Pachter Presents Picture-Perfect History

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

As director of the National Portrait Gallery, Marc Pachter has grand plans for displaying artwork to reacquaint Americans with their heroes and heritage.

In 1974, Marc Pachter was a graduate student in American history at Harvard University, when he traveled to Washington. Through an unanticipated series of events he was offered the job as chief historian at the then 6-year-old National Portrait Gallery, home to a collection of paintings and images of America's greatest men and women.

Pachter took the .job because it appealed to the deep strain of populism that constitutes a major part of his character, and because he found attractive the idea that at the Portrait Gallery, a division of the Smithsonian Institution, he'd reach large numbers of people. "I realized suddenly, that, for me, being a historian in contact with the public was more important than being an academic historian," he tells Insight.

Since May 2000, Pachter has been director of the gallery. Housed in what once was the Old Patent Office Building, which it shares with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery has between 18,000 and 19,000 objects among its holdings, Pachter says. Altogether, roughly 5,700 great Americans are represented in the collection, surely one of the great repositories of American history and memory.

The gallery Pachter heads now is closed -- probably until 2004 -- for much-needed renovations. But major parts of the holdings, including an exhibition about U.S. presidents and another called "A Brush With History" are traveling the country, attracting significant crowds of visitors.

Insight: The National Portrait Gallery is a great collection, but because it's not on The Mall along with most of the other divisions of the Smithsonian Institution, it hasn't attracted the crowds that pour through such places as the National Air and Space Museum or the National Museum of American History. It's a quieter spot where people aware of its exciting collections go to browse and avoid the hassle. Are you planning to change that and to bring in the crowds the museum deserves?

Marc Pachter: Yes. And you are right that part of the enjoyment of visitors has been that it was a quiet place to enjoy the art and the programs. They probably wanted to keep it a secret and not tell anybody about it.

On the other hand, I'm really quite a populist by temperament, and my view is that the reason the museum was created was to reacquaint as many Americans as possible with the great Americans of the past. So it's clear to me that unless you have a fair number of people benefiting directly from the museum, you're not doing your job.

I'm the type who does not want to give a party to which no one comes, even if the table is set beautifully. What I mean is that you might at some point feel you have been doing a successful job at a museum because you've just held a spectacular exhibit that has contributed to scholarship, even if not many people saw it. What I explicitly believe is that a museum is a more important place as it affects a larger number of Americans.

Insight: You have such a great building for a gallery! It functioned as a hospital during the Civil War. Clara Barton and Walt Whitman visited wounded and sick soldiers here. Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural was held here. The building itself is a national treasure that houses two national treasures -- the Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

MP: Yes, and this fabulous building was threatened with destruction in the 1950s. They were going to turn it into a parking lot! But then bipartisan forces gathered. President [Dwight] Eisenhower was one of the heroes in the effort. Sen. Hubert Humphrey [D-Minn.] also was in on it.

Here's the story. When Pierre L'Enfant designed Washington, he had a place for the chief executive -- the White House -- and a place for Congress on Capitol Hill. So what do you do with the area that's roughly midway between the two? L'Enfant recommended that on that site a pantheon be built, a place where great republican heroes might be represented.

But Congress didn't do that. Instead it built the U.S. Patent Office here. I happen to think that was brilliant, because what Congress realized was that our society was going to be a society of invention. And the Patent Office was no banal building but was built in grand terms, a great building. So important was it that the Declaration of Independence was displayed there.

But then comes the 20th century. What should be done when the Patent Office and other government agencies that had been housed there no longer needed it and the building seemed to have outlived its purpose? What could be done to save the building? It was remembered then that L'Enfant's original idea was for it to have been a pantheon to honor our heroes, and it was decided that the Old Patent Office Building would become a National Portrait Gallery. We would use it as a space to remember great Americans.

Insight: How does someone's portrait get into the National Portrait Gallery? If someone comes to you and says, "Here's a magnificent portrait of my grandfather. It's yours if you want it," do you automatically take it?