text: Colmar’s Musée Unterlinden, one of the most important smaller museums in France, has reopened after three years of renovation and expansion—just in time to double the pleasure of visitors thronging the city’s Christmas market.
  
  Ensconced in the 13th-century cloister and chapel of a former Dominican convent, the Unterlinden is renowned for its collection of medieval and Renaissance art, crowned by the multipaneled Issenheim altarpiece (1512-16). But it had grown musty and outdated, and short of space for its swelling cache of modern and contemporary works.
  
  Charged with the revamp, Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, based in nearby Basel, opted for symmetry and simplicity instead of architectural braggadocio. Opened on Saturday, their extension combines a new, copper-roofed brick building with a converted 1906 municipal swimming pool and a new brick-walled courtyard—forming an ensemble that echoes the size and shape of the cloister, which it faces from across a newly uncovered stretch of the Sinn canal.
  
  In the cloister, long walled-up windows were reopened and jerry-built partitions were cleared away, providing spacious galleries for the medieval and Renaissance collections, now presented chronologically, starting with early 15th-century Gothic works, followed by mid-15th-century Rhenish masters, including Jost Haller.
  
  An entire gallery devoted to Colmar’s own late 15th-century Martin Schongauer is an eye-opener. The vivid color and realistic detail in the big array of paintings by “Martin the beautiful” is matched by a soaring oak-beamed ceiling with a patchwork of reused panels, many of them painted, dating from the 16th to 18th centuries. The ceiling was discovered by chance during the renovation, when two successive false ceilings were dismantled.
  
  “It came as a complete surprise,” says museum director and chief curator Pantxika De Paepe. “We had no idea it was there.”
  
  Still unfinished and scheduled to open for the museum’s official inauguration on Jan. 23, the cloister’s mezzanine floor will house two of the museum’s most prized works, Hans Holbein the Elder’s “Portrait of a Woman” (circa 1515) and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s elegant and mysterious “Melancholy” (1532).
  
  In the newly oak-floored chapel, a lineup of carved wood and polychrome statuary now leads to the 12-foot-by-22-foot Issenheim Altarpiece, with its 11 painted panels by Mathis Grünewald and carved polychrome figures by Nicolas de Haguenau. The largest panels were originally mounted as pairs of unfolding wings covering the figure-filled base, but all are now clearly displayed in discreetly framed, separated sections.
  
  The cloister is linked to the new addition by a long underground gallery, passing beneath the canal, which offers a relatively small group of 19th- and early 20th-century works, including a somber Monet “The Creuse Valley, Sunset” (1889), a radiant Robert Delaunay “Still Life with Parrot” (1907), a dreamlike Bonnard landscape (1920) and a small Renoir portrait of a young boy (1870-72).
  
  The new building, with all-white walls and “floating” display panels, is strictly minimalist and contemporary, except for windows and doorways framed by Gothic ogive arches. Paintings and sculpture from 1930 to the present include works by Picasso, Léger, Vasarely, Otto Dix, Jean Dubuffet and Nicolas de Staël. The standout is a 1976 tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica by Jacqueline de La Baume-Dürrbach, one of only three produced, as stipulated by Picasso; the other two are in the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York and the Takasaki Modern Art Museum in Japan. Until now, this one rarely left the Unterlinden’s reserves.
summary: Renowned for its collection of medieval and Renaissance art, the Unterlinden museum in Colmar, France, has reopened after three years of renovation and expansion with new space for its swelling cache of modern and contemporary works.