The country's new must-see museum is meticulous and discreet

The cell phone reception may be spotty at Glenstone, the Potomac Museum of Art that opens a revamped campus, including a new 204,000-square-foot gallery called Pavilions on October 4. Signal is rare in the large outdoor courtyard concrete building, where the only sound is the water flowing through a water lily pond, and the only glimpse of the outside world is a hawk that turns overhead. Herbs planted on the green roof undulate in the wind and, frankly, any idea of ​​removing the cell phone disappears.

Glenstone opened in 2006 as a qausi-public museum on the grounds of Mitchell and Emily Rales, accessible a few days a week by reservation only. The original iteration included a much smaller gallery, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, which has since hosted critically acclaimed artist exhibitions and collected by the Raleses. This space became a pendant of the $ 200 million Pavilions Building, a collection of 11 interconnected galleries on a gentle hill, with the aquatic terrain as the visual and aesthetic heart of the experience.

Visitors to Glenstone now enter a new gate on Glen Road, park in gravel pitches with sycamores and oaks for shade, and head straight for a minimalist reception pavilion. From there, a 10-minute walk through a prairielike landscape, created by PWP Landscape Architecture, leads to the new building designed by Thomas Phifer and his partners. Phifer's vision is convincing: a building that is monumental but withdraws, discreetly grandiose but never overwhelming, with an easy natural flow around the water, punctuated by galleries that sometimes offer views of the landscape. The grounds also include open-air sculptures, paths and bridges and a café overlooking a thick forest.

Everything is discreetly spectacular, with panoramic views of the outdoors that present nature as a visual haiku, while the interior feels strangely like an architectural rendering, a ghostly landscape of geometry and subtle shades of white and gray. But the show was severely contained, framed and domesticated. Despite the rigor and finesse of the building, it is absolutely natural, except for the fact that it constantly presents to the visitor strange visions: an outside room in which the ground is detached and a jumble of huge metal beams ( sculpture by Michael Heizer) looks like a giant who played a rash game of pickup sticks; a large gallery with a room for dozens of people that contains only one painting, by Brice Marden; a long corridor that ends with a single sculpture, by Martin Puryear, which leaves a slight doubt as to its size and distance, until you get closer.

[This museum isn’t interested in Instagram. Does that make it elitist?]

The Raleses have used the freedom offered by their extraordinary wealth to design what they hope to be the ideal museum, a perfect space for the art that interests them, without the pressures that force other institutions to Compromise, compromise or follow the common modes. more populist institutions pursuing a wider, wider and more inconstant public. They cited the inspiration of the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, famous for its stone garden, which presents an idealized, distilled and symbolic view of nature, using only a few rocks and a foliage background seen at beyond a low wall. The influence is evident, especially in a room nicknamed "Visualization Gallery" which features a long wooden bench facing a horizontal window that overlooks the hilly landscape a thin fringe of trees arranged as a screen in the distance.

Nine of the eleven rooms have only one artist, while the largest gallery is devoted to an overview of the Rales collection, comprising 65 works by 52 artists, made between 1943 and 1989. The original museum building also remains open. exhibition that examines in depth the work of Louise Bourgeois. Thus, visitors have at least three modes of exploration of the art: synoptically in the gallery preview, deep in the old gallery and a set of splendid and isolated vignettes in the halls dedicated to individual artists.

Tensions arise naturally – between the contemplative and analytical mind, and between art and nature. There are rooms such as the gallery overview on thinking, history, dynamics of influence and style, psychology and the social dynamics of art. And there are theaters that succeed or fail because of their susceptibility to more irrational things, like the magic of a single work. And the natural world offers strong competition during the circulation in these contemplative spaces. Glenstone makes you aware of the difference between the museum as a provocation for reflection and the museum as a place of deliberate reflection.

On a gray day this month, I found myself doing both. The art of the 9,000-square-foot gallery was a mix of important canonical works by familiar names (Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning) and brief chapters devoted to alternative histories including a room of Japanese abstractions. made in the 50s and 60s, and Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel. A large room within this subdivided gallery has been dedicated to artists whose games with material and gravity have set up a fascinating study of gender and sexual expectations, with a piece of Richard Serra defying gravity with risky bravado . Same thing with the sleight of hand and fantasy on the back wall. This is a reflection gallery.

Nearby is a single room dedicated to On Kawara's "Moon Landing," three of his black and white date paintings that refer to important days for the Apollo 11 mission on the moon. It's a tall, square room, with just one thing to think about, and if you've ever thought about Kawara's work before, it may seem like a sanctuary. It is a danger inherent in the presentation of work with a significant conceptual advantage in what many consider ideal circumstances, a space for reflection where nothing can divert it. In isolation, work seems to be a problem to be solved, and once resolved, what is the next problem? And with Kawara's work, if you've already thought about it before, seeing it again can serve more memory at your first meetings than a new incentive to analyze.

[[[[It was so far the best Glenstone show: Fred Sandback]

The Glenstone car parks are removed from the galleries for an orchestrated walk. (Goran Kosanovic for the Washington Post)

The new Glenstone is the most important addition to the ecology of the Washington Museum since the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture two years ago. Most people will probably find that half a day in Glenstone seems to be only a first step. And it will be interesting to see how it is received, what the public does with its tone and its particularities. There is no text on the wall to explain anything, although the young visitors in a hurry approach you to start conversations. Huge amounts of space have been invested in unique works, such as Robert Gober's elaborate installation of washbasins and fake forests and piles of politically charged newspapers, a work that divides audiences according to the usual flaws in contemporary art. who find it hermetic, bewitching those who find there an obsessive dream landscape of death, escape and renewal. I found it tedious when it was seen at MoMA four years ago and extremely powerful when I saw it recently at Glenstone.

So in a single visit to this meticulously designed new museum, I found myself thinking less of an artist that I almost always admire and an artist that I often find frustrating. I've also spent a lot of time looking out the window and thinking about a great heretic thought: can any of these elements compete with the mere fact of watching the grass grow? ? This is not an easy task with the declared ambitions of the museum's creators, which was to create a place that integrates art, architecture and landscape. They have succeeded, perhaps so that the new Glenstone will put the art to the test, disturbing judgments about its value and meaning, in a manner both positive and disconcerting. It's a place that poses some of the oldest but most relevant questions that a museum can ask: what about all of this? And what does he want from us?

Glenstone will be open to the public on October 4th. Admission is free, but reservations are strongly encouraged. For more information, visit glenstone.org. The opening hours of the museum are from Thursday to Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00.