Museum hails new building, Rodin treasures

RALEIGH -- On a Sunday afternoon six years ago, Larry Wheeler, director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, pulled out his Crane stationery and wrote what might be the most important letter of his career: It was to Iris Cantor, owner of the largest private collection of Auguste Rodin works in the world.

Wheeler had cultivated Cantor's friendship since the late 1990s when they worked together on the Raleigh museum's record-breaking Rodin exhibition. In the years since, Wheeler had noticed Cantor focusing more on health care philanthropy than the Rodin collection.

"You know I'm sympathetic," he recalls writing her. "You have a lot of responsibilities, a lot of demands. Maybe it's time to divest yourself of the Rodin collection." He brazenly asked that the bulk of the collection come to the North Carolina museum.

"He was eloquent," Cantor said in a recent interview. "He was persistent. Ultimately, he was successful."

The payoff went on display this weekend, when the museum opened its new 127,000-square-foot building after three years of construction and about a dozen years of planning. The 29 Rodin sculptures not only made the state art museum one of the largest repositories of the bronze castings in the country, it also helped push through funding for the expansion, triggered many other gifts of art and helped raise $30 million of the museum's continuing goal to reach $50 million in private contributions.

The result is an art collection in a new galleries building whose architecture is drawing national attention.

"North Carolina is going to be on the map now in a big way," said Reed Kroloff, director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Museum in Michigan, who has helped organize architect searches for museums. He added that the new building "is going to be heavily lionized in the architectural press by a highly respected New York-based architect who has done one beautiful building after another after another."

Without Wheeler's vision and perseverance, "this just wouldn't have happened," said Roger Berkowitz, former director of the Toledo Museum of Art who retired to North Carolina and serves on the museum's board of trustees.

Museum officials hired architect Thomas Phifer to create a building that would take advantage of the museum property's natural assets.

"One of the great advantages of the North Carolina museum is it has all that room," says Jay Gates, a former director of the Phillips Collections in Washington and the Dallas Museum of Art who now lives in North Carolina.

Most art museums in urban settings, if they want to expand, can only go up. But the North Carolina museum sits on 164 acres, which allowed planners to pursue a one-level structure that highlights the surrounding landscape and allows more natural light into the building.

"Probably we have more natural light per square foot than any art museum created in the history of the world," Wheeler said.

Natural light is the nemesis of curators because it can damage artwork. For the past 150 years, art museums were largely influenced by Greek and Roman architecture, which didn't have windows and thus the buildings acted like jewelry boxes, Kroloff explained. This model protected the art but left visitors feeling lost amid endless galleries, cut off from the outside world. The new building in Raleigh has 360 skylights, floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto courtyards and an elaborate system for controlling and diffusing the light as it comes into the building.

"The building is breaking important new ground," Kroloff said.

With the Rodin donation and funding for the new building, other collectors made donations: a Picasso and three other modern paintings from Julian and Josie Robertson, a trio of lighted human sculptures by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa for the museum's foyer from Jim Goodmon of Capitol Broadcasting Co., and more than 100 works donated from the personal collection of Jim and Mary Patton.

"I think suddenly the art world will wake up and discover that North Carolina is a center for not only contemporary art but the whole world of art," Patton said recently.