Muscle Men in the Museum

“Institutions of culture ha[ve] their own histories, . . . develop in unexpected directions and with unanticipated consequences, and . . . reveal traces of local experience as well as cosmopolitan ambitions.”¹ So wrote distinguished historian Neil Harris in the introduction to his 1990 collection of essays on the confluence between high culture, popular culture and the marketplace. Harris’ newest book, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience, inserts another critical element into the history of America’s cultural institutions: leaders who possess a prodigious work ethic. Melding his trademark skills of in-depth archival research, adroit storytelling, and an encyclopedic knowledge of American museum history, Harris has written a sweeping book about the ambitious museum director J. Carter Brown and his leadership of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) from 1969 to 1992. Harris interweaves Brown’s achievements with those of his two chief competitors: S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution and Thomas Hoving of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The result is a fascinating page-turner that centers on the professional rivalry between three blue-blooded men who muscled the museum field forward through their contemporaneous leadership of three marque institutions. Each of the book’s fifteen chapters can be read separately as articles about different aspects of Brown’s influence on the museum world, from acquiring art to commissioning architecture to organizing exhibitions. When read together, the stories told in Capital Culture make an important scholarly contribution not only to our understanding of these institutions’ place in American history but to the disciplines of museology, business history, urban studies, and cultural geography.

J. Carter Brown was born in 1934 into one of New England’s most prominent families, perhaps best known for their eponymous university. The Browns were connected by “family, taste, money and cultivation to a chain of intellectual and artistic circles,” from opera-star Enrico Caruso to modern architect Richard Neutra (p. 13). Carter was groomed from childhood to continue his family’s legacy in art patronage, education, and national affairs. During World War II, while his father served as assistant secretary of the navy and an influential member of the Roberts Commission, young Carter attended exclusive boarding schools, hobnobbing with the sons of other elites. After the war, with Europe in ruins, New York City grabbed center stage in the art world. America’s cultural aspirations bloomed as civic leaders were no longer content with their museums’ dusty hodgepodges of educational collections. Energetic dealers, intellectuals, and artists (many of them refugees) allied with America’s patrician families to upgrade museums as part of the nation’s newfound superpower status. Stating that he craved the “weighty permanence of museums in society,” Brown decided to pursue a career in art museums (p. 21).

Using “charm, family connections, youth and intelligence,” Brown schmoozed with a veritable Who’s Who of the postwar museum world, from art connoisseur Bernard Berenson to impresario directors like Francis Henry Taylor (Worcester Art Museum), Leslie Cheek (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) and John Walker (National Gallery of Art) (p. 30). In 1961, Walker hired Brown to serve as his personal assistant at NGA. The institution had been established during the Great Depression as a repository for the art collection of banker and former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. At the age of twenty-seven, Brown arrived in Washington D.C. at the same time as another dashing and Harvard-educated New Englander, John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy, Brown was “photogenic, articulate, a suave exotic amid the predictable bureaucrats jockeying for power in Washington” (p. 60). He immersed himself in the atmosphere of “Camelot” and “the embassy party circuit” (p. 365). Eight years later he took the helm of NGA.

Despite Brown’s belief in museums as beacons of stability, his tenure coincided with social and economic flux in the nation’s capital. Until the Kennedy and Johnson years, the District...