Release Date: January 24, 1992
J. Carter Brown Retires as Director of National Gallery of Art
Washington, DC--The Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art announced today that J. Carter Brown, the Gallery’s director for the past twenty-two years, will retire from his position by the end of the year. Mr. Brown, the longest serving director in the institution’s history, and only the third to hold this position, succeeded David Finley (1941-1956) and John Walker (1956-1969).
Mr. Brown joined the National Gallery in 1961 and was appointed assistant director in 1964 and deputy director in 1968. On July 1, 1969, at the age of thirty-four, he was appointed director. "It makes me and my fellow trustees enormously sad to think of Carter Brown as no longer being director of this, the nation’s gallery," said Franklin D. Murphy, chairman of the board of trustees. "He has been an extraordinary leader of this institution and will be difficult to replace. On behalf of the board I thank him for his many services to the Gallery and wish him well in his new life."
During his tenure the National Gallery’s annual federal budget increased from $3.2 million to $52.3 million, its endowment from $34 million to $186 million, and attendance from 1.3 million to seven million visitors a year, while the Gallery doubled its square footage, increased its collection by some twenty thousand works of art, instituted an extensive special exhibitions program, and became a major educational resource to the nation. Also during this time, Mr. Brown oversaw the planning and construction of the Gallery’s East Building, designed by I.M. Pei and voted by the American Institute of Architects one of the ten best buildings in America.
Since Mr. Brown became director, the Gallery’s collections have been greatly enhanced in every area in which the Gallery collects, with special emphasis in the areas of twentieth-century art, old master and modern drawings, and photography. Among the works acquired during his tenure, some of the most significant are Paul Cézanne’s The Artist’s Father (1866), Thomas Cole’s series The Voyage of Life (1842), Henri Matisse’s paper cutouts (1950-1953), Pablo Picasso’s Nude Woman (1910), Georges de la Tour’s The Repentant Magdalene (c. 1640), Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist (1950), Georges Seurat’s The Lighthouse at Honfleur (1886), Paolo Veronese’s The Martyrdom and Last Communion of St. Lucy (c. 1582), Rembrandt Peale’s Rubens Peale with a Geranium (1801), Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol (1875), Jusepe de Ribera’s The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634), and Auguste Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (1875-76), as well as 3,702 drawings, including works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and others.
In this period the Gallery also acquired a number of important private collections, including more than one thousand major works of nineteenth- and twentieth- century art from Paul Mellon, the bequest of Ailsa Mellon Bruce, an extensive collection of prints and drawings from Lessing Rosenwald, part of the John Hay Whitney collection, the Armand Hammer collection of old master drawings, and, most recently, the Vogel collection of twentieth-century art. During its Fiftieth Anniversary Year in 1991 the Gallery acquired 2,444 works of art, representing 224 donors from twenty-two states plus the District of Columbia and five foreign countries, and six major collections.
Over the past twenty-two years an extensive special exhibitions program has become an important feature of the Gallery’s activities. Some of the most notable have been African Sculpture (1970), Archeological Finds of the People’s Republic of China (1974), Treasures of Tutankahmun (1976), The Eye of Thomas Jefferson (1976) , The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centuries of Art Collecting (1978), American Light: The Luminist Movement (1980), Rodin Rediscovered (1981), El Greco of Toledo (1982), Old Master Drawings from the Albertina (1984) , Impressionist to Early Modern Paintings from the USSR, (1986), Treasure Houses of Britain (1985), Matisse in Nice (1986) , Georgia O’Keefe (1987) , Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture (1988) , The Art of Paul Gaugin (1989), Titian, Prince of Painters (1990), and Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (1991), the last and the most ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition he ever organized at the Gallery.
# # #
