J. Carter Brown Interview (page: 3 / 6) Director Emeritus National Gallery of Art	Print Interview

How many graduate students from Harvard Business School in those days were thinking of going into the arts

J. Carter Brown: In my day, I was the only one. I made my application on the basis that I wanted to go into cultural administration and in the nonprofit world. They took me in spite of that. Maybe they thought they could convert me. But, since then I understand that up to 20 percent of the business school class at Harvard are interested in the not-for-profit sector. So there's been a tremendous sea-change. They accept women too, and that's helped. They didn't in my day. And they don't let you do what I did, which was come -- bang! -- off from Harvard. You have to have worked.

I would have gotten more out of the business school if I had worked before I went there. But I had a lot more education than I had in mind in the history of art.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I did not major in history of art as an undergraduate, and that was on purpose, on the advice of a hero of mine, the former Director of the Metropolitan Museum, Francis Henry Taylor, who was just one of the most charismatic people. And, I went to see him and ask his advice about preparing for a museum career. So he said, "Well first of all, don't major in fine arts." I said, "What?" He said, "You'll be doing that for the rest of your life. You'll have to go to graduate school, you'll be deep into it. Get a broad cultural background, so that what you do after that all has meaning." And so, I majored in history and literature, which Harvard offered to a small percentage of the class, and which was a wonderful field. And, I took some art history courses, but very little. I really got my art history aboard later.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

What do you think your experiences overseas as a young man did for you?

J. Carter Brown: Oh, it changed my life. Being in a position where you don't take anything for granted any more, you have to understand what it is to be an American.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Europe, you know, every few feet there is some extraordinary visual or cultural experience. My mentor, Francis Taylor, said, "You've got to go to Europe and wash your eyeballs in the stuff." And it's true. He had this great phrase, he said, "A museum is a gymnasium for the eye. The stuff," he said, "that's in America has been filtered through dealers. It's only what's movable, what's fashionable at the time. In Europe you get things that are painted on the walls and they're not going to move, and you've really got to expose yourself to that." And now, of course, we have this global outlook that's important, because there's Asia to see. No one will understand a Japanese garden until you've walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now, there's no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

In any field there are many smart and talented people who do not succeed. Why do you think you succeeded?

J. Carter Brown: I was immensely lucky. I was at the right place at the right time, and I just had fortune smiling. That doesn't happen to everyone.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Timing is really everything. When I got to be Director, I got into the files, and I saw that if I had gone through with my plan to get my doctorate and wouldn't have been available to be hired as a lowly assistant to the Director at the Gallery at that time, and then groomed to be Director very quickly, my then-boss had had another person all lined up. The "ifs" of history, these are the roads not taken. If I had just said, "No, I'm sorry, I'm not available for a year," that would have been the end of a National Gallery opportunity. So, it is useful to be where the lightning is coming down at a given moment. And, I credit a lot of what's called "success," to just serendipity.

Weren't you also well-prepared?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. J. Carter Brown: I was immensely prepared. I was eleven years in studying after getting out of high school. I had a year in Europe studying with Bernard Berenson, and traveling, and learning German, and going to the Louvre Museum school, and later the Hague Art History Bureau. And, I had both the business school and this very rigorous master's at NYU Institute of Fine Arts, with this Germanic thoroughness, two-and-a-half years with a full-blown thesis, comprehensive exams in the whole history of art, and two language exams. And so, yes - and I'd had this fabulous opportunity growing up of exposure - but I'm interested in the inscription that is carved, apparently, over the lintel, the entrance of the institute founded by Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin: "Fortune smiles on those prepared to receive it." And, you know, the Bermuda Race in yacht racing, my father called it "the great Atlantic lottery," because where the Gulf Stream is, and what the weather is, is so fraught with accidental eventualities. And yet, when we were doing it, Carlton Mitchell won it three years in a row. And so, you know, there must be more to it than just luck.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

You have suffered some disappointments and setbacks too. How do you deal with that?

J. Carter Brown: It's tough. You lick your wounds, and you pick up and go on.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Talking of ocean racing, one of the best lessons I learned was the concept of the rhumb line, R-H-U-M-B. You lay down a course from Newport to Bermuda, and that's your rhumb line. And then for some reason, you get blown off course. And, a lot of people make the mistake of saying, "Oh, we've got to get back to the rhumb line." There's a new rhumb line. It's from where you are to where you're going. And, it's so important to be able to pick up and forget all that and say, "Okay, play it where it lays." This is the new situation.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

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