Founded in 1842 in Hartford, Connecticut, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest continually operating public museum in the US. Recently, beset by debt and crumbling infrastructure, it flirted with losing that title. Under director Susan Talbott, it has pulled itself back from the brink.  Talbott presides over a collection that ranges from the decorative arts to old masters and the Hudson River School, from impressionism to most of modernism and the sometimes still shockingly new. This weekend, the museum celebrates something very new indeed: the completion of phase one of renovations which will increase gallery space by 27%, or 16,000 square feet.  To celebrate, the museum is reopening its galleries of postwar and contemporary American art and cutting the ribbon on a major exhibition – Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland. There is also Sideshow, a droll and uncanny installation by Michael C McMillen, the latest offering in the Atheneum’s 40-year Matrix series on contemporary art.  Once phase two is done, in September, Talbott will retire. Should her successor choose not to keep the striking 1930s beach scene by surrealist Pierre Roy that hangs on the wall of the director’s office, it and other deserving works among the 50,000 or more held by the museum may yet find a home in one of 17 new galleries. For the first time in 50 years, all of the Wadsworth will be open at the same time.  “The museum has been about half-closed for almost seven years,” says Talbott. “We so badly needed to renovate. I’d been here for only about a month when I got all these phone calls in the middle of the night saying: ‘There are leaks! We’re taking the paintings down.’ It became clear we couldn’t keep moving paintings into storage and be a viable museum.”  Viability has now been achieved, though not without strain. The vicissitudes of public museums are familiar. Finances are often precarious; ambitious expansion can lead to painful contraction. In the Atheneum’s case a futuristic 2001 plan by a firm of Dutch architects, UNStudio, would have demolished one wing, roofed-in a courtyard and closed the museum for two years. After costs and tempers ran high, the plan was shelved.  An attempt to occupy the old Hartford Times building went the same way and when Talbott arrived, from the Smithsonian, the roof was not the only thing that had sprung a leak. In the 2007 fiscal year, the Atheneum reported a $540,000 deficit.  “The UNStudio expansion was a little controversial in the community,” Talbott says, diplomatically. “But what we realised with this renovation is that we added more gallery space than had we gone through with what probably would have been a $100m project. Instead we had $33m and we added all of this space.”  Funding was mostly public but the workable plan, it turned out, looked inwards. “We realised we had this incredible opportunity to expand our footprint within our existing buildings,” says Talbott. “In other words, to free up all this space that had been closed sometimes for up to 20 years, because of either leaks or the need for storage space.”  Forced to eschew grandiose architectural statements (as made recently at Harvard, with the combining of three museums under one Renzo Piano roof) like Tate Britain in London the Atheneum has scoured and scooped, creating public space from private. Storage, a problem for any 173-year-old institution, has been moved entirely to the basement, releasing space above ground to the demands of display.  “Turning inwards is a smart trend when you don’t have the money because you don’t have the name-brand architect to flip before your donors,” says Talbott, who entrusted the renovation work to a Hartford architect, Smith Edwards McCoy. “In our case, because the state of Connecticut was so incredibly generous, we really raised very little private money. What can I say? If you have great bones, eat good food and be healthy, rather than get a facelift.”  As a result, in the words of the critic Jed Perl, “echoes of the Atheneum’s heyday” – when it was “the first American museum to mount a Picasso retrospective and the first to buy a Mondrian” – still sound strongly through the spruced up halls and galleries.  Talbott indicates a portion of ceiling in her office. It is an extension, above it a “tiny little gallery that was an electrical closet, now a boudoir to show off our 18th-century silver. Those are the little things, the jewels,” she says.  The Atheneum contains larger treasures. Willem de Kooning’s Montauk I and Jackson Pollock’s Number 9 are among a collection of abstract expressionism part-donated by Tony Smith and now shown with his sculptures. Curator Patricia Hickson’s contemporary wing is organised like a generous primer: Robert Rauschenberg and Cindy Sherman share space with a beautiful and disturbing work by an Iraqi-American, Ahmed Alsoudani, spun from the aftermath of a Baghdad car bomb. There is also room for video, currently the hour-long STREET by James Nares, a hypnotic portrait of hypermodern Manhattan life.  Upstairs, past wall drawings by Hertford native Sol LeWitt, Robin Jaffee Frank’s Coney Island exhibition collects high and low art, ephemera and carousel horses, all to tell the story of the Brooklyn pleasure resort from the Civil War to the modern day. A Joseph Stella from 1914 – Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras – explodes from the wall, the polite cubo-futurism of Severini or Nevinson shoved through a particle accelerator. After that, the show is a blast.  Back in the quieter surrounds of the director’s office, Talbott considers the impact of her grand project. One key benefit, she says, is “the opportunity to accept some major gifts, which before probably would have been impossible or would have sat in storage”.  Referring to Formal Narration by Richard Tuttle, a large minimalist work about to go on display in the new contemporary space, she tells how the artist announced his gift as a surprise in an onstage, public conversation.  “Before this renovation I would have been thrilled to have something from Richard,” she says, “but I would have been sitting there wishing he was giving us a smaller piece.”
Connecticut museum of art will soon be open in its entirety for the first time in years, after an innovative revamp that will showcase the breadth of its collection