A Clean Canvas

The Corcoran Gallery of Art's new director, Paul Greenhalgh, does not focus on cost: "If you worry about money first, you do cheap ideas. You shouldn't do cheap ideas." (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

"We are creating a priority list," he says. One decision has been to have the gallery remain closed Mondays and Tuesdays so the work can begin with a scrubbing of the columns on the first floor.

"We are clearly going job by job," he says, sidestepping the question of whether the work will require the $40 million projected in 2005.

By next year, Greenhalgh says confidently, the Corcoran's visitors will see a museum that has a different look and a different attitude.

"It will be the big takeoff year," he says. The schedule will include "Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939" now at the Victoria and Albert. The show will be the most expensive show the Corcoran has mounted. But, Greenhalgh says, it will achieve more than momentum and crowds.

"It is a very big-scale show, and it means most of our internal systems will have to change to be able to deal and cope with it. It is a way of reforming ourselves as we do it," he says. The cost doesn't scare him, he says.

"If you worry about money first, you do cheap ideas. You shouldn't do cheap ideas. You should do the best ideas, and raise the money once you have had the good idea," he says.

He has ideas for future shows, and they are a mix of topical subjects and celebrity names. He's thinking of bringing in the works of Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz in concurrent shows. He might feature a luminary such as Claes Oldenburg. And he hopes to have an exhibition on politicians in the election year 2008. When he scratched most of the exhibitions, he kept a show on Joan of Arc, which opens in the fall.

At the same time, he pledges to pay attention to the permanent collection that makes up the Corcoran's mainstream identity.

Getting into the Corcoran's storage vaults was an affirming surprise. "I was overjoyed and shocked that you could be the director of a collection of its depth," he says. "The issue is, how do you make the best use of your collection in the long term?" One idea "down the road" is to display some holdings elsewhere in the region.

In its holdings are sizable collections in five areas: historic American art, European art, contemporary art, photography and decorative arts.

"Each deserves a footprint, but at the same time we want to reserve a large part of the second floor for our temporary exhibits," he says. The temporary ones are the shows that keep the locals coming back and make it a destination for out-of-town visitors.

"It is very important to see our institution as a microcosm of the wider culture, I think," he says, coming back to the think-tank approach.

To accomplish even some of this agenda, the museum may need to reconsider the idea of an expansion. It was the desire to expand that led to the crippling impasse at the Corcoran last year.The fundraising for the Gehry wing stalled, and finally the idea imploded, resulting in embarrassment and chagrin. Greenhalgh went through a similar experience at the Victoria and Albert when it commissioned Daniel Libeskind to design an extension. It didn't happen.

"That's as parallel as parallel gets," says Greenhalgh. The criticism prepared him for any Washington firestorms, he says.

"Any time you did anything new they complained we were sacrificing our traditions. It seems to me the same parallel exists with the Corcoran. The idea that you would brand yourself with one message is, of course, the idiot's approach to museums," he says. "Museums are complicated places. There is no reason we can't be the edgiest institution and the most experimental over a period of years."

But the transformation he envisions will be an incremental one, at least at first. He plans to increase the courses available to students and public. He wants to increase the college's enrollment. He wants more property. For years, the Corcoran has been in negotiations to buy the old Randall School, a vast, rambling building in Southwest D.C. that is no longer being used as a school. He says he is planning to give the college and the gallery equal time and do more cross-fertilization than in the past.

"In reality they had drifted apart," he says. "We are an institution that is education-driven. The agenda of the college and the gallery are synonymous."

The definition of the Corcoran has always been a challenge to its leadership. Greenhalgh believes there are many Corcorans, many faces of the institution. And that's fine. Perhaps that is how the think-tank formula fits.

"There is no one thing that is the Corcoran," he says. "It is an approach."