A Work in Progress in Arkansas: Crystal Bridges, at Ten Years

Walmart money has created a heartland temple to American culture, past and present.

U ntil a few weeks ago, I’d never visited the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. Shame on me. It’s marking its tenth anniversary this year, adding to my embarrassment. Brian Time, alas, is like biblical or geological time. Everything takes forever.

I finally got there, and on New Year’s Day. It’s fantastic, as I hoped, with a few grating exceptions. The first is the museum’s dive into race politics. A Black Lives Matter banner waves its furls at the top of the Crystal Bridges homepage. Why is it there?

If anyplace should understand the centrality of branding, it’s a museum funded with Walmart money. It’s the Roman Empire of retail, with stores and ads everywhere. I know that Black Lives Matter is a slogan, and the slogan is fine with me, though I would say everyone’s life, including the unborn, is a gift from God. Would Crystal Bridges ever consider that banner on its homepage? Not for all the razorbacks in Little Rock! Too controversial, and no virtue chips with the chic set.

I also know that BLM is a money-raising organization. Its affiliate, Black Lives Matter Global Network, raises money, too. They both have big political-action committees. BLM’s got a website it keeps sanitizing to remove the smellier aspects of its mission and system of beliefs. The organization is linked to anti-Semitic causes, and it promoted riots and looting this summer in cities throughout the country. It thinks law enforcement is a racist racket and wants police departments and prisons abolished. What happens with crime and criminals? No one knows how it spends its hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, much of it corporate protection money.

The museum is endorsing the organization, and museums shouldn’t get involved in politics, much less wacky left-wing politics. Crystal Bridges’ BLM banner links to a lecture given in 2018 at the museum by Patrisse Cullors, one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter. I watched her lecture. She made good points — everyone has a point or two that makes sense — but, overall, she’s reality-challenged, to put it diplomatically. I’m sure she means well, but she’s in the rage business, as she openly admits.

It’s a free country, and the lecture is a year or two old, before those “mostly peaceful protests” she promoted, the ones that gutted city centers and destroyed hundreds of small businesses. Given the violence BLM has incited, though, why is the museum still touting it?

Cullors cites Mao, Lenin, and Karl Marx as among her deepest influences. Reading them “provided a new understanding of what our economies could look like,” she told Time magazine in 2018. Well, to borrow a Walmart slogan, Mao, Lenin, and Marx certainly had a system to “save money” — no one except the elite few had any. But how did the other part  –“live better” — work out? In Walmart’s America, people line up once a year on Black Friday to splurge on Christmas presents. In the world of Mao, Lenin, and Marx, people line up every day for a ride to the Gulag.

I think the museum has interpretation and messaging problems as well. It wants to be PC, but it’s in Arkansas, its collection doesn’t lend itself to revolution, and its money comes from Walmart. That’s the Walmart for whose customers the PC army of bourgeois socialists, thought and speech cops, Pajama Boys, professional victims, and other snoots feel unalloyed, compulsive contempt. If these people had to define “white supremacist,” we’d hear “Walmart shopper” after a few sputters and babbles.

Crystal Bridges’ exhibition program is more uneven than it should be, given the place’s wealth, curatorial strength, dazzling permanent collection, and impressive exhibition space. The museum’s a work in progress, though. The American art world is blessed in so many ways to have this new museum.

Crystal Bridges is the zenith of American philanthropy — Alice Walton’s — and a moving example of one person’s vision, generosity, determination, and civic pride. Walton put her charitable money in Bentonville, where the money was made. That’s rare, and I wish it were less so. Rich people should give where their money will have the biggest impact, and that’s often the out-of-the-way places they once called home. The Waybacks are often starved for art, for example, and Manhattan, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco are both art-rich and donor-rich.

Establishing a museum from scratch isn’t for the faint of heart. The collection of American art Walton bought for the place is famously expensive — Kindred Spirits, by Asher Durand, cost $35 million — and almost entirely the very best. I consider Crystal Bridges a temple to American culture.

The Boston architect Moshe Safdie designed the winding, eight-pavilion, one-story museum complex in the woods not far from Bentonville’s stately town square or from its sprawling dust bowl of strip malls and low-slung, low-cost office buildings. Ponds abut the museum exterior. Lots of windows give pretty views from galleries having an abundance of 19th-century landscapes.

The museum’s in a ravine. Visitors park in lots above and beyond it and take an elevator to the museum entrance. This is not exactly an elegant entrance, but I was so happy to be there, finally, that I didn’t care. The galleries are lovely and friendly to both art and people. I felt warmly welcomed by the staff. The art is really, really good. Visitors, nearly all locals, seemed happy. Everyone is proud and delighted that Crystal Bridges is in their part of the world.

Crystal Bridges is exclusively American art from the span of our history. There are about a dozen such places in the country. It has great examples from what I call the canon, which is composed of art and artists that the critics, most academics, and the civilized public agree are the best America has produced. The Crystal Bridges collection has a tweak in that it feels ever-so-slightly Western and Southern. That’s good. It’s buying Native American art, and that’s the right thing to do.

Many American art museums or big museums with a substantial American department usually focus on art coming from New York or that’s sanctified by New York critics. These days, this is a bad habit. There are great artists everywhere in America. I hope the museum buys deeply from artists beyond Manhattan and Brooklyn, especially the ones in the South and Southwest.

Crystal Bridges is already on the right track in promoting a 50-state view of the best American art. It does survey shows of new art, I believe every few years, sending a curator to every state to find cutting-edge things that seem poised to stand the test of time. I’ve looked at the objects lists for these shows. The art’s better than most of what I see in the Whitney Biennials. There, art’s subjected to a fad filter, and the fads are Manhattan-driven and too often out of sync with the what animates the rest of the country.

Crystal Bridges isn’t a big museum, so encountering one icon of American art after another with almost every step is a thrill. Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico, from 1848, is there. Indian Encampment, by Bierstadt from 1862, is there. It’s not one of the splashy, cinematic Bierstadts, which are sometimes hard to take. It’s small, pristine, and sparkling with detail, but its texture is more painterly that most Bierstadts, and the scene is domestic and cozy. Thomas Cole’s The Good Shepherd, from 1848, is indeed big, evoking a big, overlooked idea, which is that America was once, religiously what we’d call fundamentalist today. Whistler’s Chelsea Girl, from 1884, a full-length portrait, is there. There are two splendid Eakins portraits, Sargents, a representative selection of the best Hudson River School artists, and unusual portraits.

The American Modernist galleries show lots of work by Arthur Dove (and no one can go wrong there), Stuart Davis, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Blackwell’s Island, from 1928, is among Edward Hopper’s pivotal pictures from the late 1920s defining him as an American master.

In the galleries showing art closer to our time, there are lots of what I call statement pictures. They’re not trophy paintings, since that’s pejorative, but things such as a big Wesselman, a big Alex Katz, and similar acreage by Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. As a new museum, Crystal Bridges has wall space to fill and an understandable desire to say “I’ve arrived” through art that’s splashy and colorful but still very good.

It’s definitely a blue-chip collection, in every era it collects. I looked at Crystal Bridges’ new acquisitions. I think it’s moving past the point when it’s buying headline grabbers. The museum’s adding Native American art and work by young artists.

One of the best features of the museum are its niche galleries. These are small, cozy, rotating galleries of art from the permanent collection that’s not always shown. They’re interspersed among the galleries that display the big hits of the collection. I saw two appealing, clever pop-up exhibitions when I was there. One was filled with textile art by women and explored color theory.

Another was a twist on figure painting. It showed work by Jimmy Baker, Loie Hollowell, Monica Aissa Martinez, and others doing body-part art, painting that focuses on parts of the body. Hollowell’s was geometric. Martinez, inspired by X-rays, used a vivid palette to create dense diagrams of human innards.

I don’t know whether too many people are involved in gallery interpretation — the wall texts — or whether the curators are uninvolved, or the museum is unclear about the messaging it wants. Goodness, though, this shouldn’t be difficult. The money’s from the world’s retail giant. It should be expert in pitch-perfect labels and wall panels that help the art shine, yet it’s not.

I was surprised by how insipid, how shallow, and how scattershot the gallery interpretation is. Amid the many superb works in the galleries, the interpretation annoyed me for its corporate marketing tone, its sloppiness, its disconnect from the art, how snarky it sometimes is, and finally by how abruptly the pablum and piffle evaporated once I got to the Modernist galleries.

Crystal Bridges is only ten years old. It’s had some curatorial upheaval and three directors during this time. Its director now, Rod Bigelow, isn’t an art historian. His background is in museum building operations and museum finance. That said, he is a positive, can-do guy and occupies a spot in my pantheon of good museum directors. Among the few criteria for elevation is “he took one of my shows.” It was a retrospective of the work of Alfred Maurer in 2015. I thought of that show as an Old World father thinks of his ugliest daughter — “how am I going to marry her off?” It wasn’t a bad show . . . just a problem show, like the ugly daughter who’s gotten too fat and cranky.

I digress. I gather that “how well do I work with Alice Walton” defines, at least in part, success at Crystal Bridges. Some museums in America are ruled by a single, living donor or a tiny family-dominated board. There, the staff are courtiers. At Crystal Bridges, this has led to choppy seas, and I certainly can’t fault Walton, since she built the place and I admire her.

I’ll end this profile with two thoughts. Since Crystal Bridges is new, and its money comes from a built-from-scratch retail fortune, it’s not blinkered. It’s got entrepreneurial spirit in its blood. Last year, I wrote about Crystal Bridges’ new foundation, called Art Bridges. It promotes collaboration and collection-sharing among small museums. It’s new and doing good work breaking barriers that keep small museums from the exhibition circuit.

A few years ago, Crystal Bridges did something radical. It bought a 50 percent interest in the Alfred Stieglitz collection, a trove of Modernist art and African masks that Georgia O’Keeffe gave in 1949 to Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville. It was part of Fisk’s tiny art museum. Fisk tried to sell the art about 20 years ago when the school faced insolvency. Crystal Bridges’ partial purchase gave Fisk the emergency money it needed and kept the art in the public trust. The two institutions share it.

This is a new way of viewing acquisitions. It’s unnatural to most curators, directors, and boards to own half of something. As a point of pride, they want to own a work of art in its entirety. So, among other consequences, we have museums priced out of the art market. Shared ownership is one solution. As a practical matter, Crystal Bridges isn’t a big place. It has acquired the marquee collection and doesn’t need more superstar art. It might very well decide to support regional artists with acquisitions or do more part-ownership deals.

It doesn’t need to be like the MFA in Boston or the Met, with a vault filled with good art that it rarely shows. Its new foundation should support big, long-term collection-sharing projects in which the legacy, big-city museums, with acres of art in storage, share their works with museums in the South or Southwest that, for many reasons, weren’t part of the Gilded Age art-buying boom.

Crystal Bridges seems very serious about Native American culture and history. I know very little about tribes in the Southwest, but the history’s fraught, and building visibility for tribes in the region is part of Crystal Bridges’ mission. I’ll write more about this, but I hope it experiments with integrating Native American art, both art from the 19th century and today’s art, in its story of American art history. Until the last few years, Native art was put in anthropology studies, a disservice leaving great things to dwell among arrowheads and shards and at the mercy of academics for whom aesthetics is not a priority. I’ve always seen Native craft as American art, as have many artists. The curators, though, don’t have the expertise and, often, don’t seem to care to acquire it.

Crystal Bridges takes not a stab at integrating Native art, but a poke or a tickle that amounts to very little. It can do a lot more. The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa is a short distance from Bentonville. Its Native American art collection is one of the best in America.

I’d suggest a reinstallation of Crystal Bridges early-American galleries, which run to 1900 or so, placing Native art in a starring role with its Copleys, Hudson River landscapes, and Gilded Age portraits. The Gilcrease has some experience in this and has the art. There’s one collaboration that can change how people understand American art. A radical move, I know, but Sam Walton didn’t get rich by believing people who said, “Can’t be done.”