Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

By Greg Lacour

It’s a crisp, sunny late-autumn afternoon in uptown Charlotte, the kind of day the city’s leaders dream about as they try to transform Charlotte into the exemplar of The New Southern City. The sunlight glints off the office towers and freshly constructed museums and catches the bulk of Bank of America Stadium. Here it is, you imagine the folks at the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority saying. No longer are we an oversized small town built on the backs of banking and churches. Here stands a perfect intersection of commerce, culture and entertainment, intermingling until the lines among them dissolve.

That’s the hope, anyway. And in the middle of this vision of soaring glass and concrete sits a peculiar red-tile structure that represents perhaps the boldest gesture yet in the city’s nascent reinvention. On this day, John Boyer swivels from desk to laptop in his third-floor office that overlooks South Tryon Street as he prepares for the Jan. 2 opening of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.

The last several weeks have been hectic, but “it’s going fine,” says Boyer, the Bechtler’s president and CEO. “We’re in great shape with the installation of our inaugural exhibit, which is going to be too beautiful for words.”

It’s taken a long time and years of tug of war among Charlotte’s arts community, city officials and Andreas Bechtler – the retired Swiss businessman and artist whose family collection the museum will house – to get to this point. Now it’s almost ready, a cornerstone of the long-awaited Wells Fargo Cultural Campus of museums, cultural centers and performance spaces uptown. The Bechtler’s main exhibit space has about 70 percent of its art installed. The exterior sports the “Firebird” sculpture, a 17-foot, 5-inch Phoenix of mirrored and colored glass that surely must be the most incongruous creature to ever spread its wings on South Tryon.

Implicit in the sculpture, and its incongruity, is a question: Is Charlotte ready for this?

For the arts, sure. The Cultural Campus includes a new, expanded Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and a new Mint Museum of Art, scheduled to open in October 2010. But the Afro-Am Center and the venerable Mint have history, tenure. The Bechtler represents, in its presence and its collection, what modern art historians have referred to as “the shock of the new.” Or, put another way: Can a museum housing the works of Picasso, Max Ernst and Andy Warhol thrive around the corner from the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the corporate and tourist heart of stock car racing?

The Bechtler’s challenge from the beginning “has not only been in installing the exhibits. It’s building an entirely new institution from the ground up, both literally and figuratively,” Boyer says, turning away from his computer. “We’re making certain assumptions about our audience and market. Charlotte has the Mint Museum of Art, the McColl Center (for Visual Art), the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, the Blumenthal (Performing Arts Center), even The Light Factory.  That demonstrates to us that there is an appetite for ambitious, potent, meaningful engagement with art in this community.

“I know there have been some jokes about whether Charlotte is ready for the best of mid-20th century European modernism, but I figure they just have to prove to me that Charlotte’s not ready for it.”

Start with the building.

Compared to the other Cultural Campus and office buildings that surround it, the four-story structure at first seems small and undistinguished. Then you get closer.

The exterior and columns supporting the cantilevered fourth floor above the entrance appear to be made of mortarless brick. It’s an illusion. They’re red-clay terra cotta tiles, arranged in steps and grades for texture. Each tile is attached to the building’s skeleton, made of strong but lightweight aluminum armature wire. The arrangement in steps creates the effect of a series of straps holding the building together. The surface also creates its own kind of art, manipulating light and shadow depending on the weather and the time of day – or night.

“At night, it’s absolutely scrumptious, man,” Boyer says, stopping at a fourth-floor terrace overlooking the open-air atrium. “Really, really pretty.”

This is the work of Mario Botta, the renowned Swiss architect and friend of Andreas Bechtler’s. Botta designed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea. When Bechtler was convinced that uptown Charlotte would be a better setting for his collection than his own property at Mountain Island Lake, his sole condition was that Botta be allowed to design the building.

Inside, you’re surprised to find that such a compact structure could contain that much space – 36,500 square feet of it, including 10,000 in the main exhibit hall. It’s designed to catch as much natural and ambient light as possible so the effect, in Boyer’s words, is of a “cube of clay filled with light.” The backbone is the building’s glass-and-steel atrium, which seems to radiate light throughout. If you’re beginning to sense that the building itself is in effect a part of the permanent collection, you’re supposed to.

The floor plan tries to make maximum use of the available space by, among other things, locating collection storage, curatorial offices, the reference library and exhibit workroom underground, freeing up space above ground for exhibits.

And what exhibits they are. In late November, Boyer walked around the main third-floor exhibit space, pointing out the highlights of the Bechtler collection and sounding like a teacher roll-calling the giants of European modernism: Leger. Max Ernst. Picasso. Klee. Giacometti. Miro.

As prominent as the names are, their works are rarer, at least in the United States, than you might think. After World War II, American museums were caught up in a post-war exuberance for anything American, which led them to celebrate and exhibit mainly American artists – Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko. The Europeans tended to stay in Europe.

Which, of course, is where the Bechtlers were. The family, based in Zurich, owned stock in Pneumafil Corp., a manufacturer of textile machinery with a plant in Charlotte. Andreas Bechtler’s parents, Hans and Bessie, came from a family of art collectors who met and befriended many of the artists whose work they sought. (One of the collection’s pieces is a four-panel Andy Warhol portrait of the Bechtlers from 1973; there’s a young Andreas at far right, in jacket and tie.) Over 70 years, the family acquired about 1,400 pieces in assorted media, but mainly by European artists, dating from the late 1930s to the late 1970s.

Andreas Bechtler moved to Charlotte in 1979, then to Mountain Island Lake in 1997; there he founded the Little Italy Peninsula Arts Center, with studio space for artists to work in a peaceful, bucolic setting. A few years later, after his parents died, Bechtler had an idea to build a small museum on the property as an adjunct to the arts center and display the family’s collection.