Image: Cafe Eleven, Crystal Bridges Musem of American Art.
Watercolor and Micron pens in Moleskine sketchbook
3.5 x 5.5 inches. April 10, 2014

CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

For years it was whispered that Alice Walton, the daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton had been buying important works of American art from the colonial period to the present. Self appointed eastern elites scoffed at her plans to build a major center for the study of American art in her hometown.
Bentonville, Arkansas sits on a broad plateau west of the Ozarks, just east of the Cherokee Nation, where the western margin of the Mississippi woodlands meets the frontier of the Great Plains.
People started taking Walton seriously when she stunningly negotiated the purchase of Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library.
Academics and museum specialists began to realize that the lady from Arkansas was a force with whom to be reckoned. She invited Moshe Safdie to Bentonville where together on a cold damp day they tramped through the wooded ravine where Ms. Walton envisioned her museum.
They hiked along the creek. Safdie lost his footing and fell into the water. As he scrambled out of the creek Ms. Walton asked if he wanted to cut short their tour and change into some dry clothes. Safdie insisted on completing their reconnaissance. Later, knowing that other architects were under consideration, Safdie asked Ms. Walton what process she would use to make a selection.
She smiled and said that her decision had just been made.
Safdie’s building wraps around the base of a curving wooded slope, with “bridges” crossing the pond at the bottom of the ravine. The central “bridge” is a large dining and commons area where meals are served by Café Eleven, the number being significant because the museum opened on November 11, 2011—the eleventh day in the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the new millennium.
To the north another “bridge” crosses the base of the pond, where it drains into a stream flowing northward into city parks. At the opposite end of the curving main structure is the Great Hall, an events center, auditorium and reception hall.
Many of the wall surfaces throughout the building are curved. Supporting the roofs covering the Great Hall and “bridges” are huge, arcing laminated wooden beams like ribs of ancient ships, tied together by an ingenious system of steel rods which also support walls of glass that seal the gap between the floors and the ceilings. These are the “crystal bridges”—spacious and luminous interiors, above which hover turn-turtle carapaces of wood and glass.
Upon entering the building one is greeted by friendly, attractive staffers who ask if this is your first visit to the museum, before directing you to the reception counter. Free admission is underwritten by Wal-Mart, but special exhibitions such as the William S. Paley Collection, presently on loan from MoMA, require a special ticket. School groups bussed in at the museum’s expense fill the galleries and are treated to free lunches.
I was completely ambushed by the collection, especially the American modernists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Max Weber and Joseph Stella. The collection has a stunning Copley, a canonical Revolutionary-war era portrait of Washington by Charles Willson Peale, and a fabulous wall of hummingbirds in South American landscapes by Martin Johnson Heade. First rate works by Hudson River School artists include Durand’s Kindred Spirits and an unusually fine Crospey.
Recently Crystal Bridges paid a princely sum to Fisk University for a fifty percent interest in the Alfred Stieglitz collection, which had long been locked away from public view. Now on exhibit at CBMAA, it is full of surprises.
Also on view was a comprehensive exhibit of American watercolor painting and a contextual exhibit of drawings and studies for Edward Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island, recently acquired at auction by the museum.
Weather-permitting one may trek a series of footpaths and trails along which are strategically positioned sculptures such as a Luis Jimenez Vaquero and a site-specific light installation designed by James Turrell, one of Alice Walton’s favorite artists. Following the trails into the town center one passes through Compton Gardens, a public park extending from the former home of nature conservationist Dr. Neil Compton that winds its way behind private residences along paved walkways inhabited by sculptures from the Crystal Bridges collection, like Paul Manship’s monumental Group of Bears.
A few steps beyond Compton Gardens is 21C Museum Hotel, which one might expect to find in South Beach or Beverly Hills, not a city block from a typical Southern courthouse square with park-benches orbiting a pillar on which a Confederate soldier stands at “parade rest”.
Bordering the square are upscale eateries, banks, and private retailers. Under construction just off the northwest corner of the square is the kind of mixed-use retail-residential building advocated by New Urbanists, staunch opponents of laissez-faire zoning and the automotive strip-mall netherworlds where Wal-Mart reigns supreme.
Challenging regional philanthropists to use culture to transform hometowns into national destinations, Crystal Bridges celebrates art as medium of public salubrity, a way to build community, and a vaccine against mediocrity.
Art makes sense, like everyday low prices.