In a quarter of a century here, I’ve watched presidents, cabinet secretaries and powerful members of Congress come and go.
None had as much impact on this place as did J. Carter Brown, the blue-blooded Rhode Island aesthete and arts impresario who died last week at age 67 from a rare blood cancer.
A member of the very “old money” family that founded Brown University, he held a number of international arts and Washington establishment positions.
But his obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times because of his two most important posts: director of the capital’s National Gallery of Art from 1969 to 1992, and chairman of a little known but all-powerful federal agency called the U.S. Federal Arts Commission, which he led from 1971 until he resigned last month to undergo intensive treatment for his disorder.
Acting with a guiding rather than commanding hand (though he was not above a lot of backroom maneuvering and “old boy” networking), Brown was responsible for the once controversial but now beloved Vietnam War Memorial and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial. He had a say in the design of the Salt Lake City Olympic commemorative coins and the shape of what will soon be the Martin Luther King Memorial, at Washington’s famous Tidal Basin.
Brown came to the National Gallery at the age of 26 and quickly rose to rule it.When it opened in 1941, the gallery possessed only 125 paintings from the collection of founder Andrew Mellon. During his tenure, Brown added more than 20,000 artworks, including masterpieces from Renaissance painters as well as a $60 million Van Gogh and even a Jackson Pollock, though the latter was not precisely Brown’s cup of tea.
“One cannot simply draw a line at the 20th Century and say art stops here,” he once told me, on one of those personal tours of the gallery’s vast holdings he enjoyed conducting.
One of his favorite acquisitions was a small, 1580 sculpture by Giovanni Bologna called “Venus and Cupid.” He had been looking for years for a centerpiece for the gallery’s garden court fountain and came upon the work while traveling through Europe, managing to buy it as a simple collector and not as a major museum director with millions to spend.
Showman and scholar
He added the gallery’s ultramodern, sharp-edged, I.M. Pei-designed East Building, overcoming its deficiencies as an exhibition space with clever displays and a showman’s panache.
For a mammoth Rodin show, he had various-sized copies of Rodin’s famous sculpture of Balzac placed throughout the building’s huge atrium.
For an exhibition of art from Japan’s Daimyo culture, he had an actual tea house erected on one level and a Japanese no theater on another.
As much showman as scholar, he staged mammoth extravaganzas, such as the 1985-1986 “Treasure Houses of Britain” exhibition, which drew Prince Charles and Princess Di to the gallery. His last major opus, “Circa 1492,” marking the 1992 Quincentennial of Columbus’ voyage of discovery, featured art from that period from every quarter of the planet.
Brown advised Jacqueline Kennedy in her now famous transformation of the White House into the Federalist museum it is today and acted as arts adviser to other first ladies, including Hillary Clinton (though their tastes did not coincide).
More than any other individual, save Kennedy Center founder Roger Stevens, Brown was hugely instrumental in elevating Washington culturally from southern backwater to world center.
Kings and queens came. Visiting artists — Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein — were themselves honored as royalty.
And Brown’s glittering black-tie dinners opening exhibitions outshone even Nancy Reagan’s White House state dinners.
An anomaly in Washington, where even Republican Senate leaders like to play “the common man,” the effortlessly patrician Brown never ever hid the fact that he was a high-born, supremely educated, Eastern-establishment aristocrat with ties to the world’s high and mighty.
In nearly 20 years, I never once encountered him in anything other than a Saville Row-type English tailored suit, a tuxedo (one of his was velvet) or white tie (with decorations, of course, including Commander of the British Empire and French Legion of Honor).
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His two marriages were blueblood: Constance Mellon Byers, 1971-1973, and Pamela Braga Drexel (wed in Westminster Abbey), 1976-1991. With him when he died was his fiance, Anne Hawley, director of Boston’s socially pre-eminent Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Brown was elfin thin, unabashedly effete and had a disconcerting habit of rolling his eyes back under his eyelids in the midst of comment and thought. But he was a gentleman of the Oscar Wilde school (“a gentleman never insults, except on purpose”) and treated everyone, from lowly museum visitor to head of state, with the same degree of civility.
He was a visionary, doing pioneering work with Bill Gates, among others, to bring computer technology to the display of art. He created the first lastingly successful cable television arts network (Ovation). He led studies into the relationship of creativity and mental illness. He was a master at extracting funds from rich arts donors and congressional powerhouses alike.
An early exit
No one knows why he left the gallery when he was only 57. It’s said he wanted to become head of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex.
But, following tradition, the post always went to a scientist (though now it’s led by a highly controversial former home mortgage executive).
Brown was a uniquely diligent chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, which has life and death say over virtually all design and construction in the capital. He paid as much attention to murals for the sides of an inner city underpass as he did to great monuments for the Mall.
Cheered and criticized
It was Brown’s back-room hand that got the site of the much troubled national World War II Memorial moved from a thick grove of trees by Constitution Avenue out to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial’s famous Reflecting Pool, an action cheered by the war’s aging veterans but fiercely criticized by newspaper editorialists, architects and preservationists throughout the country.
Curiously, Brown had before gotten into big trouble with some former U.S. Marines in Congress by allowing the Air Force to build a memorial near the Marines’ famous Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington, Va. When it was discovered from transcripts of Fine Arts Commission proceedings that he had once described the Iwo Jima statue as “kitsch,” there were calls for his firing. They died down when a commentator suggested it was unmanly for Marines to be so bothered by a little word like kitsch, but Brown was clearly stung.
So the World War II veterans will have their memorial, on the most prominent patch of ground in the nation. Brown saw to it that the original, rather monstrous design was scaled way back and promised that we would come to love it.
Maybe so. But it was his decision, not ours.