BENTONVILLE — When Alice Walton announced plans six years ago to build an art museum in Bentonville, East Coast critics called it “the scheme of a populist tyrant.” She was, they said, “conscripting the greatest painters in American history to the service of her personal narrative.”
But some administrators at museums around the country have applauded the Wal-Mart heir’s efforts to bring significant pieces of American art to an institution where they will be showcased for the public. And they note the location continues a trend of American art moving westward as the country did.
“I’m sure she wasn’t surprised some people would say, ‘Why Bentonville?’” said Rachael Blackburn Cozad, director of the 17-year-old Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.
“A lot of people make the assumption that there isn’t a lot of art in the ‘fly-over’ states, but there really is. I think people just forget about it. When it makes the news, people take note.”
Walton will finally be able to show the art world what Eric Widing calls an “exceptional and unusually broad collection from Colonial objects to 20th-century paintings and sculpture.” Widing is head of the American art department at Christie’s in New York and one of Walton’s contacts at the auction house.
“I think it’s quite evident when you read the blogs and some of the press how provincial New Yorkers can be,” Widing said of the critics. “They think somehow New York is special.”
Largely self-taught on the topic, Walton is an astute collector, Widing said.
“She’s really a singular person,” he said. “And you can see very plainly in every category the focus and dedication she’s had in buying great objects.”
Blogger Lee Rosenbaum, who regularly contributes to The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, said Walton’s actions are compromising ethics and integrity in the art world.
“It’s not the fault of money-no-object collectors that connoisseurship, museum ethics and artistic integrity are under assault,” Rosenbaum wrote in December 2006. “They are entitled to do what they want with their megamillions. But the effect of their extravagant outlays, intended or not, may be to compromise culture, not enrich it.”
“The South Central region can use more art,” blogger William Poundstone wrote this year. “But there are other ways to address that than to establish a world-class museum in Arkansas’ 11th-largest city.”
Into The Spotlight
It was Asher Durand’s 1849 painting Kindred Spirits, Walton’s first announced acquisition in May 2005, that set in motion the East Coast criticism of Crystal Bridges. The painting depicts American artist Thomas Cole and American poet William Cullen Bryant looking across a vista in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The National Gallery of Art describes it as “a defining work of the Hudson River School,” and New Yorkers defined it as theirs.
It’s also the piece of art Andrew Walker, director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, cited as an example of Crystal Bridges’ successful effort to bring great art to greater attention.
“The thing that’s kind of wonderful is that the status of Kindred Spirits as a work of art that all communities can enjoy has been enhanced since it left its alcove in the New York Public Library,” Walker said. “It’s always been known, but now it’s really having this opportunity to be part of a major American art collection.”
“Kindred Spirits was hanging almost completely unlit and ignored for decades,” said Widing. “The fact is that it’s now in an important public institution, plus it’s being presented as the masterwork that it is. The library recognized that it was not the best steward for a significant piece of art.”
The New York Times reported in December 2005 that the sale of the painting to Walton from the New York Library ended suspense over whether the artwork would remain in New York.
When the library, citing a need to increase its endowment, offered the work for sale, it indicated that it would give New York institutions preferential purchase terms, the Times reported.
Widing of Christie’s auction house said similar “myopia” surrounded Walton’s efforts to acquire Thomas Eakins’ 1875 “The Gross Clinic,” which Widing said “hung at Jefferson College for over 100 years, and nobody ever paid any attention to it.” Philadelphians raised a ruckus when the painting went up for sale, demanding that it stay in Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts put together funding to make the purchase and keep the painting there.
“You have to remember that any of these pieces could have gone to a private collector,” the Kemper’s Cozad said. “More and more people at the higher end of the market are looking at art as an investment.
“Here we have a powerful buyer who is relatively new, with a lot of buying power, who made a choice to come to an area of the country not the most likely place for a museum. But any community will benefit from a museum. And it’s not as though she’s making a private collection that no one can see.”
Westward Ho
Just as Americans moved west, so has art — particularly American art — so a change in geography doesn’t change the cultural value of an art object, museum administrators said.
“In the 18th century, New York was a backwater. Philadelphia was the biggest city in the United States,” Widing said. “It wasn’t until the late 19th century that the institutions New Yorkers are so proud of came into being.
A group of industrialists was responsible for the creation of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Conn., the first museum to focus its collections on American art.
“This museum was started in 1903 because there were literally tens of thousands of people coming here from all over Europe,” said Douglas Hyland, the museum’s director. “The idea was to instruct and inspire and delight and entertain all of those people who might not know about the Hudson River School of art or about the expansion of the western territories or the Great Depression, the aspects of American history depicted in our paintings. It was intended to be a unifying and patriotic experience to come to our museum.”
Hyland said America is still evolving as a country and so is its art.
“I firmly believe that the treasures of this country should be spread out all over the nation,” he said. “There’s every reason for there to be an extraordinary art museum in Bentonville.”
Transformation
The keepers of America’s art collections also agreed that the story of Crystal Bridges is about the transformational power of art.
“Alice Walton had in her mind the idea to transform Bentonville, using the museum as the starting point,” said Cozad of the Kemper Museum in Kansas City.
The community is the focus of the museum’s mission, said Don Bacigalupi, Crystal Bridges’ director. Tourism and economic impact are “auxiliary benefits that will follow” with the institution’s success, he said.
That’s been true in Chattanooga, Tenn.
The Hunter Museum’s addition in 1975 helped jump-start the riverfront renaissance that also included the 1992 Tennessee Aquarium, the Creative Discovery Museum, a minor league ballpark and an IMAX theater, all in a pedestrian-friendly area filled with shops and restaurants. The $22 million expansion of the Hunter that opened in April 2005 cemented the museum as the anchor of a destination downtown. The museum welcomes an estimated 54,000 visitors a year.
Like Bentonville, Chattanooga has combined “a beautiful natural world with a community that embraces arts and culture,” but Daniel Stetson, the museum’s executive director, suggested the two communities might also share image problems.
“I think when some people think of Arkansas, they have a certain rural image, just like they might of Tennessee,” Stetson said. “Whatever those cliches or biases might be, that’s just background noise to the reality of what’s happening in Bentonville. In any successful community, the arts must be successful.”
This article was previously published in NWA Media on Sept. 4, 2011.