The National Gallery of Art. III. The East Building.

The East Building.
This is one of the art works in Washington that I have wanted to see since it was first erected (1974 -1978) and I am sorry that it has been so many years until I have come face to face with it. From the outside it is very likely the best designed building in the city. It is one of only a few government buildings in the city that does not reference the grandeur of ancient Rome and, by inference, presage the decline and fall of the American Civilization. But now that I have seen it and have gone through it I think it is probably more beautiful and exciting as a structure than it is practical as a museum. In modern architecture the dictum form follows function generally implies that the uses of the entity define the nature of the space that encloses them. In this building there is a distinct sense that the functions have been fitted into the architect’s resolution of the problems with the site and the needs of the staff.

Because of the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue on its north side the site presented a challenge to the designer, I.M. Pei. He has resolved this by making the sides parallel to the streets around it, creating a trapezoid in the plan. He has divided that into two triangles; one a right triangle, which houses the offices, and the other an isosceles triangle which houses the galleries and the atrium.

The isosceles triangle has been used as a template unit with a dimension of three and a half units high by two and one half units wide at the base, as measured by my foot. That pattern begins in the sidewalk tile outside the building and carries inside onto the floor of the atrium. The atrium repeats that shape and in the same proportion. The side between the triangles is open, with a sky light over head and floor to ceiling windows in the near and far walls. The galleries are in the solid areas along the two outside walls of the isosceles triangle.

Here again we find the usual museum expansion configuration in which there is more public space than gallery space: the atrium is enormous; the galleries feel small and cramped. I would guess that some of the larger contemporary works, those by Louise Nevelson or Murray Louis, would either not fit into these galleries or would consume all of the available wall space. I’m never sure why museums go to all the trouble to build such large expansions and then limit the gallery space so severely.

This museum design as realized creates the impression from both the inside and the outside of this being two buildings joined by a skylight and those windows; there is a real us and them, public and staff, feeling of division. The constant sense of “The Staff” in the isolated right angle tower dominating the atrium is a less than friendly feeling. In the West Building there is no awareness of the presence of the staff at all; it is the people’s building pure and simple.

As a senior citizen who relies on elevators and escalators, I was also very aware from my first entry into the atrium that there are escalators from the second to the third level, but none from the first to the second. Furthermore, I had to ask for the elevator which was not at all marked in the signage. Looking at the museum guide I have to say I was amused by the terms for the different levels: beginning at the bottom we have the concourse, the ground, the mezzanine, the upper level, and The Tower. I couldn’t image what image was being attempted here. Are B, 1, 2, 3, and 4 too mundane now for a fine arts entity?

Having then found another elevator that would take me to the Tower, to which there is access by only that one elevator and a hidden flight of stairs, I did find, however, that as one works his way back down through the galleries to the main floor, there was a nice meandering feeling to the journey. The stairway from level three to level two and another just like it at the apex of the triangle on the east side of the building are wonderful. There was a real attention to design and detail on the part of the architect. This is another example where a stairway has been used by the architect to create a moment of pure architecture, like the grand stairways in the beaux arts buildings but on a smaller scale.

In a way this museum, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, is a reconsideration of museum space and as both these museums work so beautifully as statements of the architect’s individuality it is rather sad to realize that they have had so little influence in subsequent museum design; the most common names now in museum expansions …Piano and Gehry …both repeating design ideas, facades really, in expansion after expansion …appear to have caved in to the corporate mentality of the various museum boards of directors.

As I have begun the discussion of the building from the atrium I will segue into the collection by pointing out that this is yet another museum that has an overly large Calder mobile suspended from the ceiling, up amongst the clutter of lighting fixtures and, here, the triangular shaped frames of the skylight. Because almost every museum has one and because they are so lost in space, those mobiles have assumed the character of obligatory decoration. Once they are recognized as obligatory, visitors no longer see them …they become like parking garages… invisible public icons. I doubt that many visitors gasp with awe at these or even consider them artworks, if they see them at all. This is all too bad because I like Calder’s work and I’m always sorry to see it treated in such a disrespectful fashion.

There are other objects in the atrium as well but they are so dwarfed as to seem merely decoration, something to break up the gray granite uniformity. Nothing about them made me curious to want to know what they were.

The Collection: The National Gallery East building.
Like the Metropolitan Museum in New York which missed the boat on modern art and has been playing catch up the last forty or so years, and which still has a really second string collection, this relatively new museum has a really disappointing offering as well. This is especially evident when compared to the superior collection in the West Building. Where that building opened with large bequests from the Samuel Kress, the Chester Dale, and the Paul Mellon Collections, large collections that each of those men had planned as the basis for a museum that could stand alone, there is a sense in this building that it started from scratch and that the collection is being built from what is available.

I began my visit in the Tower Gallery, a name that evokes a foreboding that was realized in its claustrophobia inducing isolation …it lacks light, it lacks air, it is small. That sense of dread was enhanced by the art work there, some six or so late painting by Phillip Guston. I am not a Guston fan.

Early in his career Guston achieved a level of name recognition for abstract expressionist work that was characterized by a lack of individuality. Whereas one can recognize at once the work of Hoffman, de Kooning, Pollack, Still, or Frankenthaler, Guston’s work never rose above the character of an also ran among others on the second and third tiers.

Later in his career he changed his approach and began to produce works that appear to me as simply self conscious efforts to create an iconic imagery, an iconic imagery being considered one of the de rigueur achievements of contemporary art. But there is a too evident sense of his attempting to do something very different, in the subject matter, but more especially in his palette, a selection of colors and keys that I find really off putting. I am all for individuality and new insights, new areas for exploration, but from what I see, Guston had the burning desire for fame and recognition but was never successful in his art; these late paintings are about “something” but none of them that I have seen have the presence of a valid visual experience: upon seeing them none creates the impact of an experience that we want to try to understand. Now the powers that be are attempting to turn him into a posthumous art world darling and I find it all rather tedious. Surely there are better things museums can do with their time.

One level down (sorry, I forget their names), can be found the masters of early twentieth century art. In my visit the day before to the West Building, I was disappointed to find that works I had wanted to see had been removed from several of the galleries. The attendant told me that they were to be repositioned in a new configuration, but that he didn’t know where. So imagine my delight when I discovered them here. Then, after seeing the whole of this collection, I wondered if they might not have been brought here specifically to dress the place up, repeating the MOMA layout that begins with Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. (Three cheers for conformity amongst American museums!)

There are five wonderful Picasso’s from early in his career, from the blue and rose periods, especially The Family of Saltimbanques which, now that I’ve read Richardson’s biographies of the artist, I can understand as an opium induced dream, wonderful late Cezanne’s, The Young Man in the Red Waistcoat, and the Chateau Noir, a nice Matisse, Coullioure, and I was surprised and very pleased to find one of Marsden Hartley’s early works made in Germany. I was aware that he was one of a few Americans here but the only representative from the German school of modern art.

Among the permanent galleries there is one featuring Matisse’s papier colle works, which was just closing as I approached …it has limited hours to protect the works on paper from the light. (When I was at the Pompidou Center where they had a huge floor full of these things, I don’t recall that they were as careful…but maybe they’ve all since disintegrated!)

Further along there was a gallery devoted to the works of Calder and it was great to see him getting some personal attention and in a gallery where the works could be seen on the floor and at eye level rather than overlooked amongst the lighting fixtures on the ceiling.

In an almost hidden corner on the first floor there is what appears to be a permanent exhibition, Small French Paintings, from the late nineteenth century. It gives the impression that this is only more work from the West Building filling up unused space. It emphasized my observation that the collection appears to be scant.

After that it dwindled to nothing. While the building gives the impression of having more public space than gallery space, the collection as displayed suggests that there is not enough of it to fill what little space there is at the present time. Which raises the question, if the collection grows substantially over the next forty years, where will they put it?


The featured exhibition was The Meyerhoff Collection, American works from the last half of the twentieth Century. It is as dreary a collection of Modern art as I have ever seen. However, the museum boasts that this promised bequest will greatly enlarge the collection. That should give you some idea of how meager the collection is to start with.

Anyone who lived in New York in the 60’s, the 70’s, and the 80’s, could not avoid the ballyhoo of the so called Art World as covered by the newspapers, the magazines, and the television reportage. Beginning with the post war boom the art scene morphed into one of the most visible and boisterous celebrants of Reagan Republican sleaze and greed. It was really just a highly publicized world of nouveau riche hucksters. Names were made, fame bestowed, fortunes made and spent. And all of it for art works that were as thin and as dull as communion wafers. At its best it is all genre, a niche market of a specific time and place. Looking back on that era, as represented by this collection, I can understand why I lost my interest in painting; there was not enough in the work of that era to sustain it.

The 60’s! The 70’s! The 80’s! They are over. (Hallelujah!) Let’s move on.

And as I stood in this exhibition and watched the other visitors drift through in a daze of pronounced ennui, I experienced a rare moment of identifying with the public. Not my favorite feeling.

The Museum web site:
http://www.nga.gov/ginfo/aboutnga.shtm

The Meyerhoff Collection:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/meyerhoffinfo.shtm