Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience by Neil Harris

Abstract

Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience by Neil Harris. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013. 616 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). The universal survey museum has long been the subject of sustained attention among scholars. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutions like the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art emerged as instruments of nationalism, or as Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach famously argued, monuments to the state. (Art History 3.4, London, 1980) In their widely cited analysis of the form, Duncan and Wallach identified the National Gallery in Washington D.C. as America's last great universal survey In his latest book, Neil Harris examines J. Carter Brown's reinvention of the National Gallery. Once concerned with the role of The Artist in American Society (Chicago, 1966), Harris now offers an analysis of the museum director's role in American culture. In some ways, this book is a sequel to his first: offering a new perspective on the original question. The former tracked the changing role of the artist in the formative years of a new American nation. Capital Culture, on the other hand, tracks the changing role of the art museum in the same nation --but under much different circumstances. J. Carter Brown's tenure at the National Gallery corresponds neatly with the United States' emergence as a global power. Thus, Harris's institutional biography of this Washington D.C. museum is not just a story about the museum or Brown's career, but a human-scale view of U.S. history through the lens of the art museum. Brown was born in a nation seeking cultural legitimation via associations with Europe, but came of age in an era of Cold War cultural diplomacy. As Brown matured professionally, U.S. leaders aggressively asserted the uniquely American qualities of its citizens' artistic expressions. Simultaneously, Americans demonstrated a growing appetite for the arts. Harris identifies Brown as a key figure in this transformation, making high culture more accessible as New Deal policies and post-war affluence offered an entire generation new pathways to higher education and upward class mobility. Brown also witnessed--and helped shape--new methods of supporting the arts. By the time he retired, a complex of funding sources such as corporate sponsors, individual donors, and the nation's federal arts infrastructure replaced the resources once channeled directly from families like the Mellons and the Rockefellers. While J. Carter Brown is the central figure in this story, the book is also about Thomas Hoving, his archrival at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, S. Dillon Ripley, whose Harvard Ph.D. in Zoology informed his work at the Smithsonian--and contrasted with Brown's Harvard M.B.A. training, Paul Mellon, John Walker, and a host of others. The book's biographical form offers a glimpse of the elaborate social network in which these figures competed for professional success. When a young Brown accompanied then-director Walker on his quest to acquire Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de Benci in 1967, for example, Brown drew on his vast social connections to lubricate negotiations. At a long-awaited meeting with Prince Franz Josef II at his castle in Liechtenstein, Brown dropped the names of 'the Szechenyis, her daughter Countess Eltz, Kaiser Otto, the Emperor of Hapsburg,' and anyone else who might bolster his credibility (p. …