Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis
in the nation’s capital, in the museum world, and in cultural diplomacy circles. Neil Harris’s new book Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience charts the career of this administrator, a power broker who negotiated the international worlds of arts, politics, and commerce and placed the National Gallery at the forefront of innovation in exhibition, sponsorship, and visitor services. In the eyes of the press and the public, Brown, one of the superstar museum directors of the 1970s and 80s, came to embody the National Gallery. The relationship between the individual and the institution and how both developed in the context of postwar shifts in funding, international relations, and cultural heritage are at the heart of Harris’s book. The National Gallery is an apt case study for the drastic changes in American art museums in the postwar period: it embodied the move from specialization and connoisseurship to public appeal, as well as the democratization of the arts in a cultural context of heightened public interest and increased funding, first, from the government and, later, from corporations. Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor of History and Art History Emeritus at the University of Chicago and an accomplished historian who has written about the complex relationship between individuals, institutions, and the larger culture, is well suited to this ambitious project. Like P. T. Barnum, who is perhaps Harris’s most notable subject, J. Carter Brown was a larger-than-life personality who was both a product of his particular cultural context and someone who changed it significantly. Although the trajectory of the National Gallery is emblematic of many of the larger changes to the postwar institutional landscape, it was and remains somewhat idiosyncratic: a museum with sometimes complicated ties to the federal government, as well as to the neighboring Smithsonian Institution. Although Harris’s focus is on Brown and the National Gallery, he includes two chapters on Brown’s counterpart S. Dillon Ripley, the longtime secretary of the Smithsonian, who shared with Brown a patrician background and a commitment to opening up museums to scholars and to the public. Likewise, New York’s Metropolitan Museum and its director Thomas Hoving—both a competitor and a collaborator throughout Brown’s tenure in Washington—often appear in Harris’s narrative. Chapters are loosely chronological and are, for the most part, organized around the signature projects undertaken by Brown: the acquisition of new pieces, such as Da Vinci’s Ginerva de’ Benci; the planning and construction of the National Gallery’s modernistic East Building; the cultivation of new sponsors and partners; and, above all, the blockbuster exhibitions that defined the National Gallery for much of the postwar period. Each chapter highlights a different part of the exhibit process, laying bare the intricate machinations necessary to mount shows such as The Treasure Houses of Britain and Circa 1492, which required international negotiations, fundraising, and complex installation by Brown and his colleagues. Brown’s skills at networking and diplomacy and his position at the center of cultural affairs are highlighted in a chapter on his longtime work with Washington, DC’s Commission of Fine Arts, presiding over difficult debates regarding the Vietnam War Memorial and other issues. Harris has used a rich archive to build his history, from the personal and professional papers of Brown, Ripley, and others at the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, and other institutions, to extensive interviews with Brown’s family, friends, colleagues, and contemporaries. He also makes use of journalistic sources. A subtheme of many chapters is the tension between Brown’s Washington, DC, and the New York of the Metropolitan Museum, and Harris’s perceptive analyses of reviews and reporting in the New York Times and Washington Post give us a sense of how critics and observers were thinking about the developments at both institutions. Harris’s lively and engaging book is an important addition to the growing field of museum studies and reflects more recent critical interest in the histories of cultural institutions. Capital Culture joins Edward Linenthal’s Preserving Memory (Columbia University Press, 2001), William Walker’s A Living Exhibition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), and others in presenting a valuable account of the interplay between politics and culture. The book contains important lessons for both students and practitioners, but it is also an interesting and appealing reading for any museumgoer—particularly one who, like myself, has visited the National Gallery of Art and remembers vividly some of the spectacular exhibitions that J. Carter Brown helped to create.