The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art floats between several different visions of itself. Like any museum, how the institution envisions its mission and future will affect the way it builds its collections, installs its exhibitions, and otherwise engages with its publics. The purpose here is not to suggest preferred goals and objectives for Crystal Bridges, but to evaluate its success in achieving the goals it seems to claim in the museum’s inaugural exhibition from its permanent collection, Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. This sprawling exhibition fills five expansive galleries (including the large temporary gallery) and spans four centuries. Such scale makes it virtually impossible to exhaustively analyze the entirety of the exhibition in the space of this review. Instead, I will comment on three themes that emerge throughout the exhibition and define the museum’s core missions. First, the exhibition presents and celebrates a narrowly defined American nationalism. Second, it offers a didactic museum experience that is intended to initiate the novice museum visitor into the experience of looking at and interpreting art. Third, it is designed to show off the collection’s holdings in the major periods of American art in order to assert Crystal Bridges’s position among the great American museums. There are consequences to working to achieve such far-reaching goals, as success in one can sometimes inhibit success in another.

These themes emerge in the first gallery, which houses Colonial and nineteenth-century art. The gallery is divided into three sections; upon entering the first section, the visitor is immediately presented with a sea of portraits. The Levy-Franks portraits (ca. 1735) attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck are grouped together on the immediate right. Nearby on the left hang John Singleton Copley’s Daniel Rogers (1767) and James Peale Sr.’s The Ramsay-Polk Family at Carpenter’s Point, Cecil County, Maryland (ca. 1793). The first section of the gallery also hosts Hiram Powers’s marble bust Proserpine (ca. 1840) and Benjamin West’s Cupid and Psyche (1808). Not only do the bold-faced artist names validate the museum’s role as a notable collector, but the curatorial choice of hanging the mythic figures of Cupid, Psyche, and Persephone with the Colonial portraits demonstrates the mythologizing mission of the museum that will be actualized in the next section of the gallery. The middle section includes political portraits and genre painting, celebrating the founding fathers and the American spirit respectively. The centerpiece of this section of the gallery is Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington [The Constable-Hamilton Portrait] (1797). It hangs carefully situated among founding political and military figures such as Alexander Hamilton (represented in both portrait [John Trumbull, on loan from Credit Suisse] and bust form [Giuseppe Ceracchi]) and the Marquis de Lafayette (painted by Samuel Finley Breese Morse). Embedded between the Trumbull and Breese portraits are two Native American figures painted by Charles Bird King. It is clear that the inclusion of the portraits of Native American political leaders and diplomats are supposed to function as recognition of alternative visions of American origins, but the small paintings are dwarfed in scale by the large full-length portraits on the perpendicular wall. While King’s work is compelling in its attention to detail and beauty, its inclusion largely serves to grant permission for the rest of the gallery’s celebration of the expansionist visions of Americans through the nineteenth century.

The transition to the next part of this section of the gallery marks an unusual trajectory. It focuses on genre painting (John L. Krimmel’s The Village Politicians (ca. 1819), Richard Caton Woodville’s War News from Mexico (1848), and Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn (1820)) and narrative scenes (Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix (1856), John Mix Stanley’s The Buffalo Hunt (1855), and George Catlin’s Indian Encampment (ca. 1852–68)). Again, that Native American scenes appear alongside those celebrating the masculinity being forged in the crucible of the American frontier at first blush seems to offer a more complicated and interesting picture of the American spirit. But, moving into the third section of the gallery, viewers encounter the unabashed celebration of American landscape by the Hudson River School. While many contemporary critics view genre painting as a reaction against the formality and scope of imagery celebrated by Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, and the like, Crystal Bridges invokes an older narrative arc that functions as a reinforcement of American nationalism and a conservative populism, in which the everyday scenes of heroic Americans function as the bridge that connects the mythical founding figures to the land itself.

Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849) hangs on the back wall of this third and last section of the first gallery. On the same wall on either side hang Cole’s The Good Shepherd (1848) and Church’s Home by the Lake (1852). It is a triumphalist moment that celebrates both American expansion and the collecting practices of the museum. While it is not the purpose of this review to enter into the ongoing debate about the collecting practices of Crystal Bridges, it is clear that Kindred Spirits is being presented as a triumph. It hangs on the back wall of the first gallery, where the curving walls of the gallery narrow from their widest point at the middle of the gallery. The effect is of being funneled into the gallery, and of being directed through an experience that broadens and then condenses back into a singular understanding. Kindred Spirits clearly serves to crystallize this effect.

There is no gallery label explaining the Hudson River School and only passing mention of it in the one or two labels associated with particular paintings. The notable lack of extensive wall didactics throughout seems to be at odds with the museum’s educational mission, instead following a more traditional salon style approach to gallery display. In this way the museum does not function as an introduction to American art history. This, in itself, is certainly not a problem. In fact, had Crystal Bridges not departed from a straightforward, didactic art-historical narrative, there would be a criticism to be made about a failure to creatively interpret and install the art. The problem is the presence of a formal art-historical structure (the galleries are organized chronologically by period and the paintings are hung in periodized groups), but this element is not acknowledged overtly in the labels or the gallery intros (and there are no outros). Therefore this approach is less of a teaching tool and more of a nod to traditional curatorial strategies for those who already understand these strategies, which is problematic. The function of categorizing and grouping artists by period, influence, school, or the like is to aid in an understanding of the intellectual, methodological, and historical context of a particular artist and/or piece. It is useful to challenge these traditional narratives in order to open up a piece or artist to new kinds of interpretation. But, Crystal Bridges seems to do both and neither. (The museum does offer a self-guided tour pamphlet and an iPod audio tour, which may expand the interpretation. I visited the museum on the crowded opening day and did not take the audio tour, which has since been revised, and so am unable to comment on it here.)

Most object labels offer only identification, and the expanded label interpretation is largely formal or iconographic analysis of the pieces. While this would encourage visitors, particularly novices, to engage in extended viewing of the work rather than the usual quick scan and text read, it does not provide a deeper understanding of the works within the context of American art history. On the rare occasion that the labels do offer historical, art-historical, or biographical context, they are presented as secondary to a didactic imperative that focuses completely on looking. While this may mirror the visitor-centered approach found in more contemporary museum installations, it also counters the museum’s asserted goal to function as a scholarly institution. Further, by neglecting to explain the overall rationale of the narrative selected for the galleries, it prevents both novices and experienced visitors from understanding the full narrative. As a reviewer, I am not arguing that exhibitions should always reinforce the traditional canon. But this museum clearly does; it is evident in the pieces collected, displayed, and hung. The museum is installed in a conventionally historicized way, emphasizing a straightforward chronology and generally grouping pieces in recognizable aesthetic periods, movements, or moments. The representation of the canon is what helps the museum make its claim to be a great new museum of American art (remember that third mission I mentioned?). So, given that the canon is so lovingly traced here, why is it separated from the didacticism associated with the second mission?

The remaining four galleries display the same tensions. The installations in the mid-nineteenth-century gallery, the early twentieth-century gallery, and the twentieth-century gallery are not as crowded as the first gallery, even though some contain more pieces. Indeed, both the twentieth-century galleries could be thought of as quite sparse. The mid-nineteenth-century gallery is largely devoted to American Impressionism. The twentieth-century galleries lend themselves to a good introduction to modern and contemporary art. But the pieces here are often not major works and for the most part they are not challenging. The absence or sanitization of artists that openly critiqued the art world, politics, dominant narratives of power and exclusion, or otherwise offered less than flattering perspectives on the nature of the American spirit have largely been excluded. Certainly there are artists here who have made that kind of work (Kara Walker, for example), but the works that have been bought or displayed are not generally those pieces. This is a safe vision of what twentieth-century art is. With a reliance on accepted abstract expressionist works alongside more readable contemporary realist paintings, Crystal Bridges’s presentation of twentieth-century art offers little evidence of the critique made by artists of the crisis of AIDS, homophobia, main street, the repression of alternative identities, and other major themes central to art from this period. Instead, we have Andy Warhol’s Dolly Parton (1985), which here appears as a hagiographic image stripped of Warhol’s commentary on consumer culture.

In many ways, Crystal Bridges is an unusual institution, at once evoking the collection museums that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the large encyclopedic museums that have come to dominate the period since. (I take the term “collection museum” from Anne Higonnet’s A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift [Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2009, xii].) It is like a collection museum in that the museum and its collection are animated by the vision and philanthropy of its patroness, Alice Walton. But, it is unlike those museums in that its collection is already available to the public (although not owned by a public institution) even as it continues to expand and collect. Thus, the museum is not a monument to a built collection. It also clearly aspires to be more than simply a place to display Walton’s collection but to be a great and encyclopedic institution of American art. If it were simply claiming to be the former, then the collecting choices (both the gaps and the strengths) would demonstrate the personality at the center of the project coupled with the constraints of the market. Instead, by claiming to be the latter, it implies that the limited view of the American spirit on display is a complete view of the history of American art. Still, for all these concerns, Crystal Bridges is a remarkable achievement. The collection is impressive (and growing). The installation, labeling, and curatorial work are still in process and likely to change. Without a doubt, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has already claimed a prominent place in the landscape of American art museums.