J. Carter Brown Interview (page: 4 / 6) Director Emeritus National Gallery of Art	Print Interview

Who else inspired you and motivated you as you were starting out? Teachers? Family?

J. Carter Brown: A succession of teachers, obviously. I think most of all my father is my hero. Just an extraordinary human being, with a great range, and a great gentleness. My mother was pretty spectacular too. But professionally, people like Kenneth Clarke -- Lord Clarke, as he became -- who did that Civilisation television series. When we showed that at the National Gallery, we caused a stampede. I mean there were traffic jams down Constitution Avenue. As soon as we got through the 13-part series we had to show it over again.

We gave the National Gallery Medal to Lord Clarke, and the day he came we recognized that we couldn't go through with the original plan of just having him appear on stage. So many people had showed up in the morning in the middle of the week that they went the whole length of the West Building inside the National Gallery. So I brought him in at the far end. As people recognized that he was coming in, they began standing up so there was this wave and this clatter of the seats scraping against the marble. By the time he got to the stage he was in tears. He writes about it in his autobiography. He said he was terrified. But it shows that people do get interested in culture if it's presented to them right.

Did you bring with you to the National Gallery a philosophy or an idea of how to present art and culture to the public?

J. Carter Brown: I feel it's important to keep the viewer in mind and not just be a top-down elitist and say, "Well here it is, and if you don't understand it, that's your problem." It also can be made fun. In exhibitions I brought my passion for theater in a little bit, because normally, a permanent collection does not occupy the dimension of time, and I think it shouldn't. I think that people can go in at any place and see anything at any moment. But an art exhibition which is only there for a while gives one an opportunity to offer the viewer an experience that is linear over time, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I had a lot of fun with the exhibitions at the National Gallery, working with this wonderfully talented team of designers and curators, and producing a kind of show out of it that would leave people changed. That was a lot of fun.

It was also a lot of work, because you had to get people to lend. But that could be fun too. There's a lot of travel involved, and a lot of jaw-boning, and a lot of disappointments. Doris Duke had a pillow which said, "The answer is maybe, and that's final." That was the story of our life borrowing art objects. They just would never commit one way or another. It was The Perils of Pauline over and over again. But it made the adrenaline flow.

You really reinvented the idea of what an art gallery or cultural institution can be. Did you meet resistance along the way?

J. Carter Brown: There is a kind of conservatism in the museum world or used to be.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In France the word for "curator" and for "conservative" is the same word. And, people like to do things the way they always were done. That's where my Harvard Business School training came in. One of the first things I did when I became Director was get rid of the desk that my predecessor had, which was this huge big desk with a high-back chair. And this little rickety chair by the side, for anyone who came to see him would come and sit straight up, sort of like a serf handling his cap. And, I got rid of all that. I got the (I.M.) Pei office to design a totally modernist interior, even when we were still in the West Building, and substituted a round table with five equal chairs that were swivel chairs. What it telegraphed was that we were all there equally to solve the problem, whatever it was, which was somewhere in the middle of the table. And, everybody could contribute and everybody, by the end of it, should buy in. And, this was just a very different management style, but it seemed to work.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

How do you deal with resistance, with criticism, of controversy?

J. Carter Brown: Well, I have a lot at the moment.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I've gone on, stayed on under my other hat as Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission. And boy, did we get it at the time of the Vietnam Memorial! I mean, I had Ross Perot in my office pounding the table! I knew that he'd sent in operatives to Iran. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. He wanted it his way. And, there was great brouhaha about that. Now, we have brouhaha about the World War II memorial. And, as of just a couple of days ago, that's all been ripped open again, and we've got to go to through more of these hearings where a small dissident group has ginned up a lot of complaint. And basically, it's a resistance to change. There's a nostalgia about the way things were, everybody thinks they were always that way. They forget that the Mall is a 20th century concept, and the Jefferson Memorial also had people lying down in front of bulldozers. But, it was built in 1941, and we have added and changed the Mall continuously, and this is only going to enhance the great design of the vista between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. And yet people just want to keep everything the way it is. And fine, sometimes it's better the way it is. But, we feel that this little Fine Arts Commission -- which are chosen to have some kind of credentials in the visual world -- has a lot of experience in visualizing what something's going to be. And, we think it's going to be okay.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

How do you deal with a Ross Perot banging on your desk?

J. Carter Brown: I think you have to develop a thick skin at a certain point.

I get these screaming editorials by people I admire saying how benighted the design is, and you just have to soldier on. I say, "Okay, everybody's entitled to an opinion."

J. Carter Brown Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6