Fabulous building, good art, and an idiotic hit job on American treasures over slavery, equality, and Columbus

I’ d never been to Milwaukee and knew very little about it aside from its breweries as well as Laverne and Shirley and the city’s Santiago Calatrava–designed art museum, which premiered in 2001 and which I imagined to be breathtaking, gutsy, and, for America, peerless. I don’t like beer and haven’t watched Laverne and Shirley reruns for eons but cherish the memories. The museum is a stunner and, set on Lake Michigan, evokes a ship fit for the Greek gods. It needs to be seen to be believed. Fantastic building aside, the collection is good and reflects local ambitions, with highs as well as voids.

Like most big-city civic museums, Milwaukee’s is an amalgam made over decades, starting with the inspired Layton Art Gallery in 1888. The meat-packing mogul Frederick Layton, born in England, came to frontier town Milwaukee as a teen with his family in the 1840s. A visionary, he bought art with a public art museum in mind. The Layton Art Gallery, together with the Milwaukee Art Society and Eero Saarinen’s 1957 war memorial and cultural center, evolved into the Milwaukee Art Museum, with about 35,000 works of art.

Milwaukee is less known for its good architecture than it should be. When the museum decided in the 1990s that it needed more space, the city’s flamboyant Flemish Renaissance buildings, lots of German beerhall Baroque, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block neighborhood, and the abstract, geometric Saarinen Center set a stage for something distinguished. No one could have envisioned Calatrava’s jewel.

The Spanish architect, born in 1951 and young, had never done an American commission. He wasn’t even among the 55 architects on the selection committee’s long list. He was famous in Europe for his bridges, among them the Alamillo Bridge in Seville, with its single, 466-foot-high pylon that inclines 58 degrees and supports 13 pairs of tensioned steel cables. The museum’s director, paging through architecture periodicals, saw a piece on Calatrava, unknown to him, and tossed his name into the mix. Up, up, up the list he went. What a brave choice.

From outside, the Calatrava building looks like a bird, light and aerodynamic, but also like a ship, white and attenuated but too buoyant to be a ghost ship. Bird or ship, set on a massive lake, with gentle waves in the breeze, it looks as if it’s found a perfect spot, port, or perch. The lofty reception hall is like a cathedral, dramatic and ceremonial. It can be accessed by an outdoor footbridge and has to be the grandest museum entrance hall in the country. There, an architectural ceiling sunscreen called a brise-soleil moves to deflect light and heat. The building is mostly concrete, painted white, but there’s lots of glass, too. An impressive galleria leads to contemporary art spaces. Displayed in the galleria during my visit were cases filled with the museum’s modern glass collection. The light’s lovely, as is the glass, set as it is against the turquoise lake, blue sky, and puffy clouds.

The galleria leads to Milwaukee’s expansive, splendid contemporary spaces and its modern decorative arts collection, both areas of great strengths. The museum’s Old Masters collection is spotty but, from the 1960s into the ’80s, the place bought well and went for splash — calling card things by Larry Rivers, Frank Stella, Chuck Close, Joan Mitchell, Donald Judd, and Ad Reinhardt in spacious, contemplative galleries. The Germans Richter, Kiefer, and Polke have a room. There’s a nice Roy Lichtenstein landscape — his landscapes are very good and have depth, which his cartoon riffs don’t – and a luscious Thiebaud pie painting from 1962, the year he hit the headlines. There’s also the de rigueur Kehinde Wiley imaginary portrait, purchased in 2006, I hope not for an arm and a leg.

Another, warehouse-size gallery shows supersize work such as Sam Gilliam’s Carousel Merge, from 1961, a mammoth, abstract, painted canvas, 186 by 102 inches, hanging from the ceiling, draped, and against a concrete wall. It’s powerful. Next to it, for contrast, is Robert Morris’s sleek, industrial felt wall hanging, also draped, from 1976. It’s the pinnacle of cool to Gilliam’s kinky undulation. A massive, bulbous Martin Puryear wood-and-wire mesh sculpture, from 1987–1988, is plunk in the middle. I loved the mix of materials, with Beth Lipman’s Laid Table (Still Life with Metal Pitcher), a glass extravaganza from 2007, on view as well. For contemporary art, there’s something good for everyone.

Between the two contemporary spaces are the modern decorative arts galleries, displaying another of Milwaukee’s great strengths. The museum has had local, design-focused donors and very good curators specializing in modern furniture, silver, and ceramics, but Milwaukee’s a factory town. Inspired industrial design is an aesthetic imperative. The breweries, Harley Davidson, Outboard Marine Company, A. O. Smith, and Allen-Bradley were masters at making snazzy things. Even beer cans have to have snap, crackle, and pop. Again, a single donor, curator, or designer like Brooks Stevens makes a huge difference in building unique, distinguished, locally spiced collections. Stevens’s archive is at the museum, as is a selection of products he designed.

I knew Stevens, the Milwaukee-based design entrepreneur, for having invented the term “planned obsolescence.” Dirty words, I know, but he meant “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” Economic efficiency aside, this makes for design that strives to appeal and to inspire. Goodness, we’re not Puritans.

I wrote that Milwaukee’s Old Masters collection is spotty, and so, overall, is its European art collection. This isn’t snark on my part since “spotty” suggests so-so moments but also high-noon splendors, too. A dark, haunting Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb, by Zurbarán, and a Caillebotte kayak picture, which I saw in Chicago on loan, are heavy hitters but the museum’s greatest European strengths are German. Not a shock. Most Milwaukee natives, and this includes people in the suburbs, have at least a few drops of German blood from waves of immigration starting around the time of the 1848 revolutions. German heritage naturally means an attraction to German art, from Dürer to Augsburg silver, adorable beer steins, Erich Heckel, Franz Marc, George Grosz, Gerhard Richter, and what’s likely the best collection of 19th-century German realism outside Germany. Not German brute realism, which anchors angst, but the art of gemütlichkeit, which is warm and cozy farm scenes, “hail, hail, the gang’s all here” art, and Alpine landscapes.

This art, beautifully displayed with little interpretation so it shines on its own, expresses an essential slice of Milwaukee, which is what I like in a civic museum that’s not in New England. If I want an overdose of Copley, I’ll go to the MFA in Boston. If I want the best bratwurst in America, I won’t find it in Vermont.

Another glorious idiosyncrasy is the Layton Collection. The Milwaukee Art Museum wouldn’t exist without Layton’s art. Layton (1827–1919) was one of our eminent Victorians who, having become rich, applied himself to the acquisition of a collection that would, sooner rather than later, educate and elevate Milwaukeeans. He liked what he liked, and in what’s said to have been 99 trips to Europe he bought liberally and well. Bouguereau’s Homer and His Guide, Tissot’s London Visitors, Dutch flower pictures, lots of Barbizon art, Alma-Tadema, and Gérôme shine among Layton’s European buys, but he picked wonderful American landscapes, too.

The Layton Collection mostly reflects one man’s taste and what he thought the locals needed. Though housed at the museum, it isn’t owned by the museum but has its own fiduciary board, an anomaly that might now and then irk the Milwaukee trustees. It still acquires art and has bought very good American colonial furniture, among other things. Favorites? I saw a combination table-couch-desk-lamp, with the lamp, alas, missing, designed by George Mann Niedecken around 1910. He worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and shared his integrated, organic style. The thing’s for a home and, I assume, someone who’s multitasker and a workaholic. Niedecken specialized in big furniture that anchored a space, divided it, and echoed the form of the house. A pair of Diebenkorn Ocean Park pictures, big, blue, green, and gray paintings, reductive, with mostly verticals balanced by the subtlest horizontals, are from the Bradley Collection, mostly Modernist and from a local grand family. Given in 1974, they seem to predict the Calatrava building for their future. Triple Profile Portrait (The Mignons of Henri III), a School of Fontainebleau painting from the 1570s, depicts three of the French king’s favorites. No, Henri wasn’t gay but, to 2025 eyes, it’s a saucy tease.

Milwaukee has mostly done very good exhibitions. It did a bracing show on Scandinavian modern design in America. It also took the Hispanic Society’s treasures show, The Glory of Spain, and a Gertrude Abercrombie retrospective is in the works as well as a survey show on Shaker art. There’s no exhibition scheduled for the Semiquincentennial. Museums seem to be going blank on this celebration, so far.

Judging from Troubled Like the Restless Sea, an impressionistic, free-floating, idiotic exhibition of very good furniture and ceramics, mostly Federal-era, the Milwaukee museum does indeed have a blind spot. The show is inspired by Frederick Douglass’s observation that “luxury household furnishings render visible the immorality and corruption of enslavers” and draws randomly from Douglass’s three autobiographies. The museum did the show with the Chipstone Foundation, the esteemed think tank near Milwaukee with a superb, mostly antebellum American decorative arts collection. Chipstone often works with the museum on projects.

In his reminiscences of his time as a slave at a plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — a short year when he was seven or eight — Douglass “boldly recasts his enslavers’ lavish lifestyles and ornate furnishings as nothing more than symptoms of the moral disease of slavery.” A gorgeous Baltimore-made desk and bookcase from around 1800 is said to promote ignorance: It’s “purposefully designed to conceal knowledge” because it has drawers that lock and curtained glass panes to hide the books inside, all protecting the rich since, as Douglass wrote “knowledge is the pathway to freedom.” A center table from 1825 has a marble top that “creates a sense of order.” Beneath it are “wild and organic” carved foliage and paw feet. The table, I read, expressed a stratified society, cultured and fashionable on top, unrefined below. A fancy pitcher made in 1992 in England to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage is the launch point for — guess what — a barb about Columbian genocide by the Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon, who’s peeved because the pitcher displays the signing of the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, which, he says, displaced his tribe. A pineapple-shaped teapot is a trophy of empire. A Federal-era chair painted with roses was owned by a man who also owned slaves. There are a few objects with abolitionist themes, too.

Granted, this installation dates to 2021, a time of peak hysteria and hypnosis over race and reckonings. Aside from its expiration dates, the art is a collective victim of a drive-by shooting. It’s treated like a prop. The Baltimore desk and bookcase are lovely, as works of art, but they’re presented as inane symbols of events that are irrelevant to its existence in the aesthetic world. And who knew that rich buyers of sumptuous art ever, somehow or somewhere, exploited others? “Only in America,” we’re led to believe. Never among the emperors, pharaohs, popes, emirs, tsars, and despots, especially among those with good taste in art.

The video is an abortion of reality and high culture since it equates inequality with evil. What is the point of this? The enslavers, the profligates, the exploiters, and the leisure lovers who bought these objects are long dead. If it’s to make people today feel guilty, resentful, and ashamed, it’s an abuse of art. And, as scholarship goes, it’s shoddy. It’s not creative. It’s formulaic. The curator, Tiffany Wade Momon, developed her rote talking points from the 1619 Project and then cherry-picked the art.

Get rid of this abomination. It’s both awful and trite. I don’t know how an institution committed to preserving heritage at its best could have waded into this cesspool. Nearly everything in the museum was, when it was made, a luxury good, or is now. Are we going to interrogate the prevailing ethics of very owner, every maker, and every patron?

Milwaukee’s anchor temporary show, Permanent Drafts, displays collages, sculpture, photographs, and videos by Erin Shirreff (b. 1975). She’s Canadian. I love her large-scale cyanotypes, but I’m a sucker for cyanotypes, and I like her layered, steel cutouts but, at 40 objects, many big, less would have been more. I left in the dark about why the museum is doing the show, aside from the curator’s interest in her work. It doesn’t resonate with anything in the permanent collection. Shirreff’s no doubt a very good artist, but a one-gallery, focused exhibition, with ten or so objects, would have been enough.

Brilliant, though, is Reviving the Dance of Death, a small exhibition of prints from the permanent collection by the German Symbolist Max Klinger (1857–1920) and the French, undefinable Albert Besnard (1849-1936), both wild and crazy guys. Skeletons gleefully nab new recruits for the afterlife, sometimes when they least expect it, sometimes ceremoniously. The Dance of Death is a late medieval genre, often German, sometimes French, coinciding with the birth of printmaking, with new episodes of that old story of war, famine, plague, and old age, and death’s inevitability. Reviving the Dance of Death tells us that the theme reappears in the late 19th century as advances in medicine, mass-casualty industrial accidents, and new, weird strains of irreligiosity scrambled death’s meaning.

You’ll never go wrong with Klinger, best known for his prints. His images of death are like stage sets and choreography. His print margins often depict ghouls, skulls, funeral flowers, and freshly dug graves. Often, death happens in otherworldly landscapes. Besnard’s demises are more matter-of-fact. He wasn’t an Impressionist but shares with Impressionism — and photography – the primacy of everyday life figures. Death comes calling as an artist sits by his easel or as a young couple canoodles on a park bench. The prints in the show are from little-shown portfolios published around 1900 by both Klinger and Besnard. Besnard is best known as director of the French Academy in Rome, succeeding Carolus Duran but, as an artist, he was good at everything, belonged to no movement, and was eclectic and curious — so he’s obscure. Art historians often don’t know what to do with artists who can’t fit in a box.

The museum had around 250,000 visitors in 2023, according to its last annual report. Financially, it relies heavily on earned income since only 18 percent of its money comes from its endowment. It’s looking for a new director. I hope whoever it is will ditch Troubled Like the Restless Sea and plans some decent programs for America’s 250th birthday. A salute to Layton, a founding father for Milwaukee high culture and an American hero, would be a good idea.