Melancholic Museum

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Linda Heinrich

Smithsonian American Art Museum, USA

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A print of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I lives in the print and study room at the National Gallery of Art, whose sculpture garden fills a significant node in Pierre L’Enfant’s plan of Washington, DC. Just five blocks north, another node in L’Enfant’s enigmatic plan, laid out in 1791, was designated as the site for a monumental work of architecture, a building intended to inhabit two entire city blocks as a Pantheon to honor great Americans. This building, initially constructed by architect Robert Mills in 1836 was immediately embroiled in controversy.

 

Determined to make the building fire-proof, Mills erected interior spaces spanned by masonry vaults, defined at the perimeters with solid cube stone walls and porticos that resembled the Parthenon. Mills was dismissed in 1851 and replaced by an antagonist, Thomas U. Walter, who directed the completion of the building in a more modern and expedient manner utilizing wrought iron trusses, only to catch fire a decade later. 

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The parts of the building destroyed by fire were rebuilt and the building reopened as one of world’s finest patent museums. The “great Americans” honored by the structure were not the founding fathers but rather inventors, physically represented by the models they submitted to obtain a patent. A decade later, the iron and glass cases that housed these inventions defined aisles for wounded soldiers lying on cots during the Civil War as the building assumed the role of military barracks, hospital and morgue. It was here that Walt Whitman read to the wounded and immortalized that experience in verse. 

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After being chosen as the site for the Second Inaugural Ball for President Lincoln in 1865, the building became federal offices for a convalescing republic, eventually falling into disrepair and narrowly avoiding demolition to become a parking lot. Dwight D. Eisenhower saved it in 1958, signing legislation that gave the building to the Smithsonian whence it became the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of American Art, a role that it continues to fulfill today. A few of the original patent models still exist in a space on the third floor designated as “open storage,” next to labs (also on view) that house conservators who repair and preserve the many objets d’art that live in the collection of the museum. 
 

Today, the Museum has a split personality. It is half American Art and half Portrait Gallery, each with their own director and staff. With a dose of melancholy, it sustains an identity crisis—with a desire to be relevant. Its future is currently being discussed by curators over tables spread with large scale plans inhabited by maquettes of the works in its collection. What story will be told? Will there be a balance?