Princeton University Art Museum Reopens: Inside the New Building, Art, and Design

Ihadn’t been to Princeton since, I think, 2017 when I saw its art museum’s splendid exhibition of the work of the Berlin Painter, the early fifth-century b.c. Greek vase painter. Whoever he or she was, since we classify vase painters by style, not personality, there’s an artist who brought proportion, reason, dignity, and aplomb to a perfect balance. It was a risky show. Greek pots draw the egghead crowd, but the Berlin Painter’s work is austerity with spice. Those looking for fabulosity might have skipped it. A year or so later, I reviewed Princeton’s Clarence White photography show, also great, but saw it when it traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

I’d been there off and on in the olden days and thought it was the typical academic art museum, quiet and cramped, where time passes at Old World speed, but in the 2010s something happened. It got ambition. Its exhibitions were not only top-notch but national. College and university museums in those days tended to be lazy and chronic navel-gazers. Plans for a new building waxed and waned for years until they could wane no more. And Princeton was, by 2020, seriously rich. When the museum closed during the Covid mass hysteria, the university pulled the trigger and decreed that the museum should build a new home and build big. In late October, the new museum opened. There are things I love and like and things I disdain and a puzzlement here and there, but overall, it’s breathtaking.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Ihadn’t been to Princeton since, I think, 2017 when I saw its art museum’s splendid exhibition of the work of the Berlin Painter, the early fifth-century b.c. Greek vase painter. Whoever he or she was, since we classify vase painters by style, not personality, there’s an artist who brought proportion, reason, dignity, and aplomb to a perfect balance. It was a risky show. Greek pots draw the egghead crowd, but the Berlin Painter’s work is austerity with spice. Those looking for fabulosity might have skipped it. A year or so later, I reviewed Princeton’s Clarence White photography show, also great, but saw it when it traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

I’d been there off and on in the olden days and thought it was the typical academic art museum, quiet and cramped, where time passes at Old World speed, but in the 2010s something happened. It got ambition. Its exhibitions were not only top-notch but national. College and university museums in those days tended to be lazy and chronic navel-gazers. Plans for a new building waxed and waned for years until they could wane no more. And Princeton was, by 2020, seriously rich. When the museum closed during the Covid mass hysteria, the university pulled the trigger and decreed that the museum should build a new home and build big. In late October, the new museum opened. There are things I love and like and things I disdain and a puzzlement here and there, but overall, it’s breathtaking.