The new Tadao Ando–designed visitor center at the Clark Art Institute. Photo: Tucker Blair

We are strolling, ever so slowly, through the new-and-improved Clark Art Institute museum in the leafy Berkshires. Various architecture experts are droning on, in English and Japanese, about granite vs. concrete, movable walls, mesh, flexible lighting and “a dialogue with the landscape.” It occurs to me that tours of Hell are probably narrated by architects.

After 14 years of talking, of battles, and of construction, and in one of the more ambitious reimaginings of a regional museum ever, the art-rich Clark has opened a new building, plopped a lake behind it and expanded to a 140-acre campus.

It opens July 4, and it is magnificent—mostly—but we’ll get to that.

To remind you, the 50-something-year-old Clark is the Williamstown, Massachusetts, institution that owns more than anyone’s fair share of Impressionism and post-Impressionism, a silly-good trove of it. There’s a sorority of Renoirs, several works by Degas, plus decorative arts and top works by Homer, Bouguereau, Sargent, many more. Gorgeous stuff, all collected by Sterling and Francine Clark, they of the Singer sewing fortune....Continue Reading

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