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The National Gallery Turns Fifty
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19728 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
1,754 Words |
| Author
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Ernest Griess
Ernest Griess is an art critic based in New York City. |
At a time when it has become almost routine to open a newspaper and read of yet another scandal unfolding in our museums, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this month, is remarkable for having in many respects avoided such disturbances.
There have been no scandals over deaccessioning objects from the permanent collection in order to raise money for some dubious aesthetic venture, such as the Guggenheim Museum has lately been engaged in. The kind of sordid and embarrassing public dispute between a board of trustees and the director, which when it occurred at the Whitney Museum last year led to the dismissal of the director, has been utterly absent from the affairs of the National Gallery. Indeed, J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery's director, is notable for having held the position over two decades.
Embarrassing questions concerning acquisitions, of the kind the Metropolitan Museum encountered twenty years ago over a Greek vase believed to have been imported illegally, are unheard of at the National Gallery. And its relations with its donors appear entirely amicable. Not for the National Gallery the shame of a family suing to recover a disputed painting, as happened to the Museum of Modern Art last winter when the heirs of Edward Steichen sought the return of a Matisse.
In short, aside from a brief brouhaha several years ago over the overcleaning of one of the gallery's Rembrandts, scandal of every sort seems to have passed the National Gallery by.
Yet the National Gallery celebrates its golden anniversary at a time when museums, and the profession of art history that enfolds them, are at their most contentious. The long-standing purpose of museums to preserve and display objects from the past, and to educate the public in matters of art, has increasingly come into question as museums have become, on the one hand, big business, and on the other, a forum where political battles are being waged.
In addition, a new type of art history has sprung up that takes no interest in--indeed, dismisses--the consideration of art in aesthetic terms. Its approach is to regard every work of art not as an aesthetic object but as a kind of "text" in which can be read evidence of injustices of race, gender, or social class.
Though the National Gallery has resisted many of these developments well,
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