When J. Carter Brown steps down as director of the National Gallery on Friday after nearly three decades of service with that institution, he will leave behind a national cultural treasure house that is not only an enormously popular tourist attraction and magnet for scholars but one man`s idea of the perfect art museum.
Well, ”almost” perfect.
”It`s like Penelope`s web,” Brown said, while conducting a guest on a
”farewell” tour of the Gallery`s permanent collection. ”You can never make it completely perfect, but you try for the best approximation.”
A half-century old last year and created as ”a gift to the nation” by financier Andrew Mellon, the Gallery is an art gallery in the collector`s sense of the term.
Over the years, millions of tourists have been drawn to its neo-classical West and high-tech East Buildings on the capital mall by the celebrity of its crowd-pleasing and spectacular temporary exhibitions-”The Treasure Houses of Britain,” ”Circa 1492,” the Japanese Daimyo culture show, Georgia O`Keeffe, Paul Gauguin, the Annenberg Collection and others.
But its principal attraction remains the permanent collection on display on the main floor of its West Building.
Newly reinstalled and refurbished in a just-concluded two-year project, this royal assemblage of nearly 1,000 paintings, sculptures and works on paper focuses on Western art and its evolution and contains some of the most prized and priceless artworks known to civilization.
They include Titian`s ”Vision of St. John the Evangelist” ceiling painting, Botticelli`s ”Adoration of the Magi,” Leonardo da Vinci`s
”Portrait of Ginevra de`Benci,” Houdon`s busts of Voltaire, Goya`s ”The Marquesa de Pontejos,” Hieronymus Bosch`s ”Death and the Miser,” Rogier van der Weyden`s ”St. George and the Dragon,” roomfuls of Van Dycks and Rembrandts (including his ”Self Portrait”), Rubens` ”Daniel in the Lions`
Den,” John Singleton Copley`s epic ”Watson and the Shark,” and Claude Monet`s ”The Japanese Bridge.”
There`s something extraordinary, if not instantly recognizable, at every turning.
The change might be lost on the casual and infrequent visitor, but the permanent exhibition space has become a far different place than one would have found even five years ago, and not only because of recent acquisitions like Monet`s ”Japanese Bridge” or Rubens` ”Fall of Phaeton.”
”Most of the changes are subtle,” Brown said, ”but they`ve required a lot of time and thought. An enormous number of people worked on this.”
The essential change, though, isn`t subtle at all. Where once the works were strictly segregated according to nationality and school, they`ve now been mingled or juxtaposed, where necessary, to reflect the influence and relationships artists and ideas have had with one another throughout the history of Western Art.
In Gallery No. 1, for example, the origins of Italian art are revealed in the chamber`s collection of Gothic medieval painting. Goya`s works have been moved from the Spanish collection to a place adjoining the French painting of his period-with which he was closely associated.
American painting extends, logically, from the British, but is arrayed just opposite the chambers full of 19th Century French painting from which American artists derived so much.
Instead of being compartmentalized in the manner of library catalog sections, the permanent collection now flows, reflecting the true currents of art through the centuries.
”Entering here at the Rotunda,” Brown said, in the manner of someone showing off a new house, ”people can turn right and then follow all these twistings and turnings through all the periods of art. Or if they`re only interested in the French Impressionists, which are always popular, they can turn left and be right there. Our wish is that they do the whole thing.”
Paintings and sculptures have been repositioned to provide centerpieces and focal points for exhibits and also to create vistas along the corridors. Works of kindred style or spirit look upon one another, often at a great distance.
Stand at one center point of the American section and one can view Gilbert Stuart`s ”The Skater” two galleries to the left and James McNeill Whistler`s ”The White Girl” two galleries to the right.
J. M. W. Turner`s shimmering seascape ”Keeman Heaving in Coals by Moonlight” hangs directly across the West Sculpture Hall from Monet`s two equally luminescent views of the Rouen Cathedral.
Renaissance sculptures, wherever possible, are now displayed in alcoves, as they would commonly have been in their time.
New wall coverings reflect the mood and appropriate ambience of particular art and time, providing the look and feel of 16th Century Venice, or Rome, Paris, Madrid and English country homes. Another intelligent and useful touch is the replacement of distracting and hard-to-view wall texts with portable, laminated texts that visitors can take from convenient bins and carry with them as they examine the works in a particular gallery. Multi-language audio tapes and itineries have also been made available for self-guided tours.
For years, the fountain in the ground floor Garden Court lacked a fitting centerpiece. This year, the Gallery came upon a bronze Venus available from an English estate that not only seemed perfect but serendipitously proved to have holes drilled into it for use as a fountain.
Venus now stands at the center of that ground floor vista and Brown seems prouder and more delighted with that particular final touch than he is with the ultra-contemporary I.M. Pei-designed East Building that transformed the Gallery into a genuine museum complex during his tenure.
In sum, as he prepares to depart, Brown reminds one of a man who has worked for years constructing and completing his dream house. He has finally got it just right-only to leave it.
Brown, 58, has opened an office on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Gallery and will continue to work with it as an adviser, as he will other institutions on whose boards he serves. He said that he also plans to spend a lot of time in New York-and Chicago, where he has long been an admirer of the collection and work of the Art Institute.
