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If you’re going to put one of the country’s best collections of art in storage for a few years while you renovate and expand, you better create something pretty compelling when you reopen.
Last year, when the Cleveland Museum of Art open the first phase of its overhaul — the 1916 building — we gave it a big thumbs up. And this Saturday, the public gets its first crack at the brand-new East Wing, a 139,000 sq. ft. addition clad in striking granite and marble stripes that serves as a visual transition between old and new.
And it’s a stunner.
Spangle had the chance to check out the building before its opening, with inside information provided by chief curator Griff Mann and other staffers. Come along as we take you through the space.
* * *
 I begin my tour, per Mann’s suggestion, at the spectacular glass cube at the south end of the new wing. Enclosed within the soaring transparent walls and bathed in natural light is the museum’s Auguste Rodin collection, which includes a diminutive cast of his famous The Thinker. Rodin died in 1917, but in his later years he was directly involved in the casting of the some of the works specifically destined for the museum, Mann mentions.
The cube is an impressive space, although on beautiful days (like the one during the media preview), the gorgeous outdoor views of University Circle and crystal skies could make you forget about the art.
As Mann recommends, I gaze down from the cube through the halls of the East Wing. It’s a travel through time, as your eyes pass the museum’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works and finish in Contemporary. You can literally stroll chronologically through the art of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, ending at the huge Celebration, by Lee Krasner. It’s kind of extraordinary to stand in the European art spaces and look through four arches onto such massive, modern madness.
My trip through time takes a side detour into the lush decorative arts room, where I meet curator Stephen Harrison. He immediately guides me to a room-anchoring piece from the Sevres Porcelain Factory. One of a pair (the other is missing, but is known to exist because it’s quite coincidentally captured on film in the museum’s photography collection), its arrival at the museum is a fantastic story.
 It “practically walked in the door,” Harrison tells me. “One of those Antiques Roadshow finds.”
The family had had the piece appraised, but thought it was worth more. So they sent Harrison a tiny .jpg image for confirmation; based on the size of the photo, he thought it was a small object. But when he saw the piece in person, he realized it was much bigger — and worth a lot more. Amazingly, the family agreed to give it to the museum, and you’ll see it on display for the first time.
It’s one of the larger pieces in the decorative arts collection, Harrison tells me. You’ll be charmed by the smaller items delicately lighted to add to their rich beauty.
I stroll further through the decades, and as the wall colors lighten I come across the Impressionists and Claude Monet’s incredible Waterlilies, one of the museum’s signature pieces. There’s also a recognizable frieze of dancers by Degas, along with works by Van Gogh and Picasso.
A few steps further and I meet Mark Cole, curator of American art. For the opening of the East Wing, he’s been given a special task: compiling the first installation of the new Cleveland gallery.
“Cleveland’s artistic legacy goes far beyond painting and sculpture,” he tells me. Because of the variety of locally produced art in the museum’s collection, the space is intended to be dynamic. Cole says he’s has selected his “greatest hits” for the opening.
 The room starts and ends with portraits of artists’ wives, and spans scenes from the Flats’ industrial heyday. There’s also a 1918 work by Charles Burchfield, Cleveland’s most-famous artist, Cole says. Amazingly, the mature work was created just two years after Burchfield’s graduation from the Cleveland School of Art. Around the corner, you’ll also catch Viktor Schreckengost’s world-renowned New Yorker (Jazz) Bowl, which Cole calls one of the great icons of the Art Deco era.
I leave Cole behind and enter the Contemporary spaces, where the museum has, for the first time, given significant wall space to photography. There’s Richard Avedon’s Beekeeper, and the 2004 Spencer Tunick shot of hundreds of naked Clevelanders resting prone on the East Ninth Street pier. (See if you can find yourself, exhibitionists.)
Amid the modern art, there’s a monstrous Warhol Marilyn Monroe piece, along with a whimsical giant-sized toothpaste tube. You’ll also see a Sol Lewitt line drawing — created directly on a gallery wall. Lewitt died in 2007, and the piece was first created in 1969, but installed just this year. How? Well, the museum purchased the rights and the directions to the piece, and two artists worked diligently, following the original instructions to re-create the work. A coat of paint could eliminate this piece of art — at least in this form — at some point in the future.
 Contemporary art curator Paola Morsiani is my final tour guide of the day, walking me over to the impressive Continuous Mile, a Liza Lou piece that consists of a mile-long black, beaded rope that winds along itself, creating a hefty cylinder (that’s more delicate than it appears). Morsiani tells me the piece explores “beads and domesticity and feminine issues and processes” while also touching on the idea of segregation and imprisonment.
Lou was a Midwest girl who moved to New York City and Los Angeles but eventually ended up in South Africa. Her current work, including Continuous Mile, also deals with her developing relationship with the people of her new home — and whether it can last forever, Morsiani says.
The museum is also for the first time including permanent video installations. The first is a wall-long Su-Mei Tse piece called Mistelpartition. The Luxembourg-born Chinese artist is a cellist who works in sculpture, photography and video. So the 2006 work combines a panoramic landscape shot of a tree grove covered in mistletoe, with beams of light that “play” a stripped-down version of a Shostokavich song. It’s an intricate combination of a naturalistic source with moving image and computerized components — but for laypeople, it’s simply a pretty view.
 You can almost miss the final work Morsiani shows me on the tour — a realistic and unsettling half-leg that juts out from the wall. It’s a piece by Robert Gober that includes actual human hair and a shoe Gober’s assistant wore until it was “cooked” to the right amount, the curator says. It could be the remains of a body, or a homeless man’s appendage sticking out from an alley.
Morsiani calls Gober “one of the most important American artists after Andy Warhol,” and the piece on display blossomed from the sculptor’s loss of many friends to the AIDS pandemic. As the description reads, the piece is an “expression of personal outrage and universal loss.”
It’s a sentiment that queer folk can understand, in a phenomenal space that provides beauty, escape and the power to move.
A success.
The Details
The Cleveland Museum of Art East Wing
11150 East Blvd., University Circle, Cleveland
Opens Saturday, June 27, 2009
Open 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
10 a.m. – 9 p.m. Wednesday and Friday.
Closed Monday.
Admission is always free.
For more information, visit www.clevelandart.org.
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