Museums Reopen to a Brand-New View

An energetic visitor could see about 5,000 works when the building reopens today. By comparison, the National Gallery of Art, the city's most famous art museum, has 2,973 on display.

Throughout the building, 588 windows have been replaced and outfitted with special filters to let light enhance the art but not damage it.

The museums have added a 346-seat auditorium. At American Art, the staff has installed open storage galleries -- a series of glass cases and drawers jammed with thousands of works from the museum's considerable overflow, works that would otherwise be in the museum's Maryland warehouse.

There's also an important change at the Portrait Gallery. It will continue to focus on pictures of "significant" Americans, but the rules about who qualifies have changed. "No longer will the person have to be dead enough, no longer 10 years," says Director Marc Pachter. In fact, subjects need not be dead at all. So there are pictures of Tom Wolfe and Hillary Clinton in addition to Babe Ruth and Marilyn Monroe.

And the building has a new name: the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. The name comes from the late media entrepreneur Donald Worthington Reynolds; the foundation he established in Las Vegas gave $75 million to the project.

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The journey to today's block party was not easy. Delays, infighting and stagnant fundraising plagued the project.

Originally, the museums were thinking small. Replace the wiring. Add new windows. Upgrade plumbing. Fix the roof. Steam-clean the columns.

When Lawrence Small took over in 2000 as head of the Smithsonian, he took a personal interest in the historic structure. He wanted a top-to-bottom rehabilitation. The result reshaped much of the interior. There will be 20 percent more gallery space. American Art will have 90,000 square feet and the Portrait Gallery 60,000 square feet.

The configuration also represents a peace accord between the two museums. They were separate and unequal before, and they squabbled publicly before the closing over one plan that had the Portrait Gallery restricted to the first floor and occupying only one-third of the space. Eventually, the real estate was divided according to what art fit best on each floor, the directors have explained amicably. For example, the third floor, with the highest ceilings, got the contemporary American art, which tends toward large canvases.

The layout is practical, says Pachter.

The building is a vast rectangle, covering two city blocks, and sorting through the galleries will be something akin to memorizing the aisles in a Wal-Mart.