Exhibit of the week: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Bentonville, Ark.

With any luck, “the most-talked-about new museum in the United States in a generation” will prove better than its “bland” and empty name, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Six years in the making, Arkansas’s new $1.2 billion repository of American art is the brainchild of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, who has ensured that the new building delivers “a substantial ‘wow’ factor” and that it places a “serious, relatively progressive” collection within a short drive of the giant retailer’s Bentonville headquarters. Architect Moshe Safdie wasn’t great on details: Some exhibition spaces feel like last-minute improvisations. But Safdie has placed the structure in a natural forested basin and integrated flowing waters that may prove delightful once all elements are complete. One thing is certain: “Crystal Bridges instantly joins the ranks of the richest museums in this country.”

Count me among the dazzled, said James S. Russell in Bloomberg.com. “Bentonville isn’t Bilbao”: The surrounding sprawl exhibits not only “a lack of civic grace but what seems a mean-spirited aversion to it.” Still, that’s no reason to write Walton off as “a rube” using ill-gotten riches “to haul the nation’s patrimony” to redneck country. She’s doing what wealthy philanthropists have always done—bringing culture home to the people among whom she was raised. Visitors stepping into the first galleries are greeted by striking examples of what great money can buy: two famous 18th-century portraits of George Washington, for instance, and Kindred Spirits, a grandly romantic 1849 Asher Durand landscape that the New York Public Library sold from its walls for $35 million. But not all the work tells a story of American triumphalism. Walton and her curators showcase much provocative, contemporary work as well.

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For now, “the Museum of Modern Art has nothing to worry about,” said Lee Rosenbaum in ArtsJournal.com. There’s “some good American modernism” here, by the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Stella. But there’s only a “smattering of pop,” no minimalism at all, and no major works of abstract expressionism, a category in which prices are often prohibitive. Just don’t let any New York sophisticate tell you that what’s hanging here isn’t “A-plus art,” said Holly Finn in The Wall Street Journal. The most unusual work may be Devorah Sperber’s After the Last Supper, a riff on Da Vinci “made of 20,736 spools of thread and viewed through a crystal ball.” The people of Bentonville, I’m guessing, will find it as marvelous as Warhol’s Dolly Parton, Chuck Close’s Bill Clinton, and everything else at Crystal Bridges.