By MARSHA MERCER
In a noisy, fast and
often vulgar world, the Freer Gallery of Art on the National Mall is a refuge
of quiet beauty.
Since it opened in
1923, the Italian Renaissance-style building with its lovely central courtyard and
outstanding Asian and American art collections has invited visitors to slow down
and look.
That’s just what
industrialist Charles Lang Freer intended.
“The interior of this
building shall be arranged with special regard for the convenience of students
and others desirous of an opportunity for uninterrupted study,” he wrote in his
letter offering his art to America. “No charge shall ever be made for
admission.”
Freer’s vision was extraordinary,
especially because he had to leave school at 14 to work in a cement factory. He
made his fortune in railroad cars and became a collector and a connoisseur of
Asian art.
When the Freer Gallery
closed in January 2016 for nearly two years of renovations, I worried the urge
to modernize might ruin its timeless elegance.
Happily, most of the
$14 million in renovations were not visible when the Freer, and the Sackler
Galley that adjoins it, reopened Oct. 14.
Such things as the heating,
cooling and humidity control systems were replaced and the Freer’s auditorium updated
for telecasting. Carpets were removed and floors
returned to the original polished terrazzo. And, of
course, there’s now an app.
The museum itself is a
work of art “where we hope we’re encouraging slow looking,” Julian Raby,
director of what’s now called the Freer/Sackler, told reporters earlier this
month.
Not quite 400,000
people a year visit the Freer and fewer visit the Sackler, an underground trove
of Asian art that opened in 1987. A visitor rarely feels jostled, though he or
she may have to dodge selfie-takers in the Freer’s Peacock Room.
The lavishly painted
and gilded room was once the London dining room of ship owner Frederick
Leyland, who hired James McNeill Whistler to add a few decorative touches in
1876. Leyland then left town, thinking the work was nearly finished.
The artist painted the
room to a fare-the-well, and the angry owner would pay only half the
agreed-upon price. Whistler insisted on finishing the satirical mural on one
wall -- a pair of fighting peacocks he called Art and Money that symbolized his
rocky relationship with his patron.
Freer later bought the
room and had it reassembled in his home in Detroit. At the museum, the Peacock
Room looks as it did there, with Freer’s ceramics from China, Korea, Japan and
the Muslim world on the shelves.
Freer wanted not just
to show what he called the points of contact between art of the East and West
but how they unite us in a universalist sense of beauty, Raby said.
“Art, in other words,
as a vehicle for empathy.” he said.
Today we think of the
Smithsonian and art as a natural combination, but when Freer offered thousands
of art works to the Smithsonian in 1905, the Board of Regents balked. The Smithsonian
was about science, not art.
A committee of
regents, including inventor Alexander Graham Bell, took the train to Detroit to
see Freer’s collection. Bell brought along his daughter, Daisy, an art student. She was studying with Gutzon Borglum, the
sculptor who later carved Mount Rushmore.
“The four regents are
men of broad education, wide experience, and of unquestioned judgment, but what
they do not know about art would fill many volumes,” Freer wrote a friend,
according to “Alexander Graham Bell,” a biography by Edwin S. Grosvenor, Bell’s
great-grandson, and Morgan Wesson.
Daisy helped convince
her father Freer’s holdings were worth having. Then President Theodore Roosevelt
intervened.
“It is impossible to
speak in too high terms of the munificence shown by Mr. Freer in this offer,”
Roosevelt wrote the board. “The offer is one of the most generous that ever has
been made to this government, and the gift is literally beyond price.”
After a year, Bell
made the motion that the regents accept Freer’s gift, and, fortunately for us, it
passed unanimously. The Smithsonian would have its first art museum.
There’s never been a
better time for slow looking, and the renovations have only enhanced the
experience. See you at the Freer.
©2017 Marsha Mercer.
All rights reserved.
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