Museum of Fine Arts gets $25 million gift from Wyss Foundation

MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum said the gift arose from a conversation he began nearly a decade ago with Swiss philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss and his late wife, Rosamund Zander, about art, the MFA, and the strengths and shortfalls of its collection.

“It’s very exciting,” said Teitelbaum, who added the collection has many 20th-century works that haven’t been exhibited in a long time. “I’m not going to say this will complete us, but it will allow us to tell a story in our galleries with dedicated space that otherwise would be somewhat hidden in the experience of our visitors.”

The museum’s modern holdings, international in span, are currently shared across numerous departments, including Art of the Americas, Art of Europe, and others. The museum has already hired Claire Howard as the inaugural Hansjörg Wyss Curator of Modern Art, and a search is underway to hire a conservator or associate conservator dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

With the addition of the Wyss galleries, the gallery space for exhibiting modern and contemporary art across the museum will total nearly 38,000 square feet, approximately 21 percent of the museum’s total gallery space.

Designed by Boston-based Annum Architects, the new galleries will be spread across two wings of the museum. Three of the new exhibition spaces, coming on line next fall, will inhabit a first-floor area near the shuttered Fenway entrance that currently houses offices.

Two first-floor galleries will present paintings, sculpture, prints, and other media from the first half of the 20th century, while a third gallery will feature individual artists, such as Paul Klee, René Magritte, or Josef Albers on a rotating basis.

Meanwhile, a sculpture gallery will be unveiled next spring in a second-floor exhibition space that currently features crafts. Curators said the gallery will likely display works from the collection by Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, Simone Leigh, Pablo Picasso, and Kiki Smith, among others.

Philanthropist Wyss said his late wife, Rosamund, an artist and author who frequented the MFA, “would be overjoyed that a new generation will be able to experience the same collections that sparked her lifelong love for the arts.”

“I am honored to have the opportunity to support the MFA’s efforts to reimagine the display of its 20th-century arts collections and highlight underrepresented artists,” he said in a statement. “Promoting the arts and enabling discovery has been at the core of the Wyss Foundation’s mission, and I’m grateful to the MFA for their support in expanding those efforts.”

The gift does not provide acquisition funds to expand the MFA’s modern or contemporary holdings, areas that lack the strength and depth of other collections within the encyclopedic museum.

Describing conversations with Zander, Teitelbaum said she had “an acute sense, you could almost say, of what we didn’t have.”

“She knew that there were moments in European modernism that were, simply stated, missing,” said Teitelbaum. He added, however, that by displaying objects from the MFA’s collection, the museum would build excitement and “encourage a new round of collecting” in modern art.

“It’s going to lead to a real commitment to build this part of the collection,” he said. “I absolutely see this institution becoming more engaged in putting together endowment funds for contemporary art and actually getting more active in the market.”

Teitelbaum, who is set to retire next August, has steadily sought to expand the museum’s presentation of modern and contemporary art over his decade-long tenure. Newer works are now sprinkled throughout the Art of the Americas Wing. The recently renovated Greek and Roman galleries contain an installation of Cy Twombly works, and there are plans to establish a room for contemporary art in the newly re-installed Japanese galleries.

These displays are in addition to the first-floor Foster and Rabb galleries and the second floor of the Linde wing, though the museum has commandeered its exhibition spaces numerous times in recent years for some tangentially-related temporary exhibitions, such as a Monet show that opened in late 2020.

Ian Alteveer, who arrived last fall to chair the museum’s contemporary art department, said the MFA planned to continue hosting temporary exhibitions in the Linde wing, though they would be more focused on “artists of our time.”

“I’m talking about artists who are still alive, who are still living in the moment, or who made work in the last 50 years,” said Alteveer. Those exhibitions could include a “program of monographs, or underrepresented artists of our time, and maybe the occasional Big Idea show about contemporary art.”

He added that the new gallery for modern sculpture will act as an intellectual and physical “bridge,” connecting the museum’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries with its contemporary holdings in the Linde wing.

“It struck us as a really exciting moment to bring visitors backwards and forwards in time,” he said, adding that all four new galleries will draw from the museum’s international collection. “We haven’t really had a space, or spaces, to tell a more broad, global story of modernism. I see an opportunity here to do a lot of that kind of storytelling.”

Alteveer, who previously worked as a curator of modern and contemporary art at Metropolitan Museum of Art, praised other museums in Greater Boston that focus on modern and contemporary art.

“It’s not about stepping on anybody’s toes,” he said. “It’s about being part of a really amazing and kind of citywide conversation about what modernism and contemporary art can be in Boston.”

Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Follow him @malcolmgay.