WHEN EAST MEETS WEST

The then-president spoke at the opening festivities back in 1978, in the bright sunshine on a steamy afternoon. Seated before him on the plaza, where Fourth Street intersects the National Mall, was a gathering of Washington officialdom and the burghers of the American art establishment. Among them were the East Building’s architect, I. M. Pei, and the benefactor who had paid for it, Paul Mellon.

“I. M. Pei and his associates have given us an architectural masterpiece,” Carter said, going on to make the new gallery sound like an amusing Beaujolais: “sensitive to its surroundings, dignified and daring . . . monumental, yet without pomposity.”

And then he said something true, which is the part worth quoting.

“This building,” the president said, “tells us something about ourselves, about the role of art in our lives, about the relations between public life and the life of art, and about the maturing of an American civilization.”

All true! Truer, probably, than Jimmy Carter could have known, and true in many and various ways.

The National Mall — that grand axis stretching from the Capitol building through the Washington monument to the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial beyond — is the most public of public properties, and home to some of the nation’s most unfortunate architecture. A couple of buildings are quaint and eccentric, like the original redbrick Smithsonian “castle” from 1851. Others are absurd, like the concrete donut Gordon Bunshaft created in 1974 for the Hirschorn Gallery. Still others, like the 1976 Air and Space Museum and the 1964 Museum of American History, are merely inept and stupid.

None of this can be said of Pei’s building. The design is an ingenious example of late modernism, sharply angular and unadorned, sheathed in shaded marble, constructed with a lavish budget and the finest craftsmanship the 1970s could muster. The East Building holds down the Mall’s northeastern corner. Behind it the Capitol looms up. Across the street on the Mall side sits the gallery’s original building, now known merely as the West Building, a massive domed and columned and porticoed pile opened in 1941. Scarcely a quarter century separates the two gallery buildings in time, but walking from one to the other you can’t help but think they come from different worlds. And so they do.

It is this contrast with its neoclassical companions that forces the East Building to continue to speak loudly, even giddily, on the questions President Carter described. Twenty years after its opening, it still “tells us something,” in Carter’s phrase, about “the maturing of an American civilization.”

And what does the East Building tell us? It helps if you remember that ” maturing” is sometimes a euphemism for “decay.”

The National Gallery of Art was the last of the great robber-baron monuments. The robber baron in this instance was Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh financier (money man to Carnegie and Frick) who in his dotage abandoned his active business career to become treasury secretary under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. In Washington, as in Pittsburgh, he became a civic booster. One of his projects was the construction of the Federal Triangle, a vast acreage of government office buildings along the Mall, done in the neo-classical style.

By the mid-1930s, architectural forward-lookers were already in the grip of modernism, and the verdict on Mellon’s project was nearly universal: The buildings were “brutal,” the critics said, and — ye gods — “unoriginal.” Mellon was unmoved, as billionaires usually are. Washington and its architecture, he believed, should “express the soul of America,” and that soul was best expressed in the neoclassical form. It was there already in the city’s oldest official buildings — the original city hall, the Patent Office, the executive mansion, the Capitol itself. In continuing the tradition, Mellon said, he was fulfilling the promise of the Founders: “We are justifying that faith which [they] had from the beginning in the future generation of America.”

Much as his critics might have wished otherwise, Mellon was not a philistine. Over the years he had quietly acquired one of the world’s great private collections of painting and sculpture, with the intention of bequeathing it to his country. He hoped it would form the nucleus of a national gallery along the lines of England’s, and he offered as well to pay for a building to house it. Congress reserved a plot of land on the Mall, between Seventh and Fourth streets, and Mellon hired the nation’s leading traditionalist architect, John Russell Pope, to continue the neoclassical scheme begun with the Triangle. Mellon knew what he was doing.

“Andrew Mellon decided from the outset that he wanted a powerful building designed in a classical idiom,” the gallery’s first curator, John Walker, later wrote. Mellon felt that people need “buildings more magnificent, more spatial, and less utilitarian than the apartments and houses they normally inhabit.”

Pope was a design consultant on the Federal Triangle, and something of a propagandist for the neoclassical revival in America. The Jefferson Memorial is his, as are a variety of Washington’s signature buildings, including Constitution Hall. He also designed the Triangle’s most elaborate building, the National Archives. With its endlessly repeated Corinthian columns, numberless pilasters, voluptuous statuary, and billowing entablature, the Archives was neoclassicism on stilts — and a little rich even for Mellon’s blood. Mellon convinced Pope to make a sleeker building for the National Gallery, more modest in its adornment, but still grand and classical enough to be worthy of the great art it would house.

Grandeur wasn’t a problem. At the time of its construction, Pope’s gallery was the largest marble building in the world. Its facade stretches nearly the length of three football fields, and what might have been a deadly, endless slab of rose-tinted stone is instead, thanks to Pope’s delicate hand, a varied, subtly shifting arrangement of paneled surfaces, modest setbacks, empty niches, and blind windows. Small gardens with fountains flank the grand stairway outside. A ten-foot wall surrounds the building, hiding the office windows on the first floor and creating the unlikely illusion that the entire weighty edifice is hovering slightly above ground. Inside, past the thirty- foot bronze doors, a dome derived from the Pantheon rises one hundred feet on twenty-four columns of green and black, and off to the left and right are a series of symmetrically arranged viewing rooms. These in turn are set around two large garden courts with vaulted skylights, filled with statuary and fresh flowers.

Pope was a classicist but not an ideologue. A colleague once said of him, ” He was always guided by an ideal, the perfection of classical architecture adapted to contemporary life.” Adaptation, the press of the present on the past, was essential to his method, and his design for the National Gallery is far more eclectic than Pope’s critics have claimed. Its low-slung, streamlined look gives off a hint of Art Deco; in its understated exterior ornamentation, it even shows the influence of modernism. It is a wholly original synthesis, tied together by Pope’s, and Mellon’s, belief in art as an uplifting enterprise and a source of quiet pleasure, best enjoyed in repose amid noble surroundings.

The architect and the benefactor died within a day of each other, when construction was just underway. The National Gallery was Pope’s last work and his greatest — and unquestionably the most inspiring museum on the Mall, fully suitable to its purpose, an act of deference and gratitude to the masterpieces within.

And everyone hated it — everyone, that is, but museum-goers. By the time the museum opened in 1941, neoclassicism was as dead as John Russell Pope, and the world of academic architecture was dissolving into the overstimulated pursuit of fashion that we know today. In thrall to modernism, and particularly to the pitiless reductionism of Bauhaus, the young architects who had taken control of the city’s Commission on Fine Arts nearly got Pope’s design rejected — and had the building not been an outright gift from Mellon, involing no public money in its construction, they might have succeeded. It lacked, they said, the “free imagination” that modern architecture demanded of its practitioners. Perhaps the design’s most furious critic was Joseph Hudnut, dean of the Harvard School of Architecture, who pronounced it ” pompous and overblown.” The National Gallery was a favorite object of scorn throughout Hudnut’s career, the exemplar of all that contemporary architecture rebelled against. It was “the last of the Romans,” Hudnut said. And, more darkly, “the death mask for an ancient culture.”

Hudnut’s contempt for neoclassicism in general and Pope in particular was deeply impressed on his students at Harvard, among whom was a brilliant young immigrant from China named I. M. Pei.

The decision to expand the gallery was made in the mid-1960s. John Walker, by then the museum’s director, persuaded Paul and Ailsa Mellon, Andrew’s heirs, to finance the construction of a new building on a site across Fourth Street from the original gallery. Pope himself had sketched a possible annex for the site — in neoclassical style, of course.

Andrew Mellon had conceived the gallery as an institution carefully insulated from the pressures of politics and artistic fashion. Money for upkeep came from Congress, but all acquisitions were to be privately funded. The actions of the gallery’s trustees, according to the charter, “shall not be subject to review by any officer or agency other than a court of law.” Mellon has insisted — and the charter established — that the gallery display only works of the “highest quality,” as reflected in Mellon’s own collection of Old Masters. To reinforce the point, the gallery instituted a policy of refusing to accept donations of works by any artist who hadn’t been dead twenty years. (The policy was violated only once, in the early 1960s, to admit the collection of Chester Dale, who wanted to donate some early Picassos and Matisses along with his collection of French Impressionists.)

And so for twenty-five years the gallery steadily expanded its holdings along the lines Mellon had prescribed. His original bequest of Italian, Dutch, and British art became the nucleus he had hoped for, drawing donations of similar or higher quality. The result was one of the world’s preeminent collections of Western painting from shortly before the Renaissance to the cusp of the twentieth century.

In a memoir, Walker compared the attitude of Mellon and the gallery’s other early benefactors to that of European nobles: “The collections they formed were to be of masterpieces. . . . But unlike their princely precursors, what they assembled was intended to go into public museums. Patriotism and popular availability, they thought, would justify their vast expenditures. If the poor, the underprivileged, the ‘ethnic minorities’ stayed away, it was not their concern. In their opinion the museum’s obligations ended with the display of beautiful works of art. . . . Museums do not exist solely for the noise and turmoil of hordes of schoolchildren!”

Well, curators don’t write stuff like that anymore, and even by 1969, when Walker retired, his views were deemed wildly anachronistic — fuddy- duddyism and worse — within the art world.

“It was as if,” the critic Hilton Kramer complained, “an intellectual moat separated the National Gallery from its own time.” This, of course, was the whole idea, though Kramer and other critics and curators found the arrangement inexplicable and irresponsible. By the late 1960s, intellectual moats were no longer in fashion — were considered, in fact, to be insults to the very idea of democracy and popular taste-making. The National Gallery of Art had been by definition an “elitist” enterprise, broadly understood, and ” elitist” was now an epithet. Walker’s (and Andrew Mellon’s) era ended immediately with his departure, when he turned the directorship over to his protege, J. Carter Brown. It was Brown who oversaw the expansion of the gallery into the new building and thereby, as his admirers said, “brought the museum into the twentieth century.” (The museum had always been in the twentieth century, of course, but people were starting to talk like this in the 1960s.)

Brown soon became famous as a skillful diplomat, exquisitely sensitive to the tastes of his various constituencies on Capitol Hill, in the press, and on the board of trustees. His resume was a curious hybrid. He had studied with Barnard Berenson at the scholarly enclave I Tatti, where he learned to savor art, and he had earned an MBA at Harvard, where he learned to please the customers — and the more customers the better. From the start, for example, Brown embraced the nascent trend toward “blockbuster shows,” those enormous crowd-pleasers that travel from city to city in a swirl of publicity, festooned with all the trappings of the road company of Cats. Just as crucially, he wanted to expand the gallery’s collection to include modern art — particularly the abstract art that Andrew Mellon had found incomprehensible. Brown quietly dropped the now-infamous “twenty-year” rule, as the gallery acquired Motherwells and Rothkos, Klines and Pollocks and de Koonings.

“My own hope,” wrote Brown, “is to see the collections grow more and more into the twentieth century, as the definition of an Old Master changes.”

The advancing perspective of history was revealed in a lopsided ratio: The gallery would reserve one building, Pope’s, for the first twenty-five centuries of artistic endeavor, and one building for the past sixty years. But displaying modern art was only one reason for the gallery’s expansion, and a relatively minor one at that. For the East Building was meant to reflect the new definition of art, and of art museums.

Pope’s stuffy old pile was raised up in an era when all you needed to run an art museum was a handful of guards, carpenters, cleaning ladies, and volunteers, under the loose supervision of a small curatorial staff. But by 1969, a cutting-edge museum — and no one in his right mind wanted to be associated with any other kind — was a spectacle, a happening (as we used to say), with shops, restaurants, hotel-sized kitchens for catering, retail space, open areas for cocktail parties and fund-raisers, auditoriums, classrooms for adult-extension programs, places to spend money and buy merchandise, laboratories for conservation work, shops, libraries, TV and film studios, shops, and honeycombs of office space for the people who specialized in all of the above, not to mention a large army of full-time publicists, catalogue writers, interior designers, researchers, historians, and curators. Museum upkeep was now a profession — the stuff of graduate study, advanced degrees, and doctoral dissertations. To the extent that the ” museologist” concerned himself with art, he was to make it “accessible” and (in the new adjectival form) “fun.” Under Brown, the moat was filled and paved over, and the hordes of schoolchildren streamed in.

Brown and Paul Mellon chose Pei as architect for the new building. In hindsight he seems the inevitable choice, for today he is as close to a celebrity as American architecture has produced since the death of Frank Lloyd Wright. In Hudnut’s School of Architecture, he had been an acolyte of Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, and Pei’s buildings were sufficiently ugly to keep him in good odor with the academics who set architectural standards. But Pei was a modernist with a twist. Most of Gropius’s students had graduated as fierce purists and gone off to lives of relative professional obscurity, railing against the corruptions of commercialism and capital. Pei, by contrast, had gone to work for a realestate developer. His success led him to found his own firm with scores of employees, a Madison Avenue atelier, where he landed one fat corporate account after another. He drew his friends and connections from the upper reaches of Manhattan and Washington society: Kay Graham, Jock Whitney, Joseph Alsop, and more Kennedys than you could shake a stick at.

In designing the new gallery, Pei faced several difficulties, which he overcame with varying degrees of ingenuity. The site is in the shape of a trapezoid, nearly nine acres in all, requiring a structure of equally unusual dimensions. Meanwhile, the East Building had to accommodate the multiple purposes of a modern museum. Only 12 percent of the new space would be reserved for the display of art. The rest was swallowed up by a grand atrium (for parties and the hordes of schoolkids), offices, loading docks, storage space, an auditorium, all those restaurants and shops, and a large academic enterprise called the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts.

But the most telling restrictions were ones that Pei, as an ideological modernist, imposed on himself. The construction of the East Building lasted almost ten years, and the whole agonizing process was preserved in a PBS documentary called A Place to Be. In its opening scene, Pei discusses with colleagues his design for the new building. In a burst of inspiration he had bisected the trapezoid with a diagonal, creating a single building composed of two triangles — one for the art displays, the other for the more important offices and study center.

“This is perhaps the most sensitive site in the United States,” Pei tells his colleagues. “The old Pope building, being of neoclassical style, managed to have columns, pilasters, and all kinds of moldings to make its surfaces” — and here his voice betrays a hint of sarcasm — “uh, interesting, shall we say. But we don’t have those devices anymore.”

We don’t have those devices anymore. The flat assertion encompasses all by itself the yawning chasm that separates Pope’s building from Pei’s. Pei wasn’t referring to the state of contemporary craftsmanship in the American building trades. Surely, with his large budget, Pei could have located somewhere a stonemason or two who were still able to fashion pilasters and columns to make his building “interesting.” No, Pei’s statement is philosophical: We don’t construct those pleasing ornaments because we don’t want them. History has moved on; an architect who uses columns and moldings is rummaging through a discredited past, abandoning his prerogatives as an artist. Without such devices, however, an architect is freed from the dead hand of history to make his expressive statement. According to the modernist credo, after all, architect is done in service of . . . the architect.

And Pei’s East Building is a feverishly expressive statement, an advertisement for the cleverness of the man who designed it. In place of ornamentation, Pei substituted geometry. The triangular motif recurs deliriously. The corners of the exterior walls are the apexes of triangles. The towers are triangles. Inside, the coffered ceilings are patterned in triangles. Structural columns are done in triangles; the inlays of the floors are triangles. The men’s rooms, the maitre d’s desk in the terrace restaurant, the roof of the skylight — triangles, triangles, triangles. And where triangles are inconvenient, Pei substituted hexagons and tetrahedrons — in the elevators, for example, and in the small, sharp-edged skylights that erupt from the plaza between the two buildings.

Pei’s plan has no right angles — none — and here again the upshot is philosophical, even metaphysical; where Pope’s classical forms offer the order and resolution of a comprehensible world, the East Building’s endless triangulation suggests a multiplicity of points of view, relativity in stone. “The angles cheerfully frustrate one’s sense of measurement,” wrote one critic, who meant it as a compliment. The effect is either annoying or stimulating, depending on your disposition. Either way, no one has accused Pei’s building of being dreary. Pope meant to induce repose and serenity and a sense of grandeur in museum-goers. Pei wants to hop them up. In a cutting- edge art museum, the curator’s worst fear is that someone might get bored. There is never a dull moment in the East Building — a fitting leisure-time option for the visitor who’s taking a break from watching TV.

“We build a circus,” Pei said. Brown agreed. “The building has to be designed in such a way that young people will find it interesting to go there, ” he wrote. “The main thing is that it be fun to visit.”

But what, you might ask, about the poor fellow who’s come to the art museum to look at art? You walk under a low overhang and enter the atrium — “It’s designed for a mob scene,” Pei remarked — and are at once bedazzled by the soaring skylight, the oddly placed ledges, the ramps and escalators and crisscrossing bridges. It is a less-grand version of the huge lobbies John Portman designed for the Hyatt Hotels in the 1970s. But where’s the bellhop? Where’s the registration desk? Come to think of it, where the hell is the art? One exhibition space is tucked off to the left behind you. Another is hidden above you beyond a balcony. A third is in the basement below, and a fourth is through a narrow doorway up ahead. You can get a map at the information desk, but all the map really tells you is that you’re in a building shaped like a triangle. Which you knew.

But there’s more art than you might first suspect. There are pieces in the atrium, and more outside the building. The works illustrate one of the many unintentional ironies of modernist architecture. Modernism forbade any conventional adornment, of course. But modernist architects, having stripped their buildings of decoration, noticed that the buildings lacked a certain — how to put it? — decoration. So they began commissioning art to adorn their unadorned buildings. Hence the careers, the fame, and the fabulous wealth of Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, and other brand names of public art circa 1975.

Each of them, not coincidentally, was commissioned to create works that would add “visual interest” to the otherwise blank stone walls of Pei’s gallery. And most of them, being contemporary artists, were comically disdainful of pragmatic considerations. Pei chose Moore’s sculpture from a catalogue — by this time, the lucky Brit was in such corporate demand that he had become a mail-order house. As originally designed, Moore’s Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece would have blocked the entrance to the museum so no one could have gotten in or out. (It was repositioned.) Calder’s atrium mobile, ingeniously entitled Untitled, was designed to hang from the skylight; at five thousand pounds, it would have brought down the whole building. (It was eventually redesigned and hands there still.) Other works, alas, were put in place as the artists wished. Anthony Caro was asked to produce a piece to rest on a ledge in the atrium, and sure enough he produced Ledge Piece, a small slag heap of corroded metal. James Rosati, perhaps in homage to Calder, contributed another Untitled. Isamu Noguchi’s Great Rock of Inner Seeking is a big hunk of bronze.

It could have been worse. For the entrance — in the place where Moore’s bolus now stands — Pei had originally commissioned a piece by Jean Dubuffet. The Welcome Parade was in the trademark style of the French absurdist: a collection of figures done in black and white, presumably museum-goers, outsized and grotesque. It was a satire, a mockery of the boobs who would come to the gallery.

In the documentary A Place to Be, we see Pei and Brown examining a maquette of Dubuffet’s piece before a model of the East Building. “Don’t you think this makes a great place to be photographed?” Pei exclaims. “You know, you come with your family from, from . . . Iowa or someplace!” The joke — the joke on the Iowans — would be delicious!

But Brown, ever the politician, didn’t agree, and neither did the board of trustees. They lacked the corrosive and reflexive disdain of the ideological modernist. And they were above all sensitive to the tastes of the philistine congressmen who every year reauthorize the gallery’s funding. Moore they could handle. And Calder. Noguchi and Caro were pushing it, but . . . mocking Iowa cornshuckers . . . making fun of taxpayers . . . wasn’t that a bit much? Debuffet’s commission was quietly canceled.

The fate of The Welcome Parade captures in miniature the conditions under which modernism came to the National Gallery. It could have been worse! By the time the doors of the East Building were opened, after all, the museum world had already been disfigured by such horrors as the Pompidou Center in Paris and Louis Kahn’s annex to the Yale Gallery of Art. Pei himself had recently designed the ludicrous Paul Mellon Arts Center at Choate and was soon to commit the greatest crime of his long career: the steel and glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. Against these the East Building is a model of decorum and taste.

There are many reasons for this. There were institutional restraints that rendered Pei’s modernist impulses almost harmless. Paul Mellon insisted that the building be sheathed in the same understated Tennessee marble his father had chosen for the original gallery. There would be no exposed beams, no tinted structural glass, no curtain walls of rusting steel. Zoning restrictions set by the Commission on Fine Arts limited the height of the building and required that its entrance face the West Building, in a gesture of deference. And deference — that most unmodern attitude — is the East Building’s saving grace, no matter how grudgingly it is paid. Here on the Mall, Pei’s gallery can’t help but submit to the grandeur and dignity of Pope’s much greater building, an unlikely testament to the enduring power of the neoclassical ideal. It’s almost as if the old master had reached out from the grave to stay his rival’s hand.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.