A Scholarly Patina

Fortunately, the catalogue published to accompany the newly reinstalled collections makes a solid effort. It is denser than most, offering details about historical context, materials and religious usage. Reading it in the museum is recommended. And Dumbarton is the rare museum that is quiet enough and unhurried enough that one can actually look, read and look again, without distractions.

Although the so-called museum experience has been improved throughout, with better lighting, ramps and elevators, and elegant presentation of the art in transparent Plexiglas cases, the place where Dumbarton comes together in all its glorious contradiction is Philip Johnson's wing, which houses pre-Columbian art. Johnson designed the extension in the early 1960s. It consists of eight circular spaces with floor-to-ceiling glass windows, arranged in a circle around a fountain; light floods the space, which particularly flatters the gold artifacts. And the gardens surround you on all sides.

The pure "beauty-ness" of the place is dazzling. One is greeted at the entrance by an Aztec stone mask mounted on an almost invisible Plexiglas stand. It seems to hover in space, invitingly open to be touched (if you dare, and you dare not because the guards are watching), or worse, bumped into. Like most of the other pieces in the pavilion, it has an almost ethereal presence. Gold jewelry, seen against the glass, seems to be floating in the trees.

Unlike the Byzantine collection, these pieces have been thoroughly decontextualized by their arrangement and by Johnson's architecture, which flatters them into glorious nonsense. Ceremonial objects, decorative pieces, jewelry, carved bowls for chocolate are converted into pure, almost meaningless beauty. Johnson, canny as always, seems to mock the basic circularity of museums devoted to things that are outside the parameters of the Western aesthetic tradition: Are they here because they're art? Or are they art because they're here?

And so you circle about, looking at other people circling about just like you, and you begin to question the whole premise of museums, and collecting, and even beauty. What impulse drove the Blisses to want Flemish tapestries, Mayan limestone panels and gold reliquaries? And whatever it was, is that impulse all that different than the one that drives squirrels to lay in nuts for the winter? Or is it even more degraded -- acquisitiveness not for survival, but purely for the sake of acquisitiveness?

No wonder they wanted their home and their collections to have some scholarly importance. The scholarly element is a kind of benediction on human rapaciousness, it purifies it and elevates it.

It is good to have the old museum back, looking fresh. Dumbarton is essential to Washington. But no other museum in Washington feels so emphatically private, so uncertain about what face it wants to put to the world. The public is invited in to admire and to covet and to wonder what it must be like to be a Bliss, blissfully surrounded with the best that money can buy. You can almost feel the old lady heave a sigh a relief as you leave: There they go, the common rabble, who will never possess these objects as I once did, and as my scholars yet may.

Dumbarton Oaks Museum, on 32nd Street NW between S and R streets in Georgetown, is open 2-5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. It is closed on federal holidays and Christmas Eve. For more information, see http://www.doaks.org.