artists in one place. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery collection is so rich and so wide as to be almost beyond belief, a museum definitely worth visiting.
A word about Buffalo and, in part, an explanation as to how a collection of art such of this could find its way here.
At the end of the 19th century Buffalo was the richest city in America with the highest percentage of millionaires to the population as existed anywhere. This wealth was built first on steel manufacturing and later, when Nicolai Tesla using the power from Niagara Fall to turn Buffalo into the world’s first electrified city, general manufacturing. Today Buffalo contains many remarkable architectural monuments to its history as a center of wealth and her architecture continues to attract tourist from all over the world to see the stain glass and gold covered roofs of the city.
Today Buffalo is a city in search of a purpose, the downtown is boarded up storefronts and empty streets but not that long ago the city attracted the wealthy and was filled with world class entertainers, the old fronts of the vaudeville theaters are still to be seen everywhere. This grand city purchased art and filled the galleries and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery saw he beginning of the decline began to sell the conservative art work collected by titans of turn of the century manufacturing and used the money to purchase pieces by artists that would themselves become giants albeit of the artistic universe.
Nearby is Niagara Falls and this world famous natural wonder continues to attract visitors from all over the world. Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is just a short drive away. There is much to see and enjoy in this part of the world. For the art lover, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery should be a draw in itself and a must see for anyone traveling in the Buffalo area for other reasons
For more information about this musuem: http://www.albrightknox.org/ |
