Doing Their Own Thing

Some museum-goers won't be happy with this cheery approach: There's not much to encourage sober contemplation of important works of art. But curator Joaneath Spicer argues that the downside is outweighed by the pleasure and historical insight the installation gives the average visitor. On a recent weekday afternoon, the new Flemish gallery was mobbed with enthusiastic school-age kids. Their teachers and parents seemed to be having fun, too.

The Walters reinstallation -- titled "Palace of Wonders," to sound more like a temporary show -- is as grabby as the special exhibitions it now competes against.

Other permanent collections have joined that competition. This fall the Corcoran Gallery of Art launched a touring show of its best American holdings. But before sending the exhibition across the country, the museum installed it in its own galleries. Many of the pictures are the same ones you'd normally see there, but they've been gathered together under a catchy title -- "Encouraging American Genius" (from the wording of the Corcoran's 130-year-old mandate) -- and given the kind of elaborate display more often reserved for blockbusters.

The Phillips Collection has done the same thing, only in reverse. Curators there sent "Masterworks From the Phillips Collection" out on tour four years ago, during a renovation that's just coming to an end. In April, the pictures will come home again. But the museum is not simply hanging them back up on various walls, as it might once have done. This time it's keeping them together for a while as a show, now retitled "The Renoir Returns."

Lockheed Martin recently announced that it had chosen "The Renoir Returns" as the show that will launch its five-year, $1.5 million sponsorship of the Phillips's special exhibition program. It's rare to get that kind of corporate sponsorship for an open-ended display of works in a permanent collection.

Jay Gates, director of the Phillips, explains that over the past 40 years museums have been "substantially reorganized" by the phenomenon of the special exhibition. "Where's the real front door of the National Gallery?" he asks. "It has in fact changed." For many visitors, Gates feels, that front door is now the East Building, which opened in 1978 primarily to house the splashy exhibitions the National Gallery had pioneered. The permanent-collection spaces in the West Building, where the gallery's world-famous Old Master holdings can be found, are now almost an afterthought for many visitors. A room of stunning Renaissance paintings by Titian, the Venetian genius who just about invented the use of visible brushstrokes, can sit almost empty.

"Will the National Gallery ever have an exhibition more important than its collection? Will we ever have an exhibition more important than our collection? No," Gates says. But with great institutions like the National Gallery leading the way, "museums have evolved from one form of species into another."

Gates, who recently turned 60, cut his teeth in the 1970s as a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, long known for its rare dedication to a substantial permanent collection. Like any sane art lover, however, he is a fan of special exhibitions. When they're any good, they give a fantastic opportunity for anyone, expert or novice, to enjoy and learn about the artworks on display.

In 2000, when the Phillips hosted an exhibition on Honore Daumier, the 19th-century French painter and caricaturist, it sparked new insights and admiration in anyone who caught the show. But that special-exhibition experience, where works of art come "packaged" around themes and art-historical ideas, needs to be balanced by the more intimate, exploratory thrill that comes from getting to know a museum's own holdings. Says Gates, "More attention needs to be focused on permanent collections, where people can develop long-term relationships with works of art, and get to know them intimately." (As Brougher pointed out, that's also crucial to training the young artists he may someday collect for the Hirshhorn.)

The problem is that museums have taught the public that going to an art institution is mostly about checking out whatever special exhibition it has up.

Art, that is, has become a high-energy, must-see "occasion," like a hot film or a big-time Broadway show. It's part of the entertainment rat race, rather than offering a contemplative experience in contrast to that rush. Museums have got their public hooked on special exhibitions, and now they're stuck having to cater to the speed freaks they've created.

The museums are hooked, too.