ON paper it resembles a subplot from David Foster Wallace’s deliriously satiric novel “Infinite Jest”: a billionaire heiress builds a spectacular art museum on family property somewhere in the Deep South and gives it the suspiciously New-Agey name Crystal Bridges. But this is nonfiction. On Nov. 11 Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, will unveil the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the small city of Bentonville, Ark.
Ms. Walton will always be remembered by New York’s cultural custodians for absconding six years ago with Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” a key piece of Hudson River School painting. (The New York Public Library let it go for about $35 million.) But Ms. Walton, 61, is no harebrained carpetbagger. A serious, lifelong art collector, she intends to make Crystal Bridges a major comprehensive repository of American art from Colonial to contemporary. In 2005 she hired the distinguished art historian and former National Gallery of Art curator John Wilmerding to advise on acquisitions and went on a buying spree that netted a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart; Norman Rockwell’s “Rosie the Riveter” (1943); Jasper Johns’s “Alphabets” (1960-62); and a 2009 portrait of Bill Clinton, a friend of Ms. Walton’s, by Chuck Close.
The 201,000-square-foot complex of retro-futuristic buildings designed by Moshe Safdie is set on 120 acres of forest and gardens, and it bridges a pair of ponds fed by nearby Crystal Spring. It may be remote, but with an $800 million endowment given by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges promises to alter the landscape of art in America.
Meanwhile, in Denver, a much smaller but in some ways no less immodest institution, the Clyfford Still Museum, will open on Nov. 18. It is dedicated exclusively to the work of Still (1904-80) one of the most irascible of that prickly bunch of New York painters known as the Abstract Expressionists. His movie-screen-size canvases loaded with lushly colored paint applied in broad swaths interrupted by flamelike passages hold a much-honored place in the canon of American Modernism. But if they nevertheless have not gotten their due, it is because Still turned his back on the commercial gallery system in the early 1950s and rarely exhibited his work thereafter. His will stipulated that his entire estate of 2,400 works should be donated to an American city willing to give it a permanent home. In 2004 Still’s widow, Patricia Still, turned the estate over to Denver.
For its opening exhibition the museum will fill its 10,000 square-foot second-floor galleries with 110 paintings and drawings dating from 1920 to 1980. According to a museum news release the show will demonstrate that Still was on to pure abstraction in the early 1940s, in advance of his colleagues Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko.
