THAT’S BUSINESS

Crystal Bridges turns the numbers, turns heads in the art world

— So Crystal Bridges is turning big numbers. Wouldn’t you expect that from a Walton?

Attendance in the first year, which will end Nov. 11, at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was originally predicted to reach 250,000.

It will be pushing 600,000 by the end of this month, according to spokesman Diane Carroll.

That puts Crystal Bridges within a stone’s throw of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, among others.

Razorback-clad visitors have adopted the museum as their own.

Seventy percent are Arkansans, mostly from the six Arkansas counties surrounding the museum.

So Bentonville is benefiting from this. (See article on this page.) Wouldn’t you expect that?

But museum exeutive director Don Bacigalupi said before the opening that the economic benefits are secondary.

Crystal Bridges, of course, is built on the fortunes of Wal-Mart, whose international headquarters are here. The original Walton’s 5 & 10 is on the square and is now a museum itself, and serves as the Wal-Mart Visitor Center.

Heiress Alice Walton’s acquisition approach was viewed by some as “that of a poacher preying on cash-strapped institutions by offering record prices for locally significant treasures. Comparisons with Wal-Mart’s business practices were inevitable,” Patricia Railing wrote in the January edition of ARTnews.

Yet Abigail R. Esman wrote in Forbes, days after the museum opened, that “thanks to Alice Walton, more Americans now have an opportunity to experience the wonders that art museums hold, and the worlds that they can open.”

Admission to permanent collections is free, sponsored by Wal-Mart.

Crystal Bridges’ permanent exhibit, which spans four centuries, “celebrates the American spirit.”

Standing in front of Charles Willson Peale’s near-lifesize portrait of Gen. George Washington, painted over two years starting in 1780, puts the viewer one degree closer to the reality of the man, one degree closer to the father of our country.

It’s one thing to see the painting in a book, another thing altogether to see it in person.

Does that feed your spirit?

(Here my notebook jottings change from ink to lead. No, it’s not the reverse alchemy of the moment. My pen is confiscated by one of the nice uniformed people who provide guidance and security. She hands me a stubby, golf-card size pencil. Take this, she explains. Not long ago, a famous painting in another museum was defaced by someone wielding an ink pen, she says.)

Does Gilbert Stuart’s 1797 portrait of Washington at the end of his presidency, the lion in winter, do it for you?

After the founding of the country comes pushing the frontier westward.

In The Life of a Hunter: In A Tight Fix (1856) by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait (never heard of him, either), a backwoodsman, knife in hand, knocked on his derriere in the snow, tries to fend off a large, angry black bear looming over him. To one side, obscured in the forest gloom, is another hunter, aiming his musket at the wild creature.

The Buffalo Hunt (1855) by John Mix Stanley shows Plains Indians on horseback subduing an American bison that has knocked one of the mounts to the ground.

Yet, much of the 19th-century art is portraiture, including American Indians. It is polite art.

Walton, founder and chairman of the museum, paid $35 million for Kindred Spirits (1849) by Asher Brown Durand in a closed-bid sale. Set in the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson River School painting had been hanging in the New York Public Library for 100 years, most recently in what had been described as an obscure corner.

The gloves came off on that one. Walton was criticized for removing the painting so famously identified with the region.

When she openly made a bid of $68 million for Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic in conjunction with the National Gallery in Washington, “local museums rallied the citizenry to match the offer and keep the painting in Philadelphia,” according to Railing in ARTnews.

If that seems provincial, there is something universal and poignant about George Inness’ An Old Roadway (c. 1880) in which an older black woman with walking stick and her worldly possessions in kit bag makes her way along a barely demarcated path across a green field. Toward freedom?

Free (c. 1876) is a bitterly ironic title of a basswood sculpture by Emma Marie Cadwalader-Guild of a muscular young black man standing with his hands behind him, as if bound (not physically), as he leans against a stump, head downcast.

But the collection is not a moral lesson, which could lead to propaganda.

Still, propaganda can be used for good purposes.

Rosie the Riveter (1943) by Norman Rockwell is one of the most recognizable works in the collection. It’s an illustration with a message. The lass with perky visage and the mannish arms (some call ’em guns these days), is taking a break from doing her part to defeat the Axis during World War II. Two things I’ve never noticed in numerous reproductions of this famous Saturday Evening Post cover — she is resting her feet on a copy of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s mad book, and above her head there is a halo.

The spirit of that work suggests that, while life is serious, it has its light moments.

A lone cowboy is lost in song as he sits on his pony and keeps his dogies happy in a nocturne by Frederic Remington, Cowpuncher’s Lullaby (1906), merging the myth and reality of the West.

Almost all of Thomas Hart Benton’s works tend toward the cartoonish — but always evoke the pathos of the people who work the land and are reminders that there are no hard-and-fast-rules of art.

Except that it should entertain, maybe enlighten, but always feed the spirit.

If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or e-mail him at

[email protected]

Business, Pages 73 on 10/28/2012

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