Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

In stepped an assortment of Charlotte city officials, members of the Arts & Science Council and tourism leaders, who already were tossing around the idea of a centralized campus for art museums and cultural centers in uptown. They didn’t care for the idea of one of the world’s greatest individual collections of modern art set in the woods 20 minutes outside Charlotte.

At first, Bechtler recalls, it was Foundation For The Carolinas President and CEO Michael Marsicano and local attorney Mark Bernstein who stepped in and convinced him to go uptown. Bechtler was OK with the idea in principle, but he wanted to retain his original idea even in a different setting: a distinct, standalone structure designed by Mario Botta. That’s why he rejected one of the initial ideas, to exhibit some of the collection in one wing of a new uptown Mint Museum.

“I knew I had a very interesting collection for Charlotte, and I also believe good cities have variety in their cultural institutions. You don’t want to have a Wal-Mart of institutions for the arts,” says Bechtler, 68. “ I decided would like to have a small place for the collection, something that has its own character. It’s all like a puzzle that falls into place.”

And that, after years of back and forth and a rental car tax hike approved by the N.C. General Assembly to help pay for the campus, was what happened. The museum broke ground in 2007, which was good timing. Another year’s delay might have meant no museum, even no campus, in a recession.

“It’s a good thing this came together before things tanked. Otherwise, the chances of it happening would be none,” said Cyndee Patterson, who chairs the museum’s board of directors. “This is Charlotte’s stimulus package. We have pumped lots of money into the economy to get this built, opened and up and running.”

And even with incomplete installation in late November – not all the pieces in place, none of the information placards – it’s clear that the collection is staggering for any city, much less lil’ ol’ Charlotte.

Turn one corner in the main exhibit space, and you find Picasso’s La Femme au Chapeau (Woman In a Hat), one of the master’s later works. Turn another to encounter Le Corbusier’s Spirales Logarithmiques (Logarithmic spirals), from the early ’30s, when he was trying to build a new vocabulary for the Cubism that Picasso and Georges Braque had created. On another wall hangs Ernst’s eerie, playful Projet Pour un Monument a W.C. Fields, with its pulsating reds and blues and spectral apparitions of Fields and a parasol-wielding Mae West.

Near another corner, you run across a surprise, one of the places where Botta’s artistry holds the others’ in its hand. Through two windows set in the walls at right angles to each other, you see a perfectly framed riot of color and geometry against a black background – the French painter Victor Vasarely’s Tridem K. It’s on an opposite wall, something you wouldn’t be able to see except for the windows and the light they let through.

Any initial doubts Bechtler might have harbored are long gone. “I’m elated,” he says. “I’m so happy I was finally able to find the right place for the collection.”

If modern art was about anything, it was about abolishing the barrier between so-called high and low culture, about finding art in the everyday and the everyday in art. The kind of audience the Bechtler is after has the same irreverence toward the distinction, or doesn’t recognize it to begin with.

There’s always been an anti-intellectual strain in American life, what Boyer refers to as “the late Jacksonian democratic notion that you should stay away from the highfalutin.”

“It’s counterintuitive of the great strength of this country,” he says. “Most of the great American scientists and writers and performers and painters, journalists, came from nowhere. In my mind, that’s the America I want to be a part of. There’s this idea of a gap between Joe Six-Pack and gallery-goers. I’d argue they’re one and the same.”

Boyer has plenty of experience in trying to eliminate those kinds of gaps. A fourth-generation Californian, he came to Charlotte in 2008 after serving as president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a New York-based public policy agency. But before that, he spent 16 years as executive director of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn. There, he expanded the Twain House’s programs to include national teacher institutes, symposia and lecture series, a citywide festival and exhibitions in fine and decorative arts.

He wants to take the same approach with the Bechtler. He’s already working on a film series and other programs arranged for local teachers. Boyer sees the artwork as a conduit for teachers to discuss history, culture, psychology; he points to Landschaft (Landscape), a striking painting by the Franco-Russian abstract artist Nicolas de Staël, who was forced out of Russia after the 1917 Revolution and eventually committed suicide at 41. In viewing the work, reminiscent of Rothko in its gloomy reds and blacks and horizontal panels, you can talk to students about the revolution, what caused it and what it led to, the turmoil on a continent and the despair in a man’s heart.

“You’re not going to get it all with one tour,” Boyer says. “The works reveal a remarkable window on not only who the painter was, but who we are … It can change people’s lives, if they let it.”

Of course, it can merely entertain them, too. No shame in that. In addition to the chamber music concerts he wants to start in February, Boyer is thrilled about plans to screen an episode of a popular television show featuring Jasper Johns as a guest star. The name of the episode is “Mom and Pop Art.” A main character unintentionally creates a work of outsider art and becomes a local celebrity, befriending Johns and other artists. The show? “The Simpsons.”

“We’ll mix it up, know what I mean?” Boyer says.

So, again: Is Charlotte ready for this?

“I think it’s very much ready,” Bechtler says. “We are new, and it will take a lot of effort to build a base … but this is my gut feeling. This is not contemporary art. It’s modern art, and these are very proven artists, and I think it’s overdue that we have this here.”

Inevitably, you go back to the Firebird sculpture, created by the late Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. It seems to represent the whole venture. Yes, it confounds your expectations. You may love it; you may not. But you cannot ignore it.

Or, as Boyer puts it: “We may be caught off guard, but we’re delighted.”

~ Greg Lacour