SAAM's shortcoming: The collection

Yesterday: I wrote about the history of muddle at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

As I said yesterday, the Smithsonian spent $283 million to re-open the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. But even after spending that much money it has failed to present us with a coherent presentation of what American art is. This is not a 2006 problem, this is a many-decades problem. As the opening installation shows, the museum has not collected American art -- especially from about 1900 forward -- in anything resembling a thorough manner. The result is a collection more defined by its gaps than by its strengths.

Where is Charles Sheeler? Cy Twombly? John Marin? Cindy Sherman? Alma Thomas? Robert Smithson? Michael Heizer? Bill Viola? Joseph Cornell? Aaron Douglas? Millard Sheets? Brice Marden? Nathan Oliveira? Robert Ryman? William Wendt? Mabel Alvarez? Gottardo Piazzoni? Sam Francis? Lee Krasner? Jacob Lawrence? (That's him at left.) Jean-Michel Basquiat? Donald Judd? Dan Flavin? Louise Bourgeois? I think Helen Lundeberg and Romare Bearden were absent too. I could keep going and going and going. (If I linked to the artist that means he's in the SAAM collection, just not on view. And I don't think there are any mistakes here -- I spent several hours double-checking it. Artists on view in the racks at the Luce Center may be listed here.)

And if it weren't for loans from the Hirshhorn, the museum would also be short Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jasper Johns. And if there's one American museum that could (or should?) show a Norman Rockwell or a Maurice Sendak, this is it. But... nope. (And that list doesn't include any photographers because for some reason SAAM has only a couple photography hallways and really no photography galleries. Nearly every prominent American photographer is absent. What the...!?)

If this is our national museum's presentation of what American art is, then that classification should die. SAAM is unnecessarily heavy on white men. It is unnecessarily heavy on Easterners; There's a lot more Eastern landscape painting and impressionism than there is contemporary, comparable work from Texas, the midwest, or California. The museum's installations and selections fail to make a case for the reconsideration of any neglected artist, school, body of work, anything. (Why not re-examine, say, the Fort Worth Circle in part of a gallery?) SAAM is a marshmellow, a nice, attractive package of mostly fluff.

SAAM's faults reveal it for what it is: a sub-regional museum, a local place, really. That's why the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times didn't send their critics to review the museum's opening -- and why the Washington Post devoted an entire Sunday Arts section to it.

All that said, there are some works (and artists) I really enjoyed seeing at SAAM. There are 'best-level' examples from Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still and a few others. The folk art collection is one of the best in America. A too-tiny gallery of WPA painting looks better than you'd think. The gallery spaces themselves are fantastic and art is well-installed and well-lit. There are some things the museum does well. Over the next few days I'll highlight some of those.