Shortly after Richard Brettell became director of the Dallas Museum of Art in 1988, a local philanthropist, Nancy Hamon, offered to give the museum $20 million to build a wing in honor of her late husband Jake.
Trouble was, Brettell didn’t think the museum needed a major addition. Its new downtown building was less than four years old, and he wanted to concentrate on developing the museum’s collections and educational programs.
But he couldn’t persuade Hamon to support those objectives. Nor could he turn down a $20 million gift. He resolved the dilemma by devising a way to make the gift work for the museum in an unexpected way.
Brettell, a former curator of European painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, decided to radically revise the way the museum displayed its collections-not just to take advantage of the extra space but to offer a novel perspective on the development of art in the Western Hemisphere.
Under his plan the museum’s collections are being reorganized into five distinct sections. Each section has been designated a self-contained “museum” within the whole.
Last spring, the collection of European art became the Museum of Europe. On Nov. 21, the contemporary art collection, already displayed as a unit, will become the Museum of Contemporary Art in an expanded space. Next fall the African and Asian collections also will become separate “museums.”
The 140,000-square-foot wing that Hamon initiated and that ultimately cost $30 million houses the fifth and most innovative major section, the Museum of the Americas.
Unlike the other internal “museums,” this one represents a conceptual breakthrough. Dallas is the first museum anywhere to present all the major art forms created in this hemisphere, from Nasca textiles to Andrew Wyeth, as thematic package.
The Museum of the Americas redefines “American art.” No longer is it just the art of the English colonies and the nation they became, as in other museums. It’s also the pre-Columbian art of South and Central America, the art of the Inuit and the Plains Indians, and the art of Spanish colonial Mexico.
The immediate appeal of this concept is the way it enhances the aesthetic achievements of the hemisphere’s indigenous cultures. They were creating magnificent art long before any European bumped into the New World. This art deserves to be recognized as “American”-that is, as distinct from ancient art produced elsewhere.
The Museum of the Americas also seems appropriate for Dallas, which has a large Hispanic population.
Yet as logical as it sounds in the abstract, the Museum of the Americas doesn’t come together very well on the ground, as an anthropologist might say. Even allowing for the fact that the concept is experimental, the realization seems expedient and historically contrived.
The Museum of the Americas aims to outline the development of civilization in this hemisphere. But that development cannot be represented by a straight-line chronology as it can in Europe. Geography isn’t a sufficient rationale for placing Mimbres pottery one gallery removed from an 18th Century Philadelphia armchair.
The history of the Americas is the collision of two disparate cultural lineages that are mutually exclusive and antagonistic, even to this day. The attempt to graft one onto the other so as to create the illusion of a unified “American” culture just doesn’t take.
This becomes apparent when a visitor passes from the first part of the installation, which features the art of indigenous societies on both continents, into the second part, where the European cultural infusion suddenly obliterates everything that came before.
A transitional gallery of Spanish colonial artifacts (many of them borrowed) attempts to bridge this chasm, but the shock of the transition remains severe. And once a visitor enters the Euro-American realm-that is, the traditional museum of American art-the indigenous cultures drop out of sight.
Add to this the fact that the museum’s collections aren’t broad or deep enough to adequately represent the hemisphere’s cultural variety. This, too, is obvious even before one enters Euro-America, but it becomes more so as one proceeds through the l9th Century.
By lumping together all its Western Hemisphere art and adding some borrowed things, the museum has created the illusion of a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The strongest parts of the whole are pre-Columbian art from various cultures in Central and South America and North American colonial furniture. Previously these unrelated groups were displayed in differernt areas of the museum. Now they have become anchors of a broad survey.
Stringing everything together also allows the museum to enhance the value of minor holdings, such as a small nook of folk art, and disguise gaps and thin patches.
The Museum of the Americas opens with its major strength, the pre-Columbian art of Central and South America and Mexico. The first few galleries contain relatively few objects, but they’re of superb quality. The connoisseurial approach encourages visitors to savor each piece as a representative of its culture rather than to try to absorb a large body of material.
The two galleries devoted to ancient cultures of the Andes, Central America and Mexico constitute the high point of the Americas collection in terms of quality and quantity. Here you can feast your eyes on generous displays of Moche and Nasca ceramics, goldwork and textiles.
The next gallery features artifacts from ancient Mexico, particularly the Olmec and Maya cultures. Objects are displayed in wall niches and lit with fiber-optic flair, which unfortunately produces too many shadows. And, you see only one side of each object.
The visitor moves from Mesoamerica into Native North America, to encounter an impressive array of Mimbres pottery from the southwestern United States and small selections of Plains Indian beadwork and ritual objects from the Northwest Coast and Alaska.
This segment ends at the gold treasury, where the chronology backtracks to pre-Columbian times. Here the museum has installed its extensive collection of ancient American gold objects, which includes masks, pendants and a large array of beakers.
The gold is out of chronological and cultural context because museum officials decided to install it in what they consider to be the Hamon building’s most imposing setting, a barrel-vaulted, chapel-like chamber.
The effect achieved is opposite to that intended, though. The room is so cavernous and gloomy that it overpowers these delicate objects and actually makes them seem ordinary.
Once you cross into the English colonial gallery, you have, in essence, entered a traditional museum of American art. Mexico and Canada are included toward the end of the installation but most of the second half of the Museum of the Americas traces the development of art in the United States.
Much of this tracing is done through decorative arts. It’s good to see a museum mixing fine and decorative arts, but until the visitor reaches the modern period, when painting takes over, the installation is overloaded with furniture, glass and ceramic.
This imbalance apparently reflects a thinness in the painting and sculpture collection. There’s very little from the 18th Century and not as much as one would like to see from the l9th.
The museum’s most important l9th-Century painting is “The Icebergs,” a grand landscape statement by Frederick Edwin Church that expresses the awesome power of nature in that artist’s inimitable style. Like the rest of the 19th Century material, it represents the culture of the rapidly industrializing United States.
The Americas concept revives in the final section, with the inclusion of a few paintings by Mexican and Canadian artists. Properly for Dallas, the installation focuses on art produced in the American Southwest and Mexico. It stops short of Abstract Expressionism.
Brettell’s scheme has given the museum a sexy selling point, but a lot more time, space and exhibition material need to be invested in what is now a skeletal outline. Filling in gaps, particularly in the post-colonial art of Central and South America, might make the intellectual construct seem less arbitrary.
Ironically, Brettell is no longer around to supervise improvements. He resigned last December after being charged with public lewdness. He was hired back as consulting director for the Hamon wing, but after it opened late last month he left the museum’s employ.
