By Tim Gihring //
Growing up in London with parents in the art world—his father had the poetic title of Keeper of Word and Image at the V&A Museum, his mother is an art historian—Max Bryant spent a good chunk of childhood in museums and cathedrals, sometimes spending hours with a single artwork. (For the record, he also went to Disney World.)
Not much has changed. Bryant joined Mia in late 2024 as the museum’s James Ford Bell Associate Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture, having worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and, more recently, at the University of Cambridge. “I was very lucky to be raised with the idea that art and design are intrinsically important, that going halfway around the world to look at a work of art is unquestionably a thing worth doing,” he says. “But you always have to find your own response to something.”
Here, Bryant shares his ideal art experiences and the pilgrimage-worthy pieces he’s already finding in Mia’s collection.
Tell me something of your adventures as a child in the art world.
I don’t want to give the impression that you have to grow up in this world to do this work, because of course you don’t. It’s more important that you bring your own experiences to it. But what I did grow up with was the idea that art was worth spending a lot of time on. I remember once going with my parents to the basilica in Padua [Italy] where there is an enormous candlestick—about twelve feet tall—by the Renaissance artist Riccio. A very tantalizingly obscure work of art and right by the altar, where you can’t really get to it. My mother talked to the Italian officials so we could get up there, and it was worth it to be so close to something extraordinary.
You focused a lot on architectural history in your previous work. How has that shaped your perspective?
Architectural history gives you a real sense of the entire context of an era. It set me up very well for being the kind of dilettante I am now, interested in everything from antiquities to all of European art and design: Muslim Spain to the Renaissance to the Ottoman Empire to modernism and post-war art up to 1970.
An omnivore, in other words.
Yes, that’s a good word for it. When I worked at the Met, it was on a renovation of the British Galleries, which covers all of British design from about 1500 to 1900. And I discovered a love of all media, from shoe buckles to ceremonial silver to Gothic furniture. To me, that’s the joy of this job, the sheer range of art and material stories you work with, not just two-dimensional images. When you have an encounter with something in the same space, it can be really powerful.
What brought you to this part of the world?
My mother grew up in the U.S., so I had always traveled here, usually to New York and Los Angeles. I was poorly traveled in the rest of the country. But my wife got a job at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, curating the textile collection there. The scope of the role at Mia is very exciting and unique, so I was glad there was something in the same part of the country that would work well for me.
Some Europeans really romanticize the strange urbanism produced by car culture. The Twin Cities are so distinctive and unfamiliar—there’s no city like this in Europe. And Madison has some treasures as well. Go see the murals by John Steuart Curry, a great Regionalist painter who was the first artist-in-residence at the university there.
What is it about Mia that excites you?
It’s one of the great American museums! European decorative arts is part of its DNA: the first director, the great Joseph Breck, was a decorative arts specialist. What’s exciting about decorative arts in a museum is that you’re always seeing things that were not meant to be in a museum. There’s this tension between the original context and the space it’s in now. And I love that I’m contextualizing this work in Minneapolis in a Kenzo Tange building. When the quality of the space is this good, it gives things a bit more life.
I want people to bring as much of themselves to this experience as possible, to engage with it on their own terms and make that imaginative leap.
Views of Mia’s Kenzo Tange-designed atrium after opening in October 1974 (now altered and subdivided).
Any pieces that have stood out to you so far?
So many. I knew going in that the collection was great in European art because the director of Mia in the 1960s and early ’70s was a scholar named Anthony Clark. He made so many wonderful acquisitions: the Piranesi table [c. 1768], the Caillebotte [Nude on a Couch, 1880], the Roman inkstand [by Vincenzo Coaci, 1792], the Thorvaldsen [Jupiter and Ganymede, 1817–29]. Nobody in the 1960s was collecting Thorvaldsen. He also collected the Veiled Lady [by Raffaelle Monti, c. 1860], which he must have known would be very impactful.
To me, this is the best approach for a museum: to shape scholarship through its collections and bring things to public attention that for whatever reason hadn’t been on their radar before. And Mia has continued to do this.
What are you hoping to bring to people’s attention?
I’m very excited for people to see the exhibition in gallery 281, “Survival of the Fittest: Lessons from La Fontaine in Textile and Porcelain,” which will be open through August 17. And I’m also working on a show called “Timber!” that opens in August, about woodwork in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The show will include two paintings by Egon Schiele—one of a sawmill, the other of a wooden bridge—from a private collection, which we’ll bring together with our great collection of modernist wooden furniture from the last years of the empire.
There are so many amazing things we want to get on display, like Renaissance decorative art, including a big, carved door frame and other larger-scale architectural elements that aren’t easy to install. I’m excited to bring out these Spanish choir stalls from the 15th century. I want people to discover the new and rediscover the familiar.
An ornate walnut doorway, probably from the 1500s (left), and a set of choir stalls, c. 1480, from Olmedo, Spain, in Mia’s galleries in the early years of the museum.
“Survival of the Fittest: Lessons from La Fontaine in Textile and Porcelain” is on view in gallery 281 through August 17.
Learn more about Mia’s curators in the Department of European Art.