The Smithsonian’s Splendid American Art Museum, with a Few Quibbles

Some of its new acquisitions are booorrring and trivial, but its time-tested stars, in one of D.C.’s most beautiful buildings, still shine.

I   visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) at the end of my research trip to Washington. Both are in what was once the United States Patent Office, a splendid Greek Revival pile occupying an entire city block between 7th and 9th Streets and F and G Streets in the city’s Chinatown. SAAM specializes in American art in all media, while the NPG is our equivalent, though a work in progress, of London’s National Portrait Gallery. For different reasons, I enjoyed my visit to both. Today I’ll focus on SAAM.

I had multiple missions in mind. I saw Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass, SAAM’s delectable new exhibition about the revival of Venice’s tourism, glass, lace, and mosaic industries in the 1870s and 1880s. I’ll write about this show in two or three weeks. How could anyone not love an exhibition that begins with Salviati & Co. glass made on Murano?

SAAM is a wonderful place. I write this first as an art historian. As museums go, it’s got start-up spirit. It’s not a big place, though it does occupy what was once Washington’s biggest building, the Capitol excepted. It’s far from the most famous of the Smithsonian museums. It’s not on the Mall but on the edge of Chinatown. It’s only American art, and you’d think that would give it pride of place in Washington. Alas, culture isn’t on everyone’s mind here in the Swamp, and the National Gallery, filled with Rembrandts and Renoirs, is the jewel in the crown.

For years, though, SAAM was a powerhouse for smart, new shows. The West as America in 1991 is probably the most influential art exhibition ever done by an American museum. It took the iconography of the American West developed over the years, the West of Remington, Gunsmoke, and savage Indians fighting civilized cowboys and observed, with ample evidence, that it was not entirely thus, especially the civilized-cowboy part. American ABC, which dealt with childhood in early America, and American Art in the Civil War were broad, thematic, and fresh. These big-idea exhibitions, so hard to organize, brought an entirely new context to chunks of art whose meaning seemed settled. The museum also did retrospectives that essentially rediscovered John La Farge, Man Ray, Albert Pinkham Ryder, William H. Johnson, and Edmonia Lewis.

SAAM was the dynamic, resourceful motivator in collecting African-American art. It was the first art museum to focus on these artists. As a cause and approach, diversity in art collecting and scholarship started at SAAM. Then, it wasn’t a bean-counting, virtue-signaling racket. In the 1980s and ’90s, it was a thrill to discover new talent and new thinking. It was an adventure. SAAM got there first. Betsy Broun, the director, and a small staff were intellectual pioneers and entrepreneurs. Since SAAM was a peripheral place in the Smithsonian galaxy, she could do what she wanted, as long as she raised the money. I think Betsy invented modern philanthropy in Washington.

The Venetian glass might be a crowd-pleaser with serious intellectual content but, for SAAM, it’s an outlier. It seems quieter now. I missed SAAM’s Alexander von Humboldt exhibition only because the Smithsonian kept its museums closed, ostensibly because of Covid but, in truth, lockdowns make livin’ easy. It’s no surprise that the Smithsonian museums, run by the federal government, were the last museums in the country to take the Keep out, taxpayers sign off the front door. The Humboldt catalogue is great. Its Bill Traylor retrospective was a snooze. Good to have one or two Traylors on view but, in abundance, he suffers from sameness.

The museum is soon doing a big exhibition on women fiber artists. Been done before. It’s doing a show on views of New York. Been done before. Fighters for Freedom is a William H. Johnson show and “a tribute to African-American scientists, teachers, and performers and to international heads of state bringing peace to the world.” Booorrring. It did a show on Native American women artists. Been done before. A year or so before the Covid lockdowns, it took a show from the Kennedy Library — American Visionary: John F. Kennedy. It was a pot of Camelot dregs.

I looked at the staff list. It’s grown to be of Washingtonian proportions, and that means huge. And as far as I can tell, much of the staff is still working remotely. That means disengagement and ennui. There are 140 staff members and twelve departments. That includes a director, two deputy directors, and ten curators. I know SAAM has two locations, but it seems to have morphed into a bureaucracy.

Its new acquisitions, judging from what it promotes on its websites, look trivial and dank. Carolyn Crump’s BLM-4 is a textile a bit bigger than a potholder showing a figure wearing a Black Lives Matter mask and holding signs reading “Stop Killing Us,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and “Stop Police Brutality.” It’s crap, and they paid good money for it. Last year, the museum bought Sonya Clark’s Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know, a 180-by-360-inch cotton textile. “The dirty white expanse physically embodies the space racial injustice holds in our national subconscious,” SAAM’s website tells us. Clark is a mediocrity who has made race a business model. SAAM actually bought it. It’s not a good work of art, it takes a huge amount of space, and, 20 years from now, no one will care about it unless there’s a cotton shortage.

Stephanie Stebich is the director, in the job since 2017. I worked with her when she managed the curatorial department at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She came to SAAM after serving as the director of the Tacoma Art Museum.

All of these small quibbles aside, SAAM’s home to some of my most-loved works of art. It’s close to a comprehensive collection, and it’s got at least one of everything. It has moments of dazzling depth, too. I hadn’t been there in a few years, so I wanted to visit my favorites. I left happy, and relieved. Nary a peep suggesting that every dab of paint on every stretch of canvas, every chip from every chisel, cries systemic racism, microaggression, white supremacy, genocide, or a climate that’s cooking us all to cinders. Almost all the objects had no didactic labels, telling us only the artist, title, medium, and how it came into the collection. Less is more. What a relief. I’m sick of despot-curators telling us what they think a work of art means.

First, my visit to the old favorites. SAAM’s galleries are arranged chronologically with some allowance for theme. Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun, from 1963, one of his last paintings, is there. It’s one of the eeriest Hoppers, showing four sunbathers in what we’d call casual business attire in beach chairs on a patio set nowhere near a beach but in a prairie with a background of mountains. A fifth figure, a man reading a book, sits behind them. All are oblivious to one another. Frederic Remington’s Fired On, from 1907, is anything but deadpan. It’s a nocturne while the Hopper is made of stripes of bright colors in intense light; it’s frank and rambunctious. They’re not displayed near each other, but both are of the very highest quality.

Everything SAAM has on its walls is good. Whistler’s Valparaiso Harbor, from 1866, and, yes, that’s the Chilean Valparaiso, is lucid and serene. Whistler went to Chile to, as he said, “assist the Chilean cause” in a war against Spain. I’d be just as useless, and as needy, in Kyiv right now but wouldn’t have anything as good to show for my exertions.

SAAM started in 1829 as a collection assembled by a public-spirited citizen, John Varden, who believed Washington needed some culture. He opened his home to what he called the capital city’s first museum. Over the years, his art wandered to the Smithsonian, established in 1846, the Library of Congress, and the Corcoran, in business by 1869. Thought of by some as the national gallery of art, the Smithsonian saw it as a nuisance. It didn’t want to get into the high-culture business.

It wasn’t until 1906 that a remarkable court decision pushed the Smithsonian off the dime. James Buchanan’s niece had died, leaving her art to what she called the National Gallery of Art. Washington’s federal court of appeals ruled not only that the Smithsonian owned such a creature but that it needed to call it the National Gallery and act like it meant it.

This started a golden age. By then Washington was neither the frontier mud patch it was in the 1820s, nor the swamp with some paved roads, Ford’s Theatre, and a domed Capitol that it was in the 1860s. Multiple wars and the Gilded Age had made it an affluent, proper city.

SAAM got major gifts, among them exquisite white-marble sculpture, two sublime stained-glass windows by John La Farge, given in 1936 by his son, 100 works by Abbott Thayer, the New Hampshire eccentric and inventor of military camouflage, and more than 20 paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder.

The museum owns dozens of paintings by Henry Tanner, again, received as a gift. Tanner is one of America’s few and great religious painters. There’s a nice exhibition on view now at SAAM about his technique. Abraham’s Oak, from 1905, and a film-noir Salome, from around 1900. Faceless and slinky, Salome is the femme fatale for all seasons. John Twachtman’s Round Hill Road, from around 1900, is an Impressionist snow scene. Twachtman is a high-establishment painter working in a style that was derivative of French art. His snow scenes, though, are abstract and bewitching, not Rothko-in-white but on the edge.

These and many other gifts came mostly from local people. I looked through the alphabetized collection listing on SAAM’s website. It’s like many collections in small civic museums, mostly so-so but great things, too, and now and then a big surprise. It’s got a big, 2014 painting by Mark Bradford, but it’s one of his abstract paintings with letters. That’s not his best work. I love Bob Thompson’s work, so I was delighted to see that his Descent from the Cross, from 1963, is there. The Girl I Left Behind, Eastman Johnson’s 1872 tribute to women whose men have gone off to war, is an electric, romantic picture. I’d forgotten it was there. SAAM’s also got a Sargent portrait of Betty Wertheimer. It’s one of the ladies of this prominent London art family, and she looks like Ava Gardner ready for love.

My biggest shock was seeing Alexis Rockman’s Manifest Destiny, a 25-foot-wide painting depicting a future, post-apocalyptic Brooklyn, most of which is underwater. I displayed this painting at the Addison in 2004, the year it was created, and Rockman was the first artist-in-residence I hired. I wasn’t interested in his global-warming message but I like Romantic-era disaster paintings. It’s certainly got presence. Rockman gave as well as he got in teaching at Phillips Academy. SAAM bought it in 2011. Good work!

Thomas Hart Benton’s 22-footer Achelous and Hercules, from 1947, is a show-stopper. Achelous was the Greek and Roman god who controlled rivers. Taking the form of a bull, he battled Hercules, some accounts say over a woman, and emerged one horn short. Hercules had ripped it off and gave it to the naiads. They filled it with fruit and flowers, calling it a cornucopia, or horn of plenty. Benton painted it for Harzfeld’s, a department store in Kansas City. It’s an opus, as is Among the Sierra Nevada, California, a ten-footer by Albert Bierstadt from 1868. It’s installed in a niche draped by red curtains to make for a dramatic, cinematic presentation.

I would describe the collection as buoyant. The La Farge pair of windows, a dozen Victorian, didactic, over-the-top sculptures such as Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra, weird angel paintings by Abbott Thayer, and Frederic Church’s Aurora Borealis, from 1865, make for an idiosyncratic, edgy look. Then there’s Malcah Zeldis’s big Miss Liberty Celebration and Stagger Lee, by Frederick Brown, both from the 1980s. They’re big and brash. Walking through the galleries, I always think “that’s America.”

SAAM got hit by an 18-wheeler called Andrew Mellon, who, in the late 1920s, formed what became the National Gallery we know today. The NG belongs to the federal government, is not part of the Smithsonian, and benefited from Mellon’s immense buying power and his primary interest in European Old Masters. SAAM didn’t entirely get schmatzed but entered, again, a long period of quietude and marginalization. Its collection continued to grow in areas such as folk art and art by African Americans, bounties that the National Gallery and most other museums didn’t want. It’s one of SAAM’s smartest moves. It’s got great things in both areas.

I’ll write about the Renwick Gallery at some point. It’s part of SAAM and specializes in American craft. The Renwick is a separate building, near the White House, and built as a museum for the Corcoran. When the Corcoran built a new, bigger museum building, the federal government bought the Renwick, which opened in 1972 as the Smithsonian’s craft museum. In the world of museology, this was a radical event. American craft — and I mean such things as textile art, glass, turned wood, and ceramics — wasn’t considered museum-worthy, so having a splendid home in the Renwick was a coup for the artists who, mostly, were women or Native Americans and who, mostly, lived outside of New York. The Renwick does very good crafts exhibitions and a famous, yearly invitational show.

SAAM wandered in the desert for years before the Smithsonian fixed its sights on the Old Patent Office as a permanent home for SAAM and the National Portrait Gallery. The massive Greek Revival building was finished in 1865 though occupied in the 1850s. In L’Enfant’s plan of Washington, it was conceived as an anchor building halfway between the Capitol and what’s now the White House — but as a national church rather than a patent office. Patent Office it became, though, and with the proportions of the Parthenon, masonry vaults, skylights, and interior courtyards. Its Great Hall was, for years, the largest room in the United States. Lincoln’s second inaugural ball was there. America is a tinkerer’s and inventor’s paradise, so giving the Patent Office a palace made sense. Its spacious, dignified spaces made it perfect for a museum, too.

It’s one of Washington’s most splendid buildings. After an 1877 fire, its third floor was renovated in Victorian style, so there’s lots of polychrome tile and decorated columns. In 1932, the Patent Office moved. In the 1950s, what was by then an old, creaky behemoth was slated for demolition to make room for a parking lot. In 1958, it was transferred to the Smithsonian. SAAM and the NPG moved there in 1968.

By 2000, the building once again desperately needed an overhaul. SAAM closed and stay closed for six years. The roof leaked. Nets on the ceiling caught falling plaster. Masonry fell in chunks. The renovation, restoration, and repurposing of the Old Patent Office cost a bundle. Everything needed to be retooled. In terms of historic preservation, old tile, a sweeping double staircase, vaults, windows, and skylights needed expert attention. The building’s vast interior courtyard was enclosed by a lovely glass canopy, creating a space of Roman grandeur. With plantings, water features, seating, and beautiful light, it’s one of the loveliest, most welcoming spaces in Washington. The entire building is resplendent.

There were near-death experiences as costs soared from an initial estimate of $120 million to a final cost of around $280 million. Twenty years ago, that was shocking. I was a curator at the time. My colleagues and I wondered whether SAAM would ever reopen. Congress appropriated more money, but Betsy Broun is the most assiduous fundraiser, having evangelical passion and will and persuasive magic. She engaged Washington’s wealthiest and raised millions of dollars.

I loved SAAM’s hallway show pairing artists who were close friends, with one work by each artist. It’s an ideal, smart use of a space used for transit. It cleanses the visitor’s palate from the bustle of a busy city and sets the tone for the elegant experience the museum provides. Work by George Tooker and Paul Cadmus made for a pitch-perfect aesthetic experience. A nice Benton is juxtaposed against an early Pollock. Benton was Pollock’s art teacher in the late 1930s. They stayed in close contact until Pollock’s death in 1956. The best pairing is a poem by Frank O’Hara, who died in 1964, and Grace Hartigan’s hot-and-cold painting in his memory from 1966. Hartigan’s a very, very good artist who deserves a splashy, scholarly retrospective. SAAM should ditch the tired survey shows and do it.