Smithsonian American Art Museum And National Portrait Gallery Reopen

SAAM's permanent collection is featured in a series of installations, starting with the "American Experience," which features everything from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century landscape paintings, like Edward Hopper's "Cape Cod Morning," 1950, that convey a sense of place, to 100 photographs of diverse American people.

The Folk Art section, curated by artist William Christenberry, covers a range of vernacular art, highlighted by James Hampton's much beloved "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly," 1950-64, an expansive visionary work created from salvaged materials covered in gold and silver foil.

On the second floor, a large section is devoted to "American Art through 1940," taking visitors on a visual tour from the early days of the nation through Western expansion, the Civil War and the Gilded Age to early modernism and art of the Southwest, including a selection of WPA murals. Among other things, visitors are likely to be drawn to George Catlin's early Native American portraits, E. Martin Hennings's more recent depiction of Southwest Indians, "Homeward Bound," circa 1933-34, and Childe Hassam's Impressionist ode to the Isles of Shoals, "The South Ledges, Appledore," 1913.

Among the standout decorative arts on view is a commemorative piano decorated by Thomas Dewing for presentation by Steinway & Sons to the White House, in a gallery with paintings by Dewing of genteel ladies in sedate interiors and vivid stained glass windows by John La Farge.

Period furniture pieces and sculpture - the museum has the largest collection of American sculpture in the world - complement paintings in a number of galleries. Memorable sculptures include Duane Hanson's super-realistic "Woman Eating," 1971, Luis Jimenez's large fiberglass "Vaquero," modeled in 1980 and cast in 1990, and Deborah Butterfield's bronze skeletal horse, "Monekana," 2001.

The high, vaulted spaces of the Lincoln Gallery on the third floor are well-suited for large-scale works featured in "Modern and Contemporary Art." On view are such familiar paintings as Georgia O'Keeffe's "Manhattan," 1932, Willem de Kooning's "The Wave," circa 1942-44, and Wayne Thiebaud's "Jackpot Machine," 1962.

SAAM director of publications Theresa J. Slowik's American Art: Smithsonian American Art Museum is illustrated with some 225 of the museum's treasures, along with a helpful text. Published by Abrams in association with SAAM and priced at $65 (hardcover) and $45 (softcover), this handsome, valuable volume underscores the accuracy of SAAM director Elizabeth Broun's observation that "A museum devoted to a nation's art provides a unique perspective on the issues and people of that country."

In addition to the awesome display of its permanent collection, SAAM has also utilized its expanded space to mount four temporary exhibitions. "William Wegman - Funney/Strange" (on view through September 24), comprises 200 photographs and other works by the artist who has made Weimaraners much-loved icons of contemporary life.

"American ABC: Childhood in Nineteenth Century America" (up through September 17) explores images by the likes of Catlin, John George Brown, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins that helped shape national attitudes toward youngsters. Particularly noteworthy: an 1853 sculpture by Randolph Rogers, "The Truant"; African American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister's depiction of "Newspaper Boy," 1869; Winslow Homer's iconic "Snap the Whip," 1872, and "Country School," 1873; Brown's "The Berry Boy," circa 1975; and trompe l'oeil master William Harnett's "Attention, Company!" of 1878.

The accompanying, 236-page, lavishly illustrated book, Young America: Childhood in Nineteenth Century Art and Culture, by Clare Perry, curator of American art at Stanford University's Cantor Center for Visual Arts (where the show opened earlier this year), offers fresh insights into the subject. Published by Yale University Press in association with the Cantor Center, it is priced at $50 (hardcover).

Sure to be a crowd-pleaser is "William H. Johnson's World on Paper" (on display through January 7), curated by SAAM's senior curator for graphic arts Joann Moser. It features more than 40 works on paper by a gifted, appealing, underappreciated African American artist (1901-1970) who abandoned his academically taught Expressionist style for a deliberate folk approach to telling the story of his people. Characteristic of Johnson's endearing, colorful images of the black experience are "Blind Singer," circa 1939-40, "Sowing," circa 1940-42, and "Jitterbugs (V)," 1941-42.

Christenberry (b 1936), who organized the adjoining folk art show, is a much-admired artist and teacher at Washington's Corcoran College of Art & Design. Drawing on his rural Alabama roots, he returns each year to photograph, paint, draw and make sculptures and building constructions of everyday sites in poor, rural Hale County. "Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry" (on view through July 8, 2007), includes multiple photographs, taken year after year, of the same building, like a nondescript structure in Warsaw, Ala., showing the ravages of time and weather.

A Spartan white church in Sprott, Ala., is celebrated in a print and a wooden sculpture. Christenberry likewise evokes both a sense of place and universal themes of popular culture in a photograph, "Corn Sign with Storm Cloud, Near Greensboro, Alabama," 1977, and a metal and tempera on wood piece, "Alabama Wall I," 1985.

Director Broun notes in the companion book that while Christenberry is "Miscast by some as a regional artist, [he] is instead a profoundly democratic and universal artist, one who gives special voice to the promise of our ideals and to the full complexity of our experience." The 204-page tome, William Christenberry, published by the Aperture Foundation and SAAM, has an informative text and 130 color plates that document the artist's knack for recording themes of time, memory and loss in the American South. It is priced at $50 (hardcover).

In its expanded digs, the NPG, a sometimes overlooked treasury of art and history, does an excellent job of telling the American story through images of individuals who have shaped it. The museum's mission is to present faces of significant Americans; it is secondarily concerned with the aesthetic quality of likenesses. As deputy director and chief curator Carolyn Kinder Carr has put it, "Traditionally, when a work is acquired by the gallery, a sitter's significance takes precedence over the object's artistic merit."

Those priorities are displayed in the centerpiece of the NPG's exhibitions, the multiple images of all 42 past American presidents.

Front and center is Gilbert Stuart's monumental "Lansdowne" portrait of George Washington, 1796, which was saved in 2001 thanks to a $30 million donation from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. Also highly familiar is the "cracked plate" photograph of a weary-looking Abraham Lincoln, taken by Mathew Brady's talented assistant Alexander Gardner some six weeks before the president's assassination. There are wonderfully whimsical sculptures of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush by cartoonist/caricaturist Pat Oliphant.

A gallery adjacent to "America's Presidents" is devoted (through July 8, 2007) to "The Presidency and the Cold War," an exhibition that explores decisions by the nation's commanders-in-chief from Yalta to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Seventeen galleries covering "American Origins, 1600-1900" remind visitors of early contacts between Native Americans (such as Pocahontas) and European explorers, of diverse statesmen, such as Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Frederick Douglass, and of literary figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry James. There are plenty of artists enshrined here, ranging from John Singleton Copley and members of the Peale family to Thomas Hart Benton's striking 1922 self-portrait and Alice Neel's daring nude self-portrait at age 80, 1980.

Galleries dealing with the Civil War feature Brady photographs, as well as painted portraits of military leaders on both sides of the conflict. Not to be missed in a stairway alcove is Oleg Peter Hansen Balling's enormous "Grant and His Generals," 1865, depicting Ulysses S. Grant and 26 of his generals on horseback.

Third floor galleries are devoted to numerous themes: (1) major cultural, political and scientific figures of the Twentieth Century (including botanist George Washington Carver and Andy Warhol's screen print of movie goddess Marilyn Monroe); (2) "Bravo," which showcases individuals, such as P.T. Barnum (with Tom Thumb), who promoted the performing arts; (3) "Champions," saluting sports figures such as Babe Ruth; (4) a temporary exhibition (through April 27, 2007) of leading lights in entertainment, sports and the arts in the last quarter century, including a hand-stenciled quilt by African American artist Faith Ringgold and a huge cast paper portrait of composer Philip Glass by Chuck Close; (5) "Portraiture Now," first of a series of changing exhibitions exploring the wide range of approaches to portraiture today, such as a peek-a-boo head shot of basketball star Shaquille O'Neal; and (6) likenesses by some 50 artists, working in a variety of media, who were finalists in the NPG's first national portrait competition, named for Virginia Outwin Boochever.

As author John Updike has observed, if there is an "American face," it is to be found in the NPG's large and diverse collection.

Portrait of a Nation: Highlights from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, accompanies the reopening. In his deft introduction, director Marc Pachter suggests that "visiting here is like going to a place filled with the most extraordinary people one would ever hope to meet." With succinct essays on scores of interesting faces, this 288-page volume, published by Merrell, is priced at $14.95 (softcover).

By every measure, the refurbishing of the SAAM-NPG building is a resounding success, offering more attractive and expanded galleries in which to showcase some of the best America has to offer in fine art and portraits.

The Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture is located between Seventh and Ninth Streets and between F and G Streets NW, with the main entrance on F Street. Hours are 11 am to 7 pm, seven days a week. For information, 202-633-1000.