Five opening shows of riches

For the public, the new galleries and expanded library are the heart of the Art Museum's Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building. Now visitors can at last appreciate the depth and range of several specialized collections, including photography, design, sculpture, and costume and textiles.

They can do this through five inaugural exhibitions, which begin just inside the building's main entrance in the Exhibition Gallery, a large space ideally suited to displaying sculpture.

For the opening, the museum has stocked this window-lined room with about a dozen modern and contemporary pieces, from Pablo Picasso's bronze Man With a Lamb to Sol LeWitt's multicolored Splotch, in which the rigorous minimalist and conceptualist becomes uncharacteristically playful.

The sculpture show feels loosely installed for such a large space. I had expected a few more pieces, but perhaps the unobtrusive nature of several works placed against walls and in corners, such as Christopher Wilmarth's Clearing for a Standing Man, No. 6, a wall-mounted sandwich of steel and glass, helps to create that impression.

The majority of the sculpture is contemporary rather than modern, and the selection represents a wide range of strategies, from Mark di Suvero's freestanding assemblage of found objects to Martin Puryear's eloquently sinuous loop of red cedar.

There's more sculpture nearby in the Perelman's most dramatic space, a light-filled galleria that links the rear of the original building with a new two-story addition. Niches in one wall accommodate sculpture and large decorative objects.

The sculptures include John Chamberlain's Glossalia Adagio, an agglomeration of automobile body parts that I think would have looked better in the large gallery, and Joan Miro's commanding bronze Lunar Bird, perfectly placed to command the galleria's long vista.

Galleries for photography, costume and textiles, and design open off the galleria. The first is slightly smaller than the other two, but sufficient for the show of works by pioneering photographer and proselytizer for modern art Alfred Stieglitz. Thanks to his widow, Georgia O'Keeffe, and his confidante, acolyte and lover, Philadelphian Dorothy Norman, the museum owns a substantial body of Stieglitz's work.