National Gallery Invades Baltimore Outskirts: Meyerhoff Outpost Planned

Claes Oldenburg, "Soft Drainpipe---Red (Hot) Version," 1967
Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, National Gallery of Art

It's a far cry from when Baltimore Museum director Adelyn Breeskin, through deft wooing, snatched the modern art collection of the local Cone sisters out from under the nose of the Museum of Modern Art's Alfred Barr, who had haughtily declared that the hometown museum simply wasn't good enough for such world-class holdings.

A very different scenario played out in 1987, when the National Gallery, Washington, announced that it been promised the important contemporary collection of Robert Meyerhoff (who had once been president of the Baltimore Museum's board) and his wife Jane. According to a NY Times article at that time by Grace Glueck, "Baltimore, which had held negotiations with the Meyerhoffs, was stung." Glueck quoted Baltimore's then director Arnold Lehman (now of the Brooklyn Museum) saying:

We made it very clear to the Meyerhoffs that we were prepared to do everything possible to serve their collection, even to the point of building a new wing.

Maybe he should have offered to maintain a portion of their collection, after their deaths, in their own home. That's what the National Gallery now says it is planning to do. Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Post reports:

The Baltimore County Council voted on Monday to allow the home to be used as a gallery....The National Gallery has agreed to maintain the collection and provide public programming. The annual budget will be provided by the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Modern Art Foundation, whose board has members from both the family and the gallery. The foundation will own the property, where the couple built several interconnected galleries for the large canvases.

It was bad enough when Robert Lehman persuaded the Metropolitan Museum to replicate rooms from his New York townhouse on its own premises to house his donated collection. Are we now going to see major collectors, emboldened by the Meyerhoffs' example, try to get their own homes adopted by major museums as monuments to themselves? With this joint-management structure (foundation owns and funds the facility; museum owns the art and runs the programs), what happens if the foundation and the museum disagree on future directions for art programs or capital needs?

This hybrid, the National Gallery's first satellite facility, will open to the public upon Robert Meyerhoff's death. (His wife died in 2004.) But because of local concerns about traffic near this Phoenix, MD, estate, visitation will be limited to only 125 at a time, the Post reported. Will this be any more economically viable than such restrictions proved to be for the Barnes Foundation?