The Avid Eclectic

By ROBERT HUGHES

From the street, the effect is disorienting; someone has deposited the set from The Guns of Navarone on the Washington Mall. It is a squat cylinder four stories high and 231 ft. across, sheathed in granite aggregate the color of flushed elephant skin. The outside wall is blank except for an embrasure; one looks (in vain) for the muzzle of a 16-in. gun peeping from the slit. Such, on first glimpse, is the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, built to house the enormous collection of 4,000 paintings and 2,000 sculptures that Joseph Hirshhorn, 75, the feisty, thrusting and by no means universally loved uranium mogul, presented to the nation in 1966.

Private Fief. The Hirshhorn collection is by far the largest public bequest of art ever made by a single American. It opens next week, after three nights of inaugural ceremonies punctuated by a "recording of opening fanfare played over sound system at intervals in the lobby." From the turning of the sod to the tootling of the brass, the building has cost $16 million and provoked steady criticism from those who see it as a feat of egotism. (Not even Andrew Mellon, critics complain, insisted that his name should stay in the title of "his" nearby National Gallery.) The Hirshhorn Museum is a branch of the Smithsonian Institution. But for the moment it is saddled with the reputation of a private fief built with public money, so far containing nothing but Hirshhorn art and directed by the man Hirshhorn had previously employed as his private curator.

The Hirshhorn collection has always been controversial, partly because nobody except Abram Lerner, its director, and Hirshhorn has seen everything in it. Hirshhorn has been collecting longer than the Museum of Modem Art, and with hardly less money at his disposal. The tone has been one of impetuous enthusiasms and voracity, rather than the historically balanced connoisseurship a great museum needs. Thus Hirshhorn's enthusiasm for De Kooning has resulted in a superb group of early De Koonings, whereas some other key abstract expressionists, notably Pollock, are represented by weak or indifferent works. So although the works on view are obviously picked with care, they contain many longueurs--especially poor European painting of the '50s and '60s, for which Hirshhorn seems to have had a predilection.

Hirshhorn's instinct for painting seems to have been weaker than for sculpture. There, nobody could cavil at the major works he has supplied Washington--the Giacomettis, the Daumiers, at least some of the 15 Moores, Rodin's Burghers of Calais and stupendous Balzac, Picasso's Baby Carriage, and the great series of Matisse's Backs of a Woman, to name only a few.

In general, the avid eclecticism that marked Hirshhorn's collecting habits comes as a relief, despite the amount of rubbish. Too many museums collect in terms of a rigid historical theory; by reminding us of the innumerable and quirkish side channels away from the so-called "mainstream" of modern art, Hirshhorn has done the state a service. But this will only remain a virtue if the museum has generous funds to fill in the gaps; it would be fatal to treat it as a static monument to one man's taste.

Blandly Totalitarian. Much less can be said for the building. The New Leader's Vivien Raynor cautiously averred that it was not "the worst building in Washington; it probably wouldn't make even the top ten in that category." Perhaps not, but it is certainly an addition to the dressing of sub-Beaux Arts modernism that gives official Washington architecture its blandly totalitarian look. The architect of the museum, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is the man who gave us the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. Both exemplify Bunshaft's talent for lumpengrandiosity. This building would make even Benito Mussolini flinch. Most buildings, whether good or bad, have iconographies; they transmit meanings and attitudes. What Bunshaft's design seems to be talking about is fortress security--art as bullion.

Perhaps in a decade when any goon can walk into the Vatican and smash a Michelangelo with his hammer, the fate of all public art is to become more and more an object of paranoia. Without meaning to, the Hirshhorn Museum vividly expresses this paranoia. This is tragic, particularly since an imaginative architect like the late Louis Kahn could have given the Smithsonian a design with the dignity the Mall demands, as well as the flexibility and humane scale that Hirshhorn's collection deserves. But only the rhetoricians seem to make it in Washington. > Robert Hughes

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