WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute's new visitor and exhibition center is all about making the museum's guests feel at home.

And we're not just talking about the living, breathing guests.

True, the Clark Center does offer a spacious, attractive dining area with its new partner, Philaselphia's Stephen Starr Events. But one of the biggest advantages the new Clark has over the old Clark is its ability to host paintings, not just people.

The Tadao Ando-designed Clark Center has just more than 11,000 square feet of new special exhibition space -- the West Pavilion upstairs and two large galleries below grade.

As he led a group of reporters through the building last week, Clark Associate Director Tom Loughman explained how important the new galleries are in expanding the Clark's mission.

"I hope you feel already the difference between these galleries from the galleries we're retiring, which we had been using for special exhibition space," Loughman said, referring to the special exhibition space in the Manton Research Center. "These are built to 4 meters [in height], state-of-the-art air movement and lighting systems and will really allow us to have an appropriate caliber space for the wonderful shows we put together."

Loughman described the environmental controls as "far superior" to what the Clark had in the Manton -- which is getting its own makeover and which will have exhibition space devoted to works on paper. The museum's original home, the neoclassical "white building," also has been entirely renovated.

The new galleries also have an LED lighting system that is so new it was not available even when the galleries themselves were conceived.

"We went with an LED lighting system for art, which two years ago would have been foolish but which now creates a no-heat, environmentally responsible means of appropriately illuminating works of art," he said.

The Clark Center also has improvements that 99 percent of the human guests never will see -- namely an adequate, secure loading dock below grade that replaces the original loading dock tacked on to the back of the marble building that houses the Clark's permanent collection.

Of course, the true beneficiaries of all these improvements are the Clark's human guests who will view the special exhibitions. It is fair to surmise that lending institutions will more readily loan great works of art if they are more confident about the environment their treasures will enter.

"There were times when we had to go to extraordinary means to ensure we were creating an appropriate space for art in the old system," Loughman said. "Now we've got purpose-built space, and we've leapfrogged two generations of technology in doing so."

Even with a state-of-the-art facility to show borrowed objects, the Clark would not be able to borrow as much great work if it did not also have great works to lend.

In that respect, the recently completed "world tour" of paintings from the Clark's permanent collection will pay dividends for years to come. In addition to being a creative way to use the art during the white building's closure and promote the Clark abroad, the tour also allowed the institution to issue some IOUs.

One is being cashed this summer with the exhibition of national treasures from the Shanghai Museum, one of the stops on that world tour of 19th century masterpieces.

"Every object we get on loan, we get not just because we're in this beautiful town," Clark Director Michael Conforti said in March. "We get them because there are objects that people want themselves at some pointn in the future.

"It's all about the relationships I and my colleagues have with institutions, how people feel about Williamstown in general and also the objects they need for their shows."

And it doesn't hurt to have friends in high places either. It certainly helped in pulling off "Make It New: Abstract Painting from the National Gallery of Art," which debuts in August downstairs in the Clark Center.

"If it weren't for Rusty being [Wiliams] Class of '66, I don't think it would have happened," Conforti said, referring to Earl A. "Rusty" Powell, the director of the National Gallery of Art. "[Powell] wanted to make sure this show was as good it could be."

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