The Nation's Grand New Showcase

By ROBERT HUGHES

Capstone of Paul Mellon's years of patronage: an eight-figure gift to the U.S.

For seven years a structure has been rising next to the neoclassical bulk of the National Gallery in Washington: cool, prismatic, with the containment and elegant definition of a quartz crystal, a hand-rubbed object if ever there was one. It is the gallery's new East Building, designed by I.M. Pei. When it is finally opened to the public on June 1, it will take its place among the great museum buildings of the past hundred years. It is not an innovative or deliberately spectacular structure, as the still debated Centre Beaubourg in Paris turned out to be. Down to the last miter in its warm Tennessee marble cladding, the East Building is intended to be an authoritative, if not exactly authoritarian, statement: balanced, lucid, reflecting the inherently conservative nature of the National Gallery's self-image. The East Building and its concourse (which together cover 604,000 sq. ft.) will be somewhat larger than the older building (522,500 sq. ft.). The new structure may be the most expensive public building to have been erected in America. Most of the $95 million that went into it came from one man, Paul Mellon -and the foundation he controls. The funds to construct the main block of the National Gallery were furnished 40 years ago by his father Andrew Mellon.

The East Building is not Paul Mellon's only colossal gift to the world of art. Between 1966 and 1968, he laid out $18 million to build, equip and maintain the Yale Center for British Art. He also paid for everything in it: 1,200 paintings, 10,000 drawings, 16,000 rare books and 10,000 reference books, 18,000 prints, and a study archive of 90,000 photographs. Their value is not publicly known, but it stands well over $100 million, since Mellon's bequest to Yale forms the most systematic collection of British art, mainly 18th and early 19th century, in existence outside London's Tate Gallery. Mellon has thus in a few years given away buildings and works of art worth rather more than $200 million. Even granted the parlous state of the dollar, no other living American has committed himself to art patronage on this scale. (Paul Getty endowed his mock-Pompeian Getty Museum above Malibu, Calif., to the tune of a staggering $700 million, but Getty died in 1976, and very little of the money has been spent so far.)

The first problem in describing Paul Mellon's role as patron is to draw comparisons. "Medicean" is the cliche for large acts of art patronage. This myth dies hard: started by the ruthless city-boss Lorenzo Il magnifico himself, prolonged by his sons, nourished by poets, flacks and hero-seeking historians from Poliziano to Jakob Burckhardt, it seems ineradicable, like kudzu. In fact, Lorenzo de Medici was not a remarkable art patron; he preferred jewelry, knickknacks, antiques and rare manuscripts to either painting or contemporary sculpture. The idea of disinterested art patronage in the service of some imagined "public good" did not occur to him -any more than it would have occurred to his successors, the royal families and saber-toothed generalissimos of 16th and 17th century Europe, who amassed vast collections to glorify themselves and reinforce their power by visible imagery.

By contrast, Mellon's patronage is rooted in an idea of public service. In the 19th century, philanthropy invented the American museum as we know it today. The U.S., it was lamented, had no great past, but it could acquire the past of others, and this enterprise would benefit the public -hence the heavy stress on education that was written into the charters of institutions like New York's Metropolitan Museum. Art was mass uplift, improvement for the industrious citizen; it was not merely right, but obligatory, to give as many people as possible free access to painting and sculpture. Consequently the museum has always borne a moral load in America.

In major cities, by the middle of the 20th century, museums had to an extent displaced churches as monuments of pride. Among the rich, gifts to museums replaced the chapel tithe of Puritan days as the most acceptable way of displaying, while doing symbolic penance for, one's wealth. (The spiritual ancestor of many an American museum trustee was not Lorenzo, but Enrico Scrovegni, the son of a Paduan usurer, who in the 14th century erected a chapel in his home town and had it frescoed throughout by Giotto as an expiatory gesture for his family's interest rates.)

In the art market boom of the 1960s, giving to museums became one of the chief tax shelters for the American rich: indeed, no museum could survive without the existing laws on tax write-offs. But no ruling American dynasts have gone about the process of systematic endowment with quite the same combination of scholarship, tact, and meticulously regulated generosity as Paul Mellon. He does not collect present-day art, or concern himself with it. What interests Mellon is history -the study, comparison and accumulation of the art of the past. His natural bias is toward English society and art, through the reigns of the four Georges (from 1714 to 1830). He is, in his own phrase, a "galloping Anglophile," whose childhood summers from 1907 to 1913 were spent with his English mother. In one of his infrequent speeches, this one delivered at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1963, he said he remembered "huge dark trees in rolling parks, herds of small friendly deer, flotillas of white swans on the Thames, dappled tan cows in soft green fields, soldiers in scarlet and bright metal, drums and bugles, troops of gray horses; laughing ladies in white with gay parasols, men in impeccable white flannels and striped blazers, and always behind them and behind everything the grass was green, green, green ... There seemed to be a tranquillity in those days that has never again been found." This Arcadia of property, of social measure and proportion organized in implacably vertical chains of patronage, is perhaps the Ideal that confirmed Mellon's love of 18th century English art.

As a student at Cambridge, where he read history, Mellon began to collect emblems of his hippophilia -English sporting prints and illustrated books. Later he advanced to horse paintings by such then neglected English artists as Ben Marshall, the Sartoriuses and George Stubbs. In England, when 27, he bought "for a few hundred pounds" what still remains his favorite painting -George Stubbs' Pumpkin with a Stable-Lad, 1774. (He would come to own 30 Stubbses, most of which went to the Yale center in 1977.)

His first essays as a serious collector, however, were in the area of French impressionism, after the second World War. He began with "things we might want to live with in our houses and then, as time went on, since we knew we didn't have room for everything, I would buy things which I liked very much -or my wife did -with an eye to giving them eventually to the National Gallery." The collection, which runs from Degas to Matisse is one of the finest of its kind in the U.S.

Mellon did not return to English art in a systematic way until the late 1950s, and in fact no more than a fraction of the prodigious collection of the Yale center had been assembled before 1959. In that year Mellon met his chief aesthetic guide and mentor -his English Bernard Berenson, as it were -the late art historian Basil Taylor. Taylor, a great scholar of English art, possessed a sense of ethical delicacy almost inconceivable in the art world today (and certainly never shared by Berenson): he advised Mellon unofficially, for free, accepting only his expenses, lest any other arrangement "cast a shadow on my judgment about things." The combination of the two men was formidable, and it brought many masterpieces of English art into Mellon's collection.

By 1966, Mellon's English collection had swollen to the point where not even he had seen it all together; it was time to consider a public home for it. As president of the museum his father built, Mellon recounts: "It would have pleased me to give them to the National Gallery; the trouble was, it could never have hung more than an infinitesimal part of this very comprehensive collection, so the vast majority would have been in storage. I didn't like the idea of that." Yale, however, was pre-eminent in English 18th and 19th century literary studies, and so, "to have the paintings and the rest of the collection at Yale made more sense." The center's first director, Jules Prown, chose as architect Louis Kahn, whose strong-thewed volumes and subtle sense of the interplay of light and material had already produced the best new museum building in America -the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, opened in 1972. Kahn accepted the job and designed a four-story box, dedicated to light: a building without gimmicks or stylistic narcissism, low-keyed but explicit, whose pale concrete, blond wood and natural linen wall coverings provided a strictly subordinate background to the paintings. (The architect never lived to see it finished; he died in 1974.) This unpretentious exactness of taste was much in keeping with Mellon's general style of philanthropy: the ambition being, a phrase often heard by the curators and museum directors who have dealt with him, to do it right, and not skimp, but within budget. Thanks to the design, most of the center's collection was simultaneously available to view after it opened in 1977.

Mellon's signature is everywhere, both on the building and on the way it is run. "He is so professional and so informed," says the center's current director, Art Historian Edmund Pillsbury, 35, "and he has such a passion for details." Mellon visits the center about once a month and is not shy about making suggestions. "Don't you think the Stubbs in the courtyard might be an inch or two too high in relation to the room?" he murmured a few weeks ago to the center's curator of paintings. The four shooting scenes were promptly rehung.

The Yale center represents an extraordinary application of taste and generosity to a neglected area of scholarship, but it has hardly exhausted Mellon's interest in building. Before it was finished, his next and most costly project was under way: the East Building of the National Gallery. This too is a building of combined functions, both exhibition space and study center. The germ of the idea was planted by John Walker, a boyhood friend of Mellon's. As a young man in Italy in 1938, Walker was offered -by Paul Mellon -the post of chief curator for the National Gallery, then being constructed. Walker wanted to stay in Italy and sought Berenson's advice. Berenson told him to go back to America and help establish "a great center of learning, like the library at Alexandria." Walker went back and eventually became director of the gallery. One day, strolling with Mellon on the vacant lot behind the National Gallery, he told him about Berenson's remark. "If we don't use this land," Walker added, "someone's going to take it from us." How much, Mellon inquired, would this rival to the glories of antiquity cost? "Paul, it'll cost $20 million."

Paul Mellon thought he could give half, and off to see his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, went Walker. "Paul thinks it's a good idea; you think it's a good idea," said she, "so I'll give you $10 million too."

In any event, the new building, which includes the "Alexandrian library," cost almost five times that sum. The library is represented by six floors of archives and book stacks, surrounding a central reading room; the exhibition areas, totaling almost 95,000 sq. ft., are an elegantly flexible blend of aedicular intimacy and ceremonial largesse. The building houses specially commissioned works by Henry Moore, Anthony Caro and Joan Miro as fixtures, together with an immense Calder mobile (whose design was finished and approved a week before Calder died in 1976) and a 31 -ft. -long mural by Robert Motherwell.

Mellon rarely interfered in decisions about detail, but he is the National Gallery's president and chief funder as well as chairman of the building committee. I.M. Pei was his choice as architect and, says the National Gallery's director, Carter Brown, 43, the patron was apt to let his preferences be known by a kind of osmosis. "His taste is there," says Brown, "and sometimes you have to watch the signals; it's sometimes a full-time job figuring out what his dislikes are." Mellon's main concern was the balance between cost and quality. Double-digit inflation in the years 1973 and 1974 drove up the cost of the wing, and so, according to some museum sources, did Pei's determination to build his own monument. In Pei, however, Mellon got a superb detailer; both men wanted to hold the line on quality. "This building," says Pei, "is going to be given to the nation, so Mr. Mellon wanted to be sure it would not be a burden to the nation -the materials, everything, had to be as maintenance-free as possible." Moreover, the architect adds, "his involvement in the building is almost total. He was chairman of the building committee; we normally scheduled meetings ten times a year. The last seven years he has not missed a meeting. Unusual? Unheard of in my business!"

The result, however, is one of the most successful conjunctions of client and architect in museological history. When it opens next month, the East Building will be filled with six major exhibitions -including a survey of key works of the abstract expressionist movement, a study of Piranesi's architectural fantasies and a large loan show of art from the museums of Dresden. But the place itself is likely to be the star. It is improbable that any other architect will receive such a museum commission this century, at least in America. Mellon's gift is not a new start, but a glorious coda to America's age of museum expansion.

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