10 Facts You May Not Know About the National Gallery Of Art | DCist

On March24, 1937, the National Gallery of Art was established by Congress. From the article:

"10 Facts You May Not Know About the National Gallery Of Art | DCist
Inside the marble walls of the National Gallery’s two buildings, there is a little bit of something for everyone—whether that’s 13th century religious altarpieces, or 20th century abstract expressionism. In line with its founding mission, the museum champions art accessibility by having free admission, keeping its doors open year-round (except for Christmas Day and New Year’s Day), and extending its exhibition space to an expansive garden. Here are 10 facts that you may not have known about the museum.

1. The gallery opened to the public in the midst of World War II.

The National Gallery of Art officially opened on March 17, 1941, decades after public museums became popular in Europe and Asia. But the first plans for a national art museum in the United States were actually made (and abandoned) 50 years earlier by Franklin W. Smith, an idealistic reformer, hardware merchant, and architectural enthusiast.

Smith’s dream was to turn the National Mall into a giant cultural enlightenment project, with monuments, museums, and buildings representing every major civilization. His plan for a “National Gallery of History and Art” was influenced by the examples he saw in his extensive travels to World’s Fairs and museums in European capitals.

Smith came close to materializing his utopian vision. He first printed his design prospectus in 1891, with drawing contributions by James Renwick, the prominent architect of the Smithsonian Castle. In the following years, Smith travelled to different cities and universities giving speeches and convincing art world leaders to consider his proposal. In 1900, the prospectus was even presented to the Senate by Sen. George Hoar, a Republican from Massachusetts. The New York Times called it “the most ambitious plan that has yet been devised in this country for the establishment of a national museum.”

But the timing was not right for Smith’s gallery. The economic depression of 1893 and, later, the war in the Philippines meant the government wasn’t concerned with erecting temples of art and culture. His plans died with the senator he trusted to turn the project into legislation.

Half a century later, Andrew Mellon, a man with much more political and financial power, realized Smith’s dream of a national art museum—albeit a more modest version.

This time, too, a war threatened to overshadow the excitement of the new museum. The National Gallery opened as national museums all over Europe were closing because of the increasingly catastrophic second World War. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt only cited this as more reason to celebrate the legacy of culture.

For Roosevelt, the gallery was a vehicle for democracy, a stepping stone toward building a society that prioritizes the common good. He especially emphasized the movement of the art from private and limited to public and democratic enjoyment. “They belong so obviously to all who love them, they are so clearly the property not of their single owners but of all men, everywhere,” he said about the gallery’s paintings.

2. Andrew Mellon was in the middle of a lawsuit for tax evasion when he approached Franklin D. Roosevelt with the idea for the gallery.

Despite the ideals of accessibility, equality, and public ownership emphasized in Roosevelt’s dedication speech, the gallery’s beginnings were rooted in the extreme private wealth of a businessman who spent his entire life fighting against progressive policies.

Andrew Mellon was a banker, industrialist, and the third-richest man in the country when he became involved in politics. In his 11 years as secretary of the Treasury, he fought relentlessly to get rid of the inheritance tax and to lower income taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

Mellon’s term as treasury secretary came to a scandalous end in 1932. Faced with impeachment charges for corruption, he resigned and became the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. When Roosevelt assumed office, his administration not only officially ended Mellon’s political career, it also began to investigate him for tax evasion.

Unsurprisingly, Roosevelt and Mellon were not the best of friends. Roosevelt spent his career reversing Mellon’s policies and redefining the public good as a responsibility of the government. So when Mellon proposed a public art museum for the benefit of all Americans, the project, so in line with FDR’s plans and beliefs, was hard to refuse. “I am not only taken completely by surprise, but delighted by your very wonderful offer to the people of the United States,” Roosevelt wrote in response to Mellon’s proposal. He warned Mellon, though, that the $10 million building and the priceless art would not buy him out of the tax fraud investigation.

In the end, Mellon was found not guilty—but the verdict was announced four months after he had already died.

3. The founder and the architect of the (original) West Building died within 24 hours of each other.

Mellon died on August 26, 1937, awaiting exoneration and anticipating the gallery opening. John Russell Pope, though 20 years younger than Mellon, died only a day later, his position as the National Gallery’s head architect cut short.

Pope was responsible for many of the neoclassical buildings that define downtown D.C. Before the National Gallery, he designed the National Archives building and the Masonic House of the Temple. (He wanted to design the Lincoln Memorial, but lost to another Beaux-Arts architect, Henry Bacon.) In 1935, Mellon commissioned Pope to design the National Gallery building.

Pope’s design for the gallery was conservative for its time, when the hottest new trends in architecture were Frank Lloyd Wright’s huge glass windows and overhanging roofs, not Ionic columns and slabs of marble. But Pope decided to stick to the classics at the behest of Mellon, who had no desire for the building to “express the spirit of the times.” The idea was to emulate the architecture of the rest of the Mall, trying to add a building that would fit in with the existing landscape. FDR also had a preference for the neoclassical style, and greatly admired Pope’s work. (A progressive in most other senses, the New Deal president was surprisingly conservative when it came to architectural taste.)

Pope died only a few months into the excavation of the building site, and he was not able to enjoy the product of his designs. (Roosevelt, however, looked out for his legacy. A year after Pope’s death, construction began on the Jefferson Memorial, a Pope creation hated by everyone except Roosevelt. Despite many protests from Washingtonians and the Commission of Fine Arts, the memorial was built in the place Pope planned, and in the same style.

4. Twenty-one of the gallery’s most prominent paintings were sold by the Soviet government to raise money for industrialization.

In the decades leading up to the construction of the National Gallery, the United States was having a cultural identity crisis. City planners and government leaders grew bent on proving that America was more than just an industrial powerhouse but a civilized, beautiful, and artistic society. This inspired the construction of museums, parks, monuments, and buildings that were supposed to make up for the centuries of Western cultural heritage that made Europe so special in the eyes of American elites.

The Soviet Union was facing the opposite problem—in the early 1930s, the primary concern of the new government was industrializing a vast country that had fallen behind its European counterparts. The first five-year economic plan called for capital, and selling the imperial treasures of the Hermitage Museum was a way to acquire it. This measure was extremely unpopular with people associated with the museum, and it eventually fell out of favor with Bolshevik politicians because of its negative effect on the country’s reputation (selling the nation’s most precious masterpieces fit awkwardly with the new Soviet slogan of “art belongs to the people.”)

Though the sale of Hermitage art did not last very long, it was enough time for Mellon to buy 21 valuable paintings, including works by Van Eyck, Botticelli, Titian, and Rembrandt. In 1931, Mellon bought the Alba Madonna by Raphael for $1,166,400, the largest sum ever paid for a painting until that time.

Even before it became known that the paintings would form the core of a national art museum, rumors of how “Andrew Mellon, the capitalist, raided Soviet Russia’s famous Hermitage,” as a 1937 Washington Post article put it, captivated news readers.

5. The museum also has more than 1,000 Rothkos, the only Leonardo Da Vinci outside Europe, and a Dalí painting that hangs in a hallway next to a bathroom.

In 1967, the museum once again took advantage of a state leader in need of resources, this time for a much more personal project. Franz Joseph II, the prince of Liechtenstein, sold Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci to pay for his son’s wedding. It is one of the most famous in the gallery’s collection, and the only da Vinci painting permanently displayed in the United States.

The only downside of having so many prominent works of art is the inability to display all of them. In 1986, the Mark Rothko Foundation gifted nearly 200 paintings and over 900 drawings by the famous abstract expressionist painter to the National Gallery. Of all these works, only a small fraction are on display, mostly his later iconic color block paintings. They all hang in the gallery’s version of a “Rothko room”—a space specially devoted to the quiet contemplation of his emotional works.

One of the more surprising placements of a painting in the museum is of The Sacrament of the Last Supper by Salvador Dalí, which hangs inconspicuously in a West Building hallway.

More than 7,000 people flocked to see the painting the first day it was displayed in 1955, but the museum hasn’t utilized its only Dalí as a way to attract visitors since then. This could have to do with the art world’s ambivalent relationship to the surrealist. Many art critics denounce his later work as kitschy and exhibitionist, one American art critic going so far as to call it “the junk food of art.” In Art Since 1900, a seminal critical history by the world’s leading art scholars, Dalí’s work is mentioned only once. The unconventional rendering of the Last Supper in the National Gallery also angered religious leaders.

The painting has been moved only once, when a handicapped visitor complained about its inaccessibility to wheelchair users in 2001. It used to hang in an even more hidden spot—in a landing visible only to those who took the stairs or the escalator.

6. J. Carter Brown, the gallery’s longest serving director, had an intense rivalry with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1969, when J. Carter Brown became the director of the National Gallery at the young age of 34, he inherited a traditional gallery devoted to old Western masterpieces, devoid of any signs of modernity. Brown dedicated his 22-year tenure to modernizing, popularizing, and elevating the status of the museum.

Thomas Hoving became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1967, two years before Brown assumed his position. By the end of his first year as director, Hoving had increased the Met’s visitors by a million people. The two museum leaders, both young, Ivy-educated, ambitious, and hungry for attention, were destined to become nemeses.

Catching up to the Met was a daunting task. It opened 70 years before the National Gallery, and boasted an encyclopedic collection of global artifacts that were much more suited to attracting wide audiences than paintings. But the Met’s most important asset was the city that surrounded it, which far upstaged D.C. in terms of its visual arts scene.

Brown, however, was ready to use his location to his advantage. He developed close ties to members of the Nixon administration, which helped him use government diplomacy to secure exhibits from abroad.

As the National Gallery began to rival the Met with its crowd-drawing exhibitions, the directors started competing over where coveted foreign collections would be displayed first. In 1974, Brown was able to secure the “Archeological Finds of the People of China,” a blockbuster exhibit that Hoving desperately wanted for the Met. In subsequent years, two more popular shows, “The Treasures of Tutankhamun” and a collection from East Germany’s museum, were sent to D.C. first, and only later to the Met. Brown’s wins left Hoving angry but impressed. “I screamed about his behavior in private with my staff but had to admire his talent for deal-making. That’s what the game is all about,” he later wrote in his memoir.

When Brown left the museum in 1992, it had 20,000 more works of art, hundreds of millions more dollars in its budget, thousands more visitors, and a new modernist building for contemporary art. Of course, there was only so much he could do to change the cultural legacy and reputation of D.C. The Met is still higher up on the list of most-visited art museums than the National Gallery. But Brown certainly transformed the museum into the modern, popular attraction that it is today.

7. Famous architect I.M. Pei designed the East Building a decade before he constructed the Louvre pyramids.

The angular, spacious, light-filled East Building was one of the most ambitious and expensive projects carried out during Brown’s time as director. Both its design and its intended purpose were to be radically different from the neoclassical West Building. The East Building would have a huge atrium, perfect for holding crowds and fundraisers, and it would exhibit works by living artists, something the museum had never done before.

I.M. Pei was an established architect when the museum’s board approached him with the East Building commission in the summer of 1968. He had previously worked for big clients like the Kennedys, various city governments, and the Christian Science Church. But he was also still reeling from the failure of a recent skyscraper project that had become infamous for its shattering windows.

The East Building project was Pei’s chance to redeem himself in the eyes of the public, and more importantly, of potential clients. This pressure, in addition to the challenge of making the building fit harmoniously with the rest of the mall’s marble landscape, made Pei “unnerved by it all.”

Critics also doubted Pei’s ability to execute the project gracefully. A Washington Post critic posed a dilemma that seemed impossible for Pei to solve. He wrote that the idea of another Beaux-Arts temple would be ridiculous “in the age of space ships,” but at the same time complained that his mind “reels from the thought of any ‘modern’ structure adjacent to Pope’s luxurious museum.”

Despite the reservations, Pei’s pyramidal skylights and sleek building were met with almost unanimous praise upon completion. The East Building resurrected Pei’s reputation and established him as a leading architect.

Still, Pei’s next museum undertaking made the criticisms and controversies of the East Building seem like child’s play. In renovating the most culturally significant institution in France, Pei took on the wrath of thousands of French conservatives and naysayers. Echoes of the East Building can be seen in the Louvre pyramids, leaving little doubt that the National Gallery was a stepping stone towards Pei’s most famous architectural project.

8. In the 1990s, the National Gallery was at the center of a controversy involving 28 fake Georgia O’Keeffe paintings.

The “Canyon Suite,” as it came to be known, was a collection of 28 watercolor landscapes discovered two years after Georgia O’Keeffe’s death in one of her old friends’ family garage. Art scholars all over the country asserted the paintings’ authenticity. The prints were bought by a prominent art dealer and put on the market, attracting the National Gallery leadership’s attention.

According to museum personnel at the time, the director and some curators of the gallery were trying to convince a banking billionaire named R. Crosby Kemper to buy the $5 million Canyon Suite and gift it to the museum.

Kemper did buy them, but instead of giving them away, he used them for the debut exhibition of his own art museum in Kansas City, Mo. Imagine his dismay when suddenly the National Gallery of Art and the Georgia O’ Keeffe Foundation release their findings—that the Canyon Suite was fake.

Kemper attributed the report to the National Gallery’s desire to spite him, but the curators involved in the research cited the type of paper, which was unavailable in the United States when the paintings were made.

9. For years, a Florida congressman pushed for the National Gallery to take over the nearby Federal Trade Commission building as an exhibition space.

The National Gallery has long enjoyed bipartisan support, its federal budget steadily growing in years when other cultural institutions suffered cuts. But one congressman took his passion for the museum to a new level.

Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., an art collector and former real estate developer, had a passion for art, and a deep appreciation for the National Gallery. From 2005 to 2011, he tried three separate times to pitch a bill that would turn the nearby FTC’s headquarters into more gallery space.

Opponents of his plan pointed out the absurdity and practical difficulty of finding a new space for thousands of government employees, while history buffs noted the connection between the agency and the building, which was constructed specifically for its current purpose.

The FTC building was constructed around the same time as the National Gallery. As with the museum, Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the creation of the FTC—both the agency and the building—with public service to the people in mind. Mica explained his interest to the Washington Post in 2011: “Some people drink, chase women, golf. I like art, architecture, a few antiques.”

Mica lost his bid for re-election to Democrat Stephanie Murphy in 2016, and the original FTC lives to see another day.

10. As of 2019, the National Gallery is the 10th most visited art museum in the world.

The museum has been receiving a steady flow of around 4 million visitors a year for the last 15 years. Free admission, picturesque rotundas, cafes, and of course, vast collections make it a popular cultural institution in D.C. The museum’s sculpture garden, a 6.1-acre oasis of art and greenery that opened in 1999, has become a hub of leisurely activities for Washingtonians. In the summer months, free Jazz in the Garden concerts attract hundreds of people from all over the city.

As the museum world changes and adapts to new technologies, the gallery has also started incorporating more multimedia features and social media outreach in its exhibits. The gallery also continues to add to its diverse collection, acquiring works ranging from María Berrío, a contemporary Colombian painter, to a set of Degas drawings."

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