ART REVIEW : SURPRISING MIX AT NEW MUSEUM

The birthrate for new art museums has climbed so steeply that we are in danger of ignoring the blessed event while puzzling over why there are so many of them. This is particularly true of the National Museum for Women in the Arts, which launched itself here last Tuesday with an inaugural exhibition called “American Women Artists 1830-1930.”

It is the kind of endeavor that immediately sidetracks observers from the “what” of the story to the “why.” Why do we need a separate museum for art made by women? Women artists have done so prodigiously well in the last 20 years that it is impossible to make up a list of important contemporaries without including women prominently. Even better is the fact that nobody but some Cro-Magnon throwback scans the roster mumbling, “There’s an awful lot of dames here.” They are artists, respected and judged as such.

In short--goes this line of argument--a women’s art museum draws a false distinction, sets out to redress a grievance already addressed and ghetto-izes women artists when they belong in the mainstream with everybody else.

The existence of this new museum is ample proof that not everyone agrees with such optimistic assumptions. Such a place bolsters the perception that it is as much an act of sociological symbolism as an aesthetic phenomenon.

The symbolism is very clear. The museum is housed in a large marmorean white building at the convergence of New York Avenue, H Street and 13th Street, just a couple of blocks from the White House. Looking a bit like a slice of wedding cake, it is a wedge-shaped, neo-Renaissance affair. Its former incarnation as a Masonic temple is not lost on the serendipitous mind.

Inside, galleries on the upper floors appear rather dinky in comparison with the lobby. It erupts in a stately atrium of pink marble, a grand double staircase, swaths of gray damask and crowns of twinkly crystal chandeliers. There is no art in this part of the building. Critic Roberta Smith said it made the place look like “a museum for ‘ladies art’ rather than art for artists who happen to be women.” I thought about “Gone With the Wind” and the populist character of the feminist art movement 20 years ago.

In the late ‘60s the movement was youthful, contemporary and pleasantly intransigent. Organizations like Los Angeles’ Women’s Building joined the anti-Establishment “alternate spaces” movement that liked to fix up derelict buildings down by the railroad tracks.

The new museum, by contrast, reeks of opulence, officialdom and conventional aspirations. It is very ‘80s. Despite its title, it is a largely private institution fueled by the enthusiasm of Wilhelmina Holladay, a Washington collector of women’s art who is president of the museum and who gave her 500-work historical collection as its core. The National of the title comes from the museum’s ambitions. It claims 60,000 members organized in every state and intends to hold contemporary shows from each in its “state” gallery that opened with a group of Kansas artists, some of whom are men.

All that remains is the crucial question of how good it’s going to be. The inaugural show is cautiously conservative and somewhat skittish, but it makes the point that very fine women artists existed all along and--although some, such as Cecilia Beaux and Harriet Hosmer, were celebrated in their day--were ignored by later history. The fact that others such as Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keeffe were not poses knottier questions.

Organized by guest curator Eleanor Tufts, the show is divided into traditional categories such as portraiture, landscape, genre and history. Each pigeonhole includes works from the whole century span and turns up consistent and excellent contributions by female artists. It would be hard to imagine a more moving self-portrait than Ellen Day Hale’s revelation of sensitive defiance, a funnier genre satire than Lily Martin Spencer’s “The Young Husband, First Marketing” or a still life more trenchant than Claude Raguet Hirst’s proto-Pop “Still Life With Japanese Children’s Book.”

Taken out of art’s main context, we have little sense of the originality of these artists but are left to suppose they were talented followers and poets rather than innovators. It is nonetheless an exhibition full of agreeable surprises and worthwhile familiarities. After closing here June 14, it will travel, appearing for Californians at the San Diego Museum of Art in December.