The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Crystal
Bridges, Alice Walton’s contribution to the heritage of
American art, are two magnificent antidotes to the credo, in
some quarters, that Arkansas is little more than a repository
for much that is backward, or deficient, or perverse in this
country – a place, to hear the snobs tell it, that lacks sophis-
tication, that worships the crude and the uneducated, that
holds no place for the pursuit of excellence in any matter
of public import, especially when it comes to finer things in
education, the arts, liberal senses.
In mid-February, we motored south and east to have a
look. We were startled.
ARKANSAS has leaped light-years from the days of Jim
Crow, Ozark moonshine and Orval Faubus jamming the
schoolhouse door. As a governor defying federal orders to
admit blacks to public schools, Faubus beat George Wallace
by nearly a decade, forcing President Eisenhower to send
federal troops in 1957 to de-segregate Central High in
Little Rock. Arkansas is home to such notables as Martha
Mitchell, brassy wife of John Mitchell, Nixon’s former
attorney general and criminal célébre. It also was home to J.
William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, among the earliest opponents of the Vietnam
War, a celebrated scholar and author (“The Arrogance of
Power” among his books), a senator in the era, not that
long ago, when legislators were literate, thoughtful, self-
less, well-read and tuned to the mission of country above
else. An east-west stretch of Interstate 630, in Little Rock,
is named the Wilbur Mills Freeway, honoring the late,
powerful and beneficent chairman of the House Ways and
Means Committee (1958-74) who served in Washington
from 1939-1977; Mills may be remembered for his dalliance
with Fanne Fox, the stripper, but should not be forgotten for
ensuring the funding for such historic measures as Medicare,
the Interstate highway system, and for later adding farmers
to Social Security and disability.
THE CLINTON Presidential Library and Museum, a $160
million post-modern glass and metal monument, is the
crown jewel among Little Rock public improvements proj-
ects. The building, opened in 2004, is a long, three-story
rectangle cantilevered along a bluff above the Arkansas
River downtown.
It’s among 14 institutions in the presidential library sys-
tem administered by the National Archives. The libraries,
from Herbert Hoover (1929-1933), in West Branch, Ia., to
George W. Bush (2001-2009) at SMU in Dallas, are hardly
libraries in the usual sense. They are archives and museums
that preserve the written and recorded record and physical
history of presidents. Noting this, and the special programs
and exhibits that serve communities, the libraries once were
described by Ronald Reagan as “classrooms of democracy”
that belong to the American people.
The Clinton Library holds the largest archival collection
of American presidential history – 80 million pages of paper
documents, 2 million photos, 13,000 videos, 83 million arti-
facts and personal memorabilia. It exhibits the president’s
personal, private and political history. On the third floor, an
exact replica of the Clinton Oval Office and Cabinet Room,
each of the 19 chairs at the table with brass nameplate for
cabinet officers and top presidential aides (chief of staff,
U.S. Trade Representative, the vice-president…)
Presidential libraries remind us that America once had a
government that worked and presidents who could lead. The
Clinton presidency prompted a time of unprecedented peace
and prosperity; an expanding American economy lifted even
further our highest standard of living on the planet as the
country experienced both low inflation and low unemploy-
ment. It was a golden age in science and technology (the
Internet), in medicine and in military power. The cold war
had ended and America had entered a period of unprecedent-
ed zeal, in risk-taking entrepreneurships flourishing at the
millennium, enterprises that created new businesses, mas-
sive consolidations, and vast fortunes, most of them new.
The Clinton Library is a monument of timeless social and
political history, a portrait of a president at his best and a
nation of unprecedented prosperity, with both at a turning
point.
CRYSTAL BRIDGES, opened in November 2011, in north
Bentonville, Ark., is the brainchild of Alice Walton, daugh-
ter of the late Sam Walton, who founded the Walmart retail
empire. We were there on a cold, gray morning in mid-
February, and were struck immediately by the energy and
nobility of the place: architectural majesty like no other, and
within it a stunning survey of American Art from the colo-
nial period to the present. Here is one of the best collections
of American art in any museum.
The name of the place comes from the land, the base
of a natural ravine in the heart of the Ozark Forest. The
scene embraces it all – a stream flows into and through a
pit flanked by two convex, ribbed-roof bridge structures, as
though armadillos had straddled the pooling of two ponds.
The ponds are fed by the inflow of Town Branch Creek
and Crystal Spring; the spring, and the stunning glass and
copper-backed bridges (armadillos) gave the place its name:
Crystal Bridges.
One of the armadillos is home to two galleries, the other a
restaurant. At the far end of the pit is another gallery space,
a curved concrete structure with a concave roof over eight
concrete pavilions inlaid with wood, all linked by bridges
and walkways offering visitors views of trees and water.
It comes together as a 200,000 square foot cultural palace
nestled below the tree line of 120 acres of Ozark forest, the
latest addition to the institutions of American Art.
It no longer matters that Alice Walton’s leadership here
flies against the image of her family’s retail dominance
in the seamy underbelly of American commerce; Crystal
Bridges offers a deep and compelling view of creativity
at the footing of American culture and its history, a living,
breathing legacy that, as the museum’s brochure tells us,
puts art “at the center of what it means to be human.”
The collection here spans five centuries of American art
from colonial times to today, all arranged chronologically
with text that provides the guest, easily, with an overview of
the art and its place in history; in a way, the art portrays his-
tory in America – “The Gross Clinic,” for example, Thomas
Eakin’s masterpiece, an oil, depicts Prof. Samuel D. Gross
removing a tumor from a man’s leg. This was before pho-
tography and anesthesia, and important for recording medi-
cal advances. In 2007 Alice Walton paid Thomas Jefferson
University in Philadelphia $68 million for the painting.
Money: The cost of the museum and how much, exactly,
Alice Walton has spent collecting for it, are not quite known,
except in terms of hundreds of millions. And in 2011, the
Walton Family Foundation gave $800 million to Crystal
Bridges, whose endowment now is more than four times
the giant Whitney Museum. Alice is thought to be the
world’s third wealthiest woman, at roughly $22 billion; her
sister-in-law, Christy Walton, is tops at $26 billion, followed
by Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oreal heiress, at $23 billion.
Alice is a longtime collector, beginning decades ago
with water colors (Childe Hassam, Sargent, Homer…). She
entered the family business in 1971, was never truly inter-
ested, left, then increased her civic work with development
groups in Bentonville, lobbying for new highways, airports
and other improvements. By the early 2000s, she began to
think of building a large collection of art, and, eventually
connected with architect Moshe Safdie, who put the mag-
nificence of Crystal Bridges on a drawing board.
HOW ODD, in this magnificent place, that there is nothing
– not a stroke – of Birger Sandzén, among the world’s most
important mid-20th century painters. Ron Michael, director
of Lindsborg’s Sandzén Memorial Gallery and curator Cori
North say that early last winter a couple of members of the
Crystal Bridges board of directors visited the Gallery, unof-
ficially, and remarked that their museum needed Sandzén’s
work.
Michael said the Gallery would be interested in discussing
a proposal from Crystal Bridges, but neither he nor North
have heard from the museum.
A pity. Without Sandzén, Crystal Bridges in all its glory,
remains incomplete, and not quite the finest collection of
American art.
*
– JOHN MARSHALL
