Grand glimpse of the Taubman Museum of Art

The nine galleries in the new Taubman museum of Art contain some fine things. But the first thing you'll notice are the stairs.

The stairs leading up to the galleries are made of frosted glass, lighted from below. The effect is a little like walking on water. Most people who go up the staircase for the first time find themselves looking down, at the steps, and not up, at what lies ahead.

So the surprise is all the greater at the top. The hallway leading from the stairs past the galleries resembles a subterranean river, with sculpted walls and milky, filtered light.

Randall Stout, architect of the new $66 million museum, likes to compare his design to natural elements drawn from the surrounding mountains. You can see it in the meandering hallway/riverbed and in the galleries branching off like caves and grottoes to the right and left.

The museum officially opens Saturday. But many people got their first glimpse of the finished product Thursday, with a news conference and media tour in the morning and a museum members preview in the afternoon.

At a morning presentation in the museum's soaring glass atrium, the museum unveiled two previously undisclosed acquisitions: "The Cotton Picker" by Thomas Hart Benton and "The Leeds Jug" by Emil Carlsen. Both were purchased by the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust, which has bought dozens of paintings for the museum over the past decade.

The museum also announced the formation of the Horace G. and Ann H. Fralin Center for American Art, which museum literature describes as "an interdisciplinary research and programming center."

"Wow -- what a building," gushed trust administrator Heywood Fralin on Thursday to applause from an audience that included Nicholas and Jenny Taubman, for whom the museum is named, past and present museum officials, various museum supporters and local media. Nicholas Taubman is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Advance Auto Parts and the current U.S. ambassador to Romania.

Stout, the architect, spoke of the museum's glass atrium as a "beacon welcoming the community" and explained how the building design "has a dialogue with the industrial buildings" around it, and with the railroad.

Jenny Taubman said Roanoke will become known as "a community with culture, but also a community with guts."

For many, Thursday was their first look inside the building that has been rising downtown for two years. In the afternoon, hundreds of visitors of all ages drifted in and out of the pristine galleries, admiring exhibits on baroque Italian art, modern photography, tattoo design and Judith Leiber handbags.

For the first time, an entire museum gallery is devoted to the museum's collection of more than 20 paintings by Thomas Eakins and his circle. The collection was bequeathed to the museum by Eakins descendant Peggy Macdowell Thomas, a Roanoker.

An adjacent gallery showcases the rest of the museum's collection of 19th and early 20th century American art, including works by John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, Winslow Homer -- and now, Carlsen and Benton. The two new paintings, which were unveiled in the museum's atrium Thursday morning, had both been installed in the American Art gallery by Thursday afternoon.

Unlike some of the museum's more modern galleries, with their high white walls and tilting ceilings, the American galleries suggest 19th century drawing rooms, with walls painted in deep, rich colors to display paintings in gilded frames.

Watching museum members get their first look at the galleries hung with art offered a clue to how museumgoers may react on Saturday and beyond. The museum has given out 7,000 free admission tickets so far for its opening on Saturday.

Children seemed enthralled by the Virginia Tech interactive exhibit Revo-Over, with its various video projections and liquid sounds. Older visitors gazed at the American or the Italian art, while local artists gravitated toward the contemporary gallery, which includes work by some artists from the region.

John Robinson, a Roanoke dentist and photographer, said he was "just in awe, walking in the building and seeing this space open up before me. And only five minutes from home. The lighting, the space. It's world class."

Artist Katherine Devine said the museum's interior may silence some critics of Stout's design.

"They'll see some of the thought that went into it," Devine said. "When you see it from inside, some of the angles make a lot more sense. I really do think he honored the community."