national gallery of art

national gallery of art

Exploring the Role and Impact of the National Gallery of Art

1. Introduction to the National Gallery of Art

The NGA, though certainly unique in the distinguished federal company of the Library of Congress and the National Archives, nevertheless seemed to me to be a latecomer. It was an extraordinary success, undeniably, but at best only a repetition of acts and acts already accomplished and set out in almost endless confetti-like array by an already hardworking host of art and library and museum historians. While the NGA has shared the resources of its Francis Ouimet-like venture with the Boston “links” of major museums, and its “handicap” prize system with the few, of whom all can name Apollo-like tycoons, albeit maybe Babson of the Campbell Soup Company instead of Mssrs. ja, Andy, and precedent-shattering Marsh, and its USGA methods-inspired museum professionals, the NGA is nevertheless neither a classic nor even modern post-Imagist development. Its biography plots a more or less direct extension, or historical event, of taste.

Our symposium examines the impact of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) during its first 50 years. It grew out of an ongoing initiative on the history of federal cultural policy sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts as a program of the Gallery, together with the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. The panelists cover a range of perspectives, representing those of practicing artists, art historians, and arts administrators, each of whom brings a particular approach to the question of the purposes and effectiveness of the Gallery and the manner in which it carried out its mission. The Gallery comes at mid-century, toward the end of the period of a real flowering of activities in the fine arts field, largely supported by private beneficence. Who can challenge the greatness and importance of all that was achieved by the directors of major museums, library curators, and university presidents from 1880 to 1940, from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to Oberlin, the National Gallery of Art in London to the Ghetto Fighters House in Haifa? Their selection policies and museum displays will continue indefinitely to influence the tastes and shapes of aspiring connoisseurs.

2. Historical Evolution and Founding Principles

This paper is a result of the decolonial World Café and record of interviews process conducted at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, USA in September 2018. This decolonial method promotes questioning the debated un- or invisibility in history of subjects while reflecting about national art galleries and museums as part of larger state structures through hosting historically materialized beliefs and worldviews. The World Café process and questions were designed by Dr. Naja Blichmann. Themes include gallery collections, buildings, history, and renovation. Participants included 50 gallery visitors in general public from the USA, with 23.9% from Washington, DC; 35.2% from local areas beyond Washington, DC; 25.3% from other states; and 15.3% international. The research reflects how participants represent themselves when answering the questions, and which images and metaphors were drawn. The World Café process was not recorded. The record was obtained through participant observation. As a critical reflexive dialogue approach, the researcher is identified, and benefits of own and others’ reflexivity during the study are considered.

Lorena E. Ortiz obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in Geography from the University of Oxford in 2017 with previous periods of study and practice in architecture, fine arts, and urban geography in Mexico City, London, Singapore, and Barcelona. Her doctoral thesis discusses the role of national art collections in international diplomacy by examining the case of the Mexican Diplomatic Services of Visual Arts offerings in the United Kingdom from the early 20th century to date. The project was comparative and study modes included institutional ethnography and serviceable space analyses. National Cultural Diplomacy was examined using an interdisciplinary approach. The findings suggest that national art institutions maintain a structure and culture that assumes diplomatic roles and are situated within the public international art world, hosting performing public diplomacy duties. Public serviceable meso-level spaces within national art galleries all over the world furnish qualitative evidence of this.

3. Curatorial Practices and Collection Development

The Gallery does not turn to other museums possessing works of art it might wish to acquire in order to inquire about the conditions of purchase, such as price, preemption clauses, loan status, and so forth. For one thing, the Gallery does not wish to appear to be operating a commercial enterprise at a time of soaring art prices, a time that has considerably hampered the recent American trend of offering substantial sums to foreign museums in order to enable these institutions to retain important works of art that they have been forced to sell by increases in the level of value the art market attaches to masterpieces which had been long ago nationalized. For another, the Gallery’s acquisitions expenditure has enabled the United States to become, for the first time, and partially through purchases from foreign private collections by the Gallery, this year the first time in a decade, a net importer of art. Such United States’ negotiating to buy works of art might well turn the tide of unfavorable exchange conditions which this capital-exporting nation is currently suffering.

Acquisitions for the National Gallery during the 1972 fiscal year ran to about 120 works of art. Two-thirds of these were gifts, primarily as recent tax changes have stimulated the giving of art to museums from private collectors. The selection of specific works to be acquired is carried out not by committees of academic art historians and connoisseurs, but overwhelmingly by the staff of the Gallery’s curatorial offices. While to date, library research on horizontal aspects of art history has dominated the creation of the Gallery’s collections, of late increasing numbers of experts, generally research professionals holding appropriate graduate degrees, have been added to these offices. They carry out object-oriented investigations, recording, analyzing, publishing, and often researching at the Museum the Gallery’s collections of graphic arts, old master paintings, antique sculpture, and decorative arts.

4. Educational Programs and Community Outreach

The programs of the Gallery’s Department of Education are there to illustrate this point. Every year, the Gallery helps to organize exhibitions of its works or to loan them to other museums in the United States, and, in some cases, it cooperates with the directors in the preparation of the shows. These exhibitions, which also include works on paper, are displayed in the educational departments of the collaborating institutions. Along with their guides, the students have at their disposal a variety of educational materials, which the National Gallery of Art makes available for the occasions. Examples include the reproducible slides, transparencies, and photographs of details, as well as the books and essays that illuminate the exhibitions. The educators present the wide variety of styles and materials of the works that they have prepared – works that are true masterpieces of world art. In addition, they also supply the students with well-structured educational itineraries, all of which are designed to permit a better and deeper understanding of the works in the classrooms and studios where the students are examining the museum exhibits.

In a letter of March 19, 1941, to Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the president of the newly established National Gallery of Art, Paul Mellon, placed the new institution “at the service” of the United States “in such a manner that it will prove worthy of our great traditions.” His statement also bears eternal witness to the role that a national museum should play – one that goes beyond displaying the most beautiful examples of human artistic endeavor, which alone could justify the existence of a national institution such as the Gallery. In his letter, Mellon hints at the function of the museum as a place of education, as an actor in the intellectual history of a country, and as a forum that broadens our frame of reference outward.

5. Future Directions and Challenges

One possible future direction for the Gallery is increased attention to works of art on the part of the museum visitor. In recent decades, concern for the effective visual education of persons visiting museums has made major progress. The leaders in this movement have recognized the vital role that American art museums might play in transforming sprouts of natural appreciation into cultivated love of art. Although the processes by which visitors learn while inside museum walls have been difficult to identify, quantitative tools like questionnaires and interviews have verified the unique and vital attributes of museum experiences. These measurable contributions include the development of intellectual and personal skills, the refinement of appreciation, and the introduction of aesthetic values and suitable alternatives to popular culture which might lead to enricher, more meaningful lives. Also unique is the fact that visitors have themselves identified their own reasons for visiting museums, while nearly half of those who did so traced their reasons directly to the viewing of works. It is the personal study of original works, the ability to get close to masterpieces and to study line, shape, texture, and color and thus better understand the artist’s purposes, that fulfills the potential of the museum.

To what extent has the National Gallery of Art fulfilled the vision of its donors and founders? There is no easy answer. Some purposes can be measured, particularly the number of visitors or the quantity and diversity of art that has been acquired since 1937. The broader goal of fostering the “study and enjoyment of art” is more difficult to assess. It is questionable whether governments can improve their societies by subsidizing the arts or, ultimately, by monopolizing the stewardship of great national art collections. It is difficult to measure the extent to which the purposes have been accomplished. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask from now on what roles the Gallery might serve and what special challenges it might face. The rapidly increasing rate of technological and social change simultaneously affords new opportunities and adds heightened urgency to the need for reassessment of all public institutions, including those in the arts.