The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

I. The West Building.
In my museum going the last few years I have been reminded by several sources that The National Gallery is the outstanding Fine Art Museum in this country, an interesting appraisal because of its youth: the museum was not opened until 1941. I have been hesitant to agree as I have not been here since 1967, and although I remember it fondly it is as if through a glass darkly.

Having now seen it again I can report that there is no other museum in this country that has the presence, the grandeur, and the elegance of this institution. I suspect the secret of that success lies in its simplicity, its less-is-more philosophy: the focus here is on great painting …with some few pieces of small sculpture …there are no period rooms, no vast collections of Romanian silver or tomb figures from the Dalmatian Islands.

This is not to say that the museumgoer is stymied. Other venues in the city allow for this specialization: just across the Mall are the Smithsonian Museums of African Art, the Sackler Collection of Asian Art, the Hirshhorn Collection of Modern Art, and the Freer Gallery of Asian Art. As far as I am concerned museums in this country would do well to place large areas of their collections in buildings other than the main building, as is done in Philadelphia which shares exhibition spaces with galleries at the University of Pennsylvania. Museums need to get over the mentality that a museum is a five ring circus, a midway of brick-a-brack for the out of town tourists.

This building stretches for two blocks along the Mall and is probably the last of the great American museums built in the beaux arts classic revival, the City Beautiful, style. As a late arrival but with high ambitions, every effort was made to make it the largest and the purest. As the most august presence on the Mall, it makes its neighbor, the U.S. Capitol, seems frivolous and rococo by comparison. I am mindful, however, that despite its presence, it is exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he called certain architectural entities copies of copies of copies.

A large stairway in the center leads from the street into the Great Hall, a rotunda with a coffered dome resting on sixteen dark marble columns each four feet in diameter at the base. Central corridors lead off the Hall and run the length of the building, with a cross corridor some way distant and a large Palm Court in the transepts. All of the galleries are on this main floor. Below the main floor, as the long exterior stairway would indicate, there is a lower floor. There one finds the galleries for the works on paper …drawings and photographs …as well as the museum shops, I assume the offices of the staff, and the restaurant which, I am sorry to report, is as bad and as over priced as any other museum restaurant.

The corridors are kept open for the foot traffic. There are pieces of sculpture placed here and there but they offer no interference to the movement. Parallel to the corridors there are galleries on both sides two rooms deep all along the way. Those looking at pictures in the galleries are not swarmed by the hordes making their way to one or the other end of the building. The galleries are decorated in styles compatible to the time and culture of the paintings hanging there. There is a clear cut sense of organization and with that a sense of calm and order that is the epitome of elegance. Appearing now much as it did to me forty five years ago, there is about it a sense of timelessness that I think is not at all inappropriate for a venue of works of fine art.

I believe no other museum has so many really great paintings side by side as can be seen here. They are exclusively European and American and begin with Gothic religious works dating from probably 1200. The most recent works are the late Cézannes. All of them are hanging in the modern style with one painting in each unit of vertical space and all at approximately the same eye level. I cannot remember, nor did I note, that any one of them was overly large …there is no Coronation of Napoleon or Raft of the Medusa such as one can see at The Louvre.

When visiting a museum for the first time I usually just allow myself to wander about and to admire what I see, not looking for any one work in particular and not worrying whether what I see is a Rubens or a Hoch. I can imagine someone spending a day here as one of those treats that comes from being in a really magnificent space.

Of course there is always that one painting that stands out and commands one’s attention and in this case it was a work by Duccio de Buoninsigna, Sienna, 1308-1311, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew. It is about 18 inches square in tempera on wood panel. The Christ figure is seen standing against a raw sienna rocky mountain in the center of the left one third of the painting. In the center of the other two thirds the two who are called stand in a small simple boat on the sea lifting their net full of small fish. The sea is a wash of sea green color. The men, standing before a gold leafed sky, are dressed one in pale red and the other in pale blue. The Christ figure is dressed in a darker blue and darker red. Everything in the painting is simplified to illustrate the story without confusion. There are shapes but there are no forms, there is no modeling. There are contour lines indicating the flow of the robes. This is a tale told by a man who loved to paint and every brush stroke is lovingly made, and then, as a final gesture, a thread thin line of gold follows all around the edge of the Christ’s garment Yes indeed, this man loved to paint. And for all its loving detail, he knew exactly when to stop.

Another painting that stood out was a Marsden Hartley. As stated above the most recent work in this collection dates from 1906 and the death of Cezanne. Yet in the American section, the last I visited although I made no effort to see anything in any order, the last painting hanging beside the door leading out of that gallery was a landscape with mountain and clouds, Mount Katahdin, dated 1942. My first response to this was to think that this museum does not consider him a modern. It is a wonderful painting with a profound emotional quality, one of those last paintings of his that make me think he is the Eugene O’Neill of American painting. And so it became my second thought that this museum considers him one of the great “old masters”. While I agree with the assessment, I still think it odd that a painting forty years younger than the next oldest can be found in these galleries. It is, however, a great honor to a deserving artist who has yet to receive his due.

The museum has one of the best museum web sites: any of the works on view in the galleries is available to view online. For each work or artist listed one can find all the necessary information regarding the work, the artist, the provenance of the work, and the biographical material of the persons named in the provenance. This museum and these art works belong to the government, to the American people. There is a very strong sense in everything the museum does that, short of taking the works home, everything possible is being done to enhance the experience of these works …they make films available on a wide range of subjects free of charge.

http://www.nga.gov/home.htm