New Haven: British Art, Brutalist Architecture
By • February 27, 2025 0 572
Philanthropist, connoisseur and horse breeder Paul Mellon, who died in 1999, was devoted to three art museums: the National Gallery of Art, his father Andrew’s gift to the nation; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which he served as trustee for more than four decades; and the Yale Center for British Art, his gift to his Connecticut alma mater (class of 1929).
Known early on as “the Mellon Center,” the Yale museum opened in 1977, three years after the death of its architect, Louis Kahn. Steel gray on the outside and woodgrained within — its central stair in a massive exposed cylinder of poured concrete — the YCBA will reopen on March 29 following a two-year conservation project.
Also designed by Kahn, the Yale University Art Gallery’s midcentury modern building is directly across New Haven’s Chapel Street (for which celebrity seal pup Chappy was named). With both museums playing up British art this spring, Anglophiles may want to check out Avelo Airlines’ hour-and-20-minute flights from BWI to Tweed New Haven. Amtrak is another option, offering far more departures.
The Yale Center for British Art, designed by Louis Kahn, will reopen on March 29. In the distance: Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building, now Rudolph Hall. Photo by Richard Selden.
Refreshed with works from storage and recent acquisitions, the Yale Center for British Art’s permanent collection, the most comprehensive of its kind outside Great Britain, has been rehung. The reinstallation’s title, “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” reflects its broader social context and expanded representation of women artists and artists of color. (Playing on words, it may also refer to the replacement of the museum’s light fixtures and fourth-floor skylights.)
Two special exhibitions will open on the same Sunday, one focusing on Britain’s greatest painter (in most estimations) and the other on a bold and protean living artist.
On view through July 27, “J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality” marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Yale’s exceptionally strong holdings of Turner’s works — paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints — includes masterpieces such as “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave” of the early 1830s and the artist’s only complete sketchbook outside the British Isles.
The other special exhibition, “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning,” will be on view through Aug. 10. Emin, 61, was part of the notorious Young British Artists group of the 1990s, creating provocative installations using textiles and personal belongings (shall we say). Chiefly a show of her paintings, the exhibition will also feature works in other media, including neon. Dame Tracey — knighted last year for contributions to the visual arts — will visit the YCBA for a public conversation with Paul Mellon Director Martina Droth on Thursday, April 3, at noon.
The Yale University Art Gallery will synergistically present “Romney: Brilliant Contrasts in Georgian England,” on view through Sept. 14. Not the George Romney who fathered Mitt, this 18th-century society portraitist — if less celebrated than 11-years-older Joshua Reynolds and seven-years-younger Thomas Gainsborough — merits a full portrayal.
Obsessed with Emma Hart, the blacksmith’s daughter who became Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson’s mistress, whose modeling for the painter led to her posing in “tableaux vivants,” Romney also pursued allegorical, Shakespearean and prison-reform subjects.
“Staffa, Fingal’s Cave,” 1831-32. J. M. W. Turner. Courtesy YCBA.
Hundreds of his drawings and three of his sketchbooks were donated to the YUAG in 1964. Since Romney, trained as a cabinetmaker, made violins in his youth, the exhibition will also feature selections from Yale’s Morris Steinert Collection of Musical Instruments, currently closed. (Yale’s other museum, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, which reopened last year after a major expansion, is a sure hit for families with children. Unaccompanied adults will find its gems and minerals galleries astounding.)
Apart from its special exhibitions, the Yale University Art Gallery displays the full range of European and American art, along with works from the ancient world, Africa, Asia and the pre-Columbian Americas. Its Kahn building is a modernist landmark, as the architect’s second Yale museum, the YCBA, is a Brutalist landmark, though Kahn’s Brutalism is extraordinarily refined.
New Haven is an open-air showcase of modern architecture, not only on Yale’s picturesque, largely Collegiate Gothic, campus. For the full rundown, visit newhavenmodern.org, but here are a few Yale highlights: Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building, now Rudolph Hall, of 1963, across York Street from the Yale University Art Gallery; Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Ice Rink of 1958 and Stiles and Morse Colleges of 1961; and Philip Johnson’s Laboratory of Epidemiology and Public Health, now the School of Public Health, of 1964 and Kline [originally Biology] Tower of 1966.
Open to the public and not to be missed: Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Gordon Bunshaft, who later designed the Hirshhorn Museum. Jewel box-like, with a grid of translucent white marble squares on four sides and a sunken court by Isamu Noguchi, the library opened in 1963. Inside: a glowing, glass-enclosed, multistory stack of rare volumes and the special exhibition “Taught by the Pen: The World of Islamic Manuscripts,” on view through Aug. 10.
Bauhaus-trained architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer — designer of the Whitney Museum’s former Madison Avenue building (soon to become Sotheby’s) and several federal agency headquarters — is credited with two New Haven buildings. One is Yale’s Becton Engineering and Applied Sciences Center of 1970. In the other, you can stay overnight.
Built in 1968 along New Haven’s harbor-facing, highway-bordered Long Wharf section, the 165-room Hotel Marcel, part of the Tapestry Collection by Hilton, was originally the Armstrong Rubber Company’s corporate office (the elevated cube) and research and production facility (the long, low plant — now sheared of its rear extension).
Though sustainability isn’t a priority for tire factories — Armstrong was bought by Pirelli in 1988 — two years after the hotel opened in 2021, its internal conversion complete, the building received LEED Platinum certification. Like the TWA Hotel, designed by Saarinen as the airline’s terminal at what became JFK Airport, Hotel Marcel is a paean to midcentury architecture, Brutalism in this case, retrofitted with contemporary technology and designer comforts.
The building’s grid of vertical windows brings harbor light into the guest rooms. Though some, one glimpses the bold blue and yellow façade of the Ikea store next door, which formerly owned the property. The windows have automatic blinds with a control panel offering the following settings: sheer, blackout, entry, art, morning, night. The choices of room lighting, in addition to on and off, are Social and Romantic.
A Hotel Marcel guest room. Photo by Richard Selden.
The hotel’s first floor extends laterally from a spacious lobby lounge on the right, past the reception desk, to a café-restaurant-bar branded BLDG. Though Hotel Marcel — pet-friendly and with a 24/7 fitness center — is walking distance from New Haven’s Union Station and, a bit farther, downtown New Haven and Yale, most visitors without a car rely on Uber, Lyft and a courtesy shuttle that serves a five-mile radius (including the airport and Union Station) from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
In between Long Wharf and downtown is Wooster Square, New Haven’s Little Italy, centered on serene Wooster Square Park and the famed coal-fired pizza [uh-BEETS] ovens of Wooster Street. On a much smaller scale than the D.C. celebration, but lovely and uncrowded, the park will host the city’s 52nd Cherry Blossom Festival on Sunday, April 6.
