J. Carter Brown Interview (page: 2 / 6) Director Emeritus National Gallery of Art	Print Interview

Looking back on those early years, were there any books you read that were especially important to you?

J. Carter Brown: When I was 14 or 15, we had a wonderful history teacher at school, and I remember Arnold Toynbee made a tremendous impression. I remember that sense of "Enough, Too Little and Too Much," these great generalizations about why some civilizations made it instead of others, where it was too hot or too cold. Great concepts that were pretty challenging.

However, there was no art history taught there, but I did run across a book of Flemish painting, and I sort of turned the pages and really fell in love with that. Then I had a fabulous opportunity which was to take a gap year in England because my parents said, "You're pretty young to go to college. Why don't you just do something else?" That opened me up to the wonderful opportunities to spend a year at Stowe House in Buckingham, England.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Stowe School - it was the perfect place to go because it was fairly recent compared to some of those hide-bound English schools. So to come in at the top, it was okay not having been through the whole system. And, it was set in the most gorgeous country house in Britain. I mean there was the South Front by the Brothers Adam, the original, by Vanbrugh and these great architects, and one of the fabulous parks that Capability Brown designed, making a revolution in landscape architecture. And this whole concept of these houses as vessels of civilization really gets to you. You absorb it through the pores. And, I had a wonderful experience being out of my own country and understanding you've got to be answering all the questions everybody says. Anything that happens in America, you're responsible. And, I think it's the most broadening thing you can do. My daughter has just had a fabulous time by having a year in France as a junior in high school, and it's changed her life; she's completely opened up, and I highly recommend to people to get time out of their own country. It just makes all the difference.

Then I came back to the United Sates and...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Harvard offered me to skip freshman year, and I thought that wasn't the point. And so, then when I was in a closer range to my classmates, I was a happy camper. God! I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, and there were kindred spirits there. I was in dramatics, I was president of the Harvard Glee Club -- which was the nearest thing to a professional organization -- as an undergraduate. We sang as the chosen chorus in those days of the Boston Symphony. We toured. We sang in Carnegie Hall, we recorded with RCA and won the Grand Prize for our Berlioz, sang all the great literature -- the Bach B minor, and the Passions, and Beethoven. I mean it was a fabulous opportunity. Three rehearsals a week, 50 concerts a year, and then the final summer a European tour, which was the first time since right after World War I that they'd done it. So, we were embraced with open arms by the Europeans, and we sang for the Pope in St. Peter's, and in Royal Albert Hall, and the Music Festival in Holland, and then Berlin over the radio. That was very rewarding to be there with a purpose, not just rubbernecking. We really felt needed and doing something for America and for Harvard, and also for ourselves.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

I take it you were a good student in college, too.

J. Carter Brown: I managed to get a summa from Harvard. That was kind of exciting to be up there on that stage with eight other people representing the whole class, and there wasn't grade creep in those days. But again so much is luck. I got a wonderful teacher who put me onto a text -- there's only one copy in the world, which is in the Treasure Room of the National Library in Paris -- of a poet who had been overlooked by generations of French who got into classicism. This guy was a shaggy, baroque poet, rather like the British at the time. So it was fun to do an undergraduate thesis that really was breaking new ground in scholarship. That was very rewarding.

Was there any doubt in your mind about what you were going to do with your life?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. J. Carter Brown: I didn't know what channel I would follow to carry out this idea of cultural administration. But, it was very simple. I didn't have enough talent to do any one thing superbly well. I couldn't draw. I wasn't that musical, although I've sung all my life in choruses. I wasn't that good an actor. I didn't do math, and didn't do the visual expression that it would take to be an architect, although I loved architecture. And, I wasn't going to be a poet. And, I wanted to achieve, so I figured the solution is to combine something so you can get a niche that other people haven't got. So, I would go into the arts from an academic point of view, and I'd combine that with a business school degree. And then, I could market myself as a kind of cultural administrator, a kind of midwife for culture, and someone to arc the connection between an audience and the work of art, or of the arts. And so, that was a career objective that I carved out for myself as a kid.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was driving from the station in Washington, home to Georgetown. My father was working in the government, and I think I must have been 12 years old. I remember it was raining. We passed the National Gallery, and it was -- that wonderful pink marble in the rain it gets very rich rose, and... I remember looking up and saying to my parents, "That's the kind of job I would like to have some day." Now, little did I know that I would actually be Director of that museum. But I felt that institutions had the stability to bring the arts to people, and perhaps art museums were the most stable because theater companies come and go, and there's a lot of risk in the various performing arts and it's sort of ephemeral. But, there's something wonderfully permanent about those collections in art museums, and then you can use that as a base to bring in other art forms.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

We had performing arts at the National Gallery. We have our own orchestra, one of the only museums that does have free concerts every week. We would bring dance groups in to relate to our Munch show or whatever. And then we had outreach. Our education system went out and reached, in my day, 80 million people a year. So out of this institution one had a kind of base, and that seemed to make sense.

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