I found these buttons that I picked up at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1996. It was a cold October night when Amy, Tom, and I passed through the striking lion sculptures to go inside the museum and enjoy its collection of American art dating back to the 1800s.
We couldn’t do that now. After years of grappling with financial problems (I can’t help but wonder if some of those might have been avoided if the museum hadn’t lost a large bequest due to its part in the Mapplethorpe scandal in 1989), the collection’s fate is now in the hands of the National Gallery of Art and the school is being absorbed into George Washington University. Eventually the museum plans to reopen with a smaller gallery space that will feature rotating exhibitions from its collection chosen by curators from the National Gallery.
I’m lucky to have seen it when I did.
The sad thing is, as a graduate of GW, I am dismayed they have influence over the direction of the school, but at least they don’t have the collection. I remember a great number of huge mountain landscapes at the Corcoran. At the time, I remember thinking they looked like paintings my dad liked, and therefore couldn’t be fine art. Now I suspect that amount of wall space is too precious for those paintings to be displayed with similar effect anywhere else. I was happy to hear Detroit’s museum is safe.
Yeah, some of those massive paintings were great displayed that way, since the artists wanted to convey the sense of vastness, of space, of early/frontier continental USA.
I was talking the other day to someone about Detroit who agreed with me–it’s going to roar back with a vengeance, and I hope much of what is good about it will have been preserved. You led me to go read about how the collection was very nearly dismantled to pay off the city’s debt–a shortsighted solution.