The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is one of the finer history museums in the country, so naturally the people in charge are trying to muck it up. Unlike the Museum of American History, which has become a breeding ground for fashionable multicultural grievances, the Portrait Gallery has always held true to its core mission, telling the American story through the lives of the great individuals who shaped it. The museum houses famous portraits of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and boasts a complete Hall of Presidents, but it has devoted galleries and shows to a wide range of Americans: the organizers of the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, novelists such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, photographers ranging from Matthew Brady to Annie Leibovitz, as well as musicians, jurists, and military leaders. But the National Portrait Gallery is also part of the Smithsonian Institution, and therein lies the problem.
The gallery shares the Old Patent Office Building, at 8th and F Streets Northwest, with another museum in the Smithsonian system, the National Museum of American Art. That museum is headed by Elizabeth Broun, who is known around town as a skillful political player. Ms. Broun has asked Hillary Clinton to serve as honorary curator for special exhibitions. She put on an exhibition of Tipper Gore’s photographs. And she hired the wife of then Smithsonian head I. Michael Heyman to serve as guest curator. On Mr. Heyman’s last day as director of the Smithsonian, he announced a renovation plan for the Old Patent Office Building. When the work is done in a few years, Ms. Broun’s museum will dominate the building. Now, the Portrait Gallery has the lion’s share of the space, as envisioned by the original legislation creating the museum. But under the new arrangement, the Museum of American Art will enjoy 62,000 square feet of exclusive space and the Portrait Gallery about 21,000 square feet.
Moreover, there will be a dramatic change in the quality of the museums’ spaces. The National Portrait Gallery will lose its grandest galleries. At the moment, it maintains the Great Hall on the building’s third floor as well as half of the galleries on the second floor, with their vaulted ceilings and ornate designs. After the renovation, the gallery will lose its second and third floor spaces and be relegated to generic spaces on the ground floor. That’s important because it affects fund-raising. Donors are more likely to give money to have a handsome gallery named in their honor than they are to have a plain room bear their moniker, so the Portrait Gallery will find it much harder to woo contributors.
The curators at the Portrait Gallery are outraged by what many see as a slow and steady effort to destroy their museum and dissolve their collection into the Museum of American Art. They tried to rally support for their cause, but the new head of the Smithsonian, Lawrence Small, placed a gag order on all staff. Though the Smithsonian is funded in large part by the taxpayer, the whole controversy is now shrouded in secrecy, as Portrait Gallery curators remain mute for fear of losing their jobs. Broun, again showing her superior savvy, has been openly talking to the press. She says it would be better for all concerned if they would stop revisiting the renovation decision, which is in the past, and instead start planning for the future. Those at the Portrait Gallery “prefer to retain the status quo, and we prefer to move forward,” she says. “When the decision has been made, the proper thing for grown-up, mature people to do is to say, ‘Okay, chief. We’ll move forward.'”
Broun has succeeded in shaping most of the press coverage of the controversy (with the exception of some fine pieces by Michael Kilian in the Chicago Tribune). For example, Broun adamantly denies ever trying to merge the Portrait Gallery’s collection into hers, a claim some reporters have accepted. In her interview with me, she said she has merely hoped to bring in some disinterested outside observers who would be able to explore all possible futures for the museums. But in this regard, she is being Clintonian. In fact, last April she distributed a report she had commissioned that argues vehemently for merging the National Museum of American Art, the Portrait Gallery, and the Archives of American Art into one institution called the “Public Center of American Art and Culture.” The report doesn’t explicitly say that Broun should head the center, but it treats her museum as the core of the new institution, with the other two entities as adjuncts. The report describes this consolidation as if it were the Holy Grail of museumology, and in her cover sheet, Ms. Broun endorses the idea. The Portrait Gallery people are not paranoid to think that their museum is in peril. It took an angry delegation to Heyman from the gallery’s board of governors to head off that proposed consolidation.
The struggle between the two institutions is interesting not only because it affects two of the country’s better museums, but because it shows which way the cultural winds are blowing, which sorts of cultural institutions thrive in this day and age and which sorts do not. Ms. Broun and her staff at the National Museum of American Art earned their greatest burst of publicity in 1991 when they mounted a notorious exhibition called “The West As America.” It was a tendentious, quasi-Marxist depiction of the settling of the American frontier. It showed classic Western paintings by Remington and William Jewett and then undercut them with polemical wall-texts designed to show that the Westward expansion was little more than a tale of capitalist greed and exploitation. For example, Remington’s Fight for the Water Hole, a standard depiction of cowboys fighting Indians, was identified in the wall copy as a metaphor for “the plight of the embattled capitalist elite in an era of strikes, violence and widespread immigration.” As many critics pointed out, the paintings actually offered a more nuanced view of the mixture of idealism, opportunism, and oppression that characterized the Westward expansion than the exhibition’s interpretive texts. Historian Daniel Boorstin toured the exhibition and wrote in the guest book that it was “perverse, historically inaccurate and destructive.” The exhibit was supposed to travel to Denver and St. Louis, but museums in both those cities canceled their participation. Ms. Broun admits that some of the wall texts were clumsy, but says she is proud of the ideological content of the show, “We feel it has been to a fair degree vindicated as to its ideas.”
But the conflict between her museum and the National Portrait Gallery is not primarily an ideological fight. Any ideological component to the art museum’s more flamboyant shows is merely one manifestation of a whole approach to running a museum: The crucial contrast between the two museums is that Ms. Broun seems in step with the cultural climate, while the leaders of the Portrait Gallery seem out of step and unsure of themselves. Ms. Broun is doing what every successful museum curator does these days. She is putting together controversial shows that generate buzz, networking and fund-raising aggressively, and engaging in modish multicultural politics and sometimes heavy-handed power plays. She happens to share a building with a museum that does not do, or is slower to do, these things, so almost by force of nature her institution dominates its less assertive neighbor. Not to push the analogy too far, but the National Portrait Gallery is a bit like the New Yorker of the 1970s, worthy but dated, and Ms. Broun is vaguely akin to a Tina Brown, introducing brassier methods well adapted to a faster world.
The National Museum of American Art is woven into the fabric of elite Washington. Among other things, 80 percent of the art that the Smithsonian lends to government offices is lent by Ms. Broun’s museum. She worked closely with Tipper Gore to select and supply the art that now hangs in the reception rooms of the vice-president’s residence. If you do a Nexis search on the museum you come across small newspaper filler items that quote cabinet secretaries and Supreme Court judges expressing their delight and gratitude for loans from Ms. Broun’s museum.
Members of Congress sometimes seem less interested in preserving the cultural holdings of the museums they oversee than in making sure some of the contents tour their districts. The National Museum of American Art has been a leader in making its collection accessible to people who never come to Washington. Its award-winning web-site is exactly the sort of thing appropriators like to hear about. Meanwhile, the museum has put on desperately with-it and contemporary shows that appeal to the art establishment: installations with Jimi Hendrix music and names like “Megatron/Matrix.” That last exhibit consisted of a massive wall of 215 television monitors showing a riot of images and centrally featuring two young women clad only in pink panties striking classic poses.
During the fight over the renovation plans, by contrast, the National Portrait Gallery was headed by Alan Fern, who is now retiring at age 69. Mr. Fern was a teacher at the University of Chicago who then worked at the Library of Congress for 20 years. He moved to the Portrait Gallery 18 years ago and set a standard for professorial, effective, but not flashy leadership. When the Washington Times ran a nice profile of Mr. Fern upon his retirement, he wrote a gracious and self-effacing letter to the editor pointing out that the bulk of the credit for the museum’s accomplishments should go to the staff and not him — a generous if somewhat old-fashioned gesture. During the fight over the space, Fern and his staff never went outside the Smithsonian to rally political support, though they probably would have found it on Capitol Hill. They seem unaware of how to pull strings in Congress or generate favorable publicity. During the turf war, the Portrait Gallery has played, and continues to play, the good Smithsonian soldier, hoping for some act of charity from the higher-ups.
If anything, the Portrait Gallery staff seemed a bit apologetic about their mission. History that focuses on individual achievement may be popular on C-SPAN and among the general public, but it is out of fashion in professional circles, where the focus is on the daily life of the masses, not the doings of elites. Instead of defiantly championing their beleaguered cause, Portrait Gallery staffers sometimes seem to have, as Marx would say, internalized their own oppression — accepted the profession’s verdict that portraits celebrating the illustrious are fusty and elitist. Relegated to the lower depths of a building that is off the Mall and therefore remote from the tourist hordes, the gallery may see its already-low profile dwindle. Then the day will come when one and all agree that the reasonable thing to do is merge it with some other museum. That would be a tragedy, because right now the National Portrait Gallery is the best place in Washington for wandering around talking about the scope of American history.
It’s also ironic that the Portrait Gallery should be in such danger now, when the Smithsonian is making strides to trim its ideological sails. Controversies proliferated in the early nineties, as the institution put on one agitprop exhibition after another. But for the past few years, the officials in the Smithsonian castle have been trying to rein in the academic shock troops. Lawrence Small, the new director, promises a more businesslike approach and has already streamlined the administrative structure. He has hired Sheila Burke to head what is effectively the American history group of museums.
When Burke was Bob Dole’s top staffer, she was something of a bete noire to movement conservatives. She then went on to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which couldn’t have done her any good. But nobody doubts that she is superbly competent. And measured by the ideological standards of the Smithsonian, she counts as a raving right-winger — which is to say, she has actually met and talked with Republicans. So perhaps she will bring a different perspective to an insular institution.
What the Portrait Gallery so obviously needs is a leader who will vigorously champion its mission and take on the current academic orthodoxy. After all, outside the world of museumology and the professoriate, historical biography is thriving. Surely there must be a curator out there — part Robert Maynard Hutchins, part Tina Brown — who could take the Portrait Gallery, now a victim, and turn it into an aggressor.
David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
