Smithsonian American Art re-opens, but why?

The Smithsonian spent $283 million to re-open the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. You'd think that after spending that kind of money, that SAAM would present a rationale for its existence, that it would make a case for what American art is and why American art is a conceit worth considering within the context of broader art history.

Nope. Not even close. This month's re-opening of SAAM is the most disappointing museum re-opening in recent memory. (True: I haven't seen the new High.) Quite simply: If there's a reason for SAAM to exist, I don't know what it is. They don't seem to know either. That's been the museum's problem for 70 years.

In the beginning SAAM's mission was pretty clear: Paul Mellon had banished American art from what was then called the Mellon Gallery, which was being built on the National Mall. (Today, of course, we call it the National Gallery.) New Dealers thought that the ideas behind the Mellon Gallery, from its Eurocentrism to its neo-classicism, was typical of wealthy, elitist, entitled Republicans (such as Mellon).

So led by the New Deal's art czar, Edward Bruce, progressives wanted to build a new museum of modern art called the 'Smithsonian Gallery of Art.' It would show the American art that Mellon disdained and it would provide a place for living American artists to exhibit. The feds had lots of art to show: Throughout the New Deal the federal government had acquired a trove of American art, especially art funded by New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration. Eventually, so went the shared optimism of Bruce and his pals, in decades or centuries the achievements of those Americans would come to rival European art.

In 1937, Bruce, joined by the chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission Frederic A. Delano, marched up to Capitol Hill to sell the idea. "In Paris, for example, they have their Luxembourg Gallery, and works of art graduate into the Louvre later," Delano told a House committee by way of explaining how America's two national museums would relate to each other. Delano also reported that his uncle, FDR, was "quite enthusiastic" about the idea. 

While Delano was supportive, the project was Bruce's baby. No man of his generation did more to support art and artists than Edward Bruce. (A woman, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was the other American who matched Bruce's focus on modern art.)  "I think we are building something like they had in the Renaissance, and, of course, I have dedicated myself to it," Bruce told the House.

Congress, at first anxious to be seen as empowering an American-led Renaissance, went along. But because of a battle over the museum's building -- a pioneering modernist design by Eliel and Eero Saarinen -- the museum was never built. (The project re-gained some traction in 1939 but it was derailed by the need to pay for what became World War II.) Eventually the museum ended up off of the National Mall.

Bruce's drive to create an American national gallery left behind one important document: the Saarinens' design, which would have been the most progressive American building of its day. The model for the building, commissioned by Congress and made by two of the Saarinens' students (you may have heard of them: Charles and Ray Eames) is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Unfortunately it's not online.)

When SAAM re-opened, it chose not to exhibit the Saarinens' model. As we'll see in my next post, it would only serve as a sadly perfect introduction to dozens of galleries of unfulfilled potential. (I'll have daily posts about SAAM all week.)