The Brooklyn Rail

Which was the first purpose-built art museum? Perhaps the Musei Capitolini in Rome, though that museum is dedicated to Rome and its antiquities. My choice, because it looks like a museum—large windows and display halls—and not a marble palace or temple, would be Sir John Soane’s Dulwich Picture Gallery (1811–17), intentionally created to house and display all sorts of art. Its avowed purpose was simultaneously to teach and delight. You might think learning and pleasure are complementary concepts, but in the university context, art history departments and college museums have often been at loggerheads, each thinking the other should be subservient.

The new Princeton University Art Museum, brilliantly designed by Sir David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates and led since 2009 by James Steward, resolves that conflict. The building opened on Halloween, October 31, 2025 in a special 24-hour session: it overflowed with visitors on that day, and continues to draw crowds. This is remarkable, because the original art museum at Princeton was usually empty. To explain the museum’s remarkable success, let’s imagine a visit.

It’s easy to get to Princeton from Manhattan by train from Penn Station. New Jersey Transit will get you to a dismal Princeton Junction, where you take a spur line (locally known as the dinky) to the campus. Now, you climb an easily walked hill for less than half a mile, about 8 blocks, and find yourself surrounded by a labyrinth of buildings. Building fever has swept Princeton since the start of the twenty-first century: there are buildings everywhere. But one stands out, a massive structure in ribbed light stone: the new Princeton University Art Museum. You are still walking west, and if you continue you will eventually reach Nassau Hall, built in 1756 to house the College of New Jersey, Princeton’s earliest incarnation. Beyond Nassau Hall is Nassau Street, the traditional boundary between town and gown, yet another frontier canny James Steward has managed to efface, opening the museum and the university to all.

We turn back from Nassau Hall and enter the museum, descending a staircase (there are multiple entries for people with disabilities) and find ourselves in a wide avenue that leads to the center of the first level. The structure invites you in, and the wide halls allow you to look around comfortably, to get the lay of the land. Passing the museum store, you come to the Grand Hall, grand but not cavernous because the interior of the museum is dominated by pale wood beams that soften the lighting and eliminate the corporate, office-building feeling of so many museums. This hall is a metaphor for the ingenuity that went into the entire structure: on the one hand, it is a place to sit down and collect thoughts, but it can instantly be repurposed as a lecture hall. The slatted wood paneling at the east end conceals bleacher-style seating and the moveable walls can be closed. The hall metamorphoses into a lecture room for large introductory art history courses. So, the students get to learn about art in the museum and then see exactly what the professor was talking about by ascending to the second level. Theory and practice mesh seamlessly.

Level Two is the immense heart of the collection. Here categories dominate: Asian, European, Ancient Mediterranean, African, the Islamic world, and Art of the Ancient Americas. Begin your tour with Asia and be astounded by a Guanyin statue (Southern Song Dynasty, 1127–1279). The piece, with its utter tranquility and gender ambiguity, is simply amazing. The European collection contains all you would expect, from Jacques-Louis David’s 1787 Death of Socrates to one of Paul Cézanne’s views of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904-06). Ease of movement from category to category is notable, as is the respect for history: chronology and coherence remind the visitor that history and context give these precious objects meaning.

The Princeton Collects exhibit is a harbinger of things to come. A gush of gifts, some two-thousand, flooded into the collection with the opening of the new building. What the visitor sees here is an expression of alumni largesse, but also a hint that the university may expect further avalanches. The objects are too numerous to list, running from an exquisite Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) Sleeve-dancer to a Gerhard Richter abstraction from 1986, a wonderful Joan Mitchel painting from 1975-76, and a zany Joan Jonas video from 1973. A potpourri to say the least, but no matter where you turn your eye something to educate and delight you. And the restaurant, on level three, serves delicious food.