ART : This Room Is Not for the Birds : Whistler’s legendary ‘Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room’ is refurbished at the Smithsonian

James McNeill Whistler’s legendary “Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room” (1876-77) is a strange anomaly in the body of the artist’s work--indeed, perhaps in all of Western art since the Renaissance. Has anyone ever before conceived of an entire room, from floor to ceiling, walls to window shutters, as a kind of environmental picture-frame, designed to hold a single painting?

Whistler did. Unsatisfied with the dining room scheme prepared by decorator Thomas Jeckyll for Frederick R. Leyland’s London house, the American expatriatesought to spruce things up a bit. After all, the picture hanging in a place of honor over the mantle was Whistler’s graceful “La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine,” painted 12 years before. A dark-haired, Rossetti-like figure of a woman, dressed in Japanese robes and holding a painted fan, the “Porcelain Princess” was depicted posing in a room outfitted with a serenely beautiful folding screen, decorated rug and blue-and-white vase.

The picture demanded, in the artist’s mind, a setting in sync with its visual aspirations. It’s an exquisitely decorative pictorial essay espousing Whistler’s aesthetic creed, which championed art as a harmonious orchestration of elements from nature, without regard to literary values or Victorian moralizing.

Befitting its luxurious sensuality, “The Peacock Room” would frame this exalted example of art-for-art’s-sake. And so it did, in a manner whose sumptuousness--and oddity--are only now coming into full view.

Last week, the newly cleaned and refurbished “Peacock Room” was reopened to the public, after a 4 1/2-year hiatus, as perhaps the most visibly dramatic element in a splendid, $26-million expansion and renovation of the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art, where Whistler’s grand decoration had been moved in 1923. The reopening May 9 came 70 years to the day after the Freer had its debut as the Smithsonian’s first repository for art.

The museum, whose 1923 Italian Renaissance-style palazzo stands in the shadow of the Smithsonian’s unmistakable red-brick castle on the south side of the Mall, has long been one of those places cherished by a relative few but typically passed over by the throngs trundling past its bronze front doors, on the way from the Washington Monument to the National Air and Space Museum. In part, the renovation means to entice this audience inside.

The expansion of the Freer Gallery involved a complicated scheme, since space on the Mall is scarce. In effect, two floors were added beneath the existing building. The central garden courtyard was excavated, new facilities for the museum’s conservation lab, scholarly research and collection storage were added below, and then the courtyard was put back in place.

The Freer’s eccentricity is distinct but subtle--a museum whose principal glories are in Asian and Near Eastern art but whose holdings in a particular style of turn-of-the-century American painting also pointedly mean to propose an international aesthetic link. The connection between East and West is theatrically embodied in Whistler’s “Peacock Room.”

An underground gallery was also added, linking the Freer with the adjacent Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which in 1987 became the Smithsonian’s second national museum of Asian art. The Sackler has an active exhibitions program, but the Freer’s charter forbids loans of any work from its often dazzling collection. In the new gallery that connects the Freer and the Sackler, which share a single staff, small exhibitions that draw on both collections and on outside loans can now be mounted.

Sensible--not to mention a rather appropriate symbol representing a convoluted feat of bureaucratic legerdemain, wryly appropriate to a federal institution.

In the main galleries of the museum, a visitor isn’t likely to notice much that is different--which is just as it should be, given the history of the place. Everything simply looks better, more appealing.

The refurbishment of the galleries has been understated and discriminating, with every indication of a carefully balanced effort: to restore with sensitivity and skill architect Charles Platt’s original design (the building is on the National Register of Historic Places); and, to lift the gloom that once shrouded the galleries in a dull, vaguely mausoleum-like aura.

Limestone and marble have been cleaned, plaster repaired and painted. Original skylights have been improved, using modern technology to diffuse and balance natural light, while a new system of artificial illumination brings individual objects into lively focus. A newly designed adaptation of the original display cases preserves tradition, while partaking of current standards of display.

Perhaps the best example of the utterly unobtrusive feel of the renovation is in the specially constructed cases for the display of such exquisite objects as “Waves at Matsushima,” an extraordinary pair of standing, six-fold, 17th-Century Japanese screens. The cases utilize a new type of non-reflecting glass, developed in Germany for industrial purposes.

When you look through it, you see the art, rather than phantom reflections of your own peering face, with almost no distortion in the screens’ color, despite the thickness of the glass.

Finally, there’s Whistler’s “Peacock Room,” whose restoration and conservation, with the aid of a sizable matching grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust, is triumphant. What had once seemed a rather dark, if sumptuous, Victorian space is suddenly a delirious, head-spinning fantasia.

Not least among the reasons is the return of 60 Chinese blue-and-white porcelains to the abundant, gilded niches that encircle the room. Frederick Leyland’s collection of porcelains was disbursed after his death, while those displayed after Charles Lang Freer bought the 20-by-32-foot room in 1904 and transported it to his Detroit house, include important ceramics elsewhere in the museum collection.

During the last four years, the Freer assembled a group of period vessels of similar size and shape to those that would have been in Leyland’s original collection. Their inclusion in the richly appointed dining room adds much-needed dimension to an environment constructed to enshrine Whistler’s “Porcelain Princess.” Suddenly, it all makes sense.

The room is an orgy of sensual delights. The grinning “princess” holds court over deep, Prussian-blue walls, embellished with golden flowers and gilded cabinets and niches, which hold their lacy porcelain prizes aloft.

Window shutters sport imperious golden peacocks, whose impossibly exaggerated tails cascade to the floor, or rise in splendor to the ceiling. Fanning out from the ceiling’s pendant lamps, blue and green peacock feathers over a shimmering gold ground form an exotic canopy overhead.

On the wall opposite the “Porcelain Princess,” Whistler painted a mural depicting his travails in completing an appropriate setting for the canvas: two preening, gilded peacocks are shown in sharp confrontation. The mural alludes to the furious battle between the arrogant artist and his wealthy patron, who hadn’t quite expected so extensive an alteration to the dining-room scheme as the one Whistler ultimately provided.

The sensitive renovation of the museum’s building, brought to a crescendo in the restoration of Whistler’s magnificent room, provides an important stage for the examination of individual works of art. Equally important, the project and its excellent book, published for the occasion by Harry N. Abrams Inc., encourages reconsideration of Charles Lang Freer’s distinctive place in the history of American taste.

Like Albert C. Barnes, whose later collection of French Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings is currently represented in a controversial show at the National Gallery of Art across the Mall, Freer espoused a faith in art as a universal language, which could cross international boundaries and identify a common humanity. Consider what he fought to build as the first national art museum: an Italian Renaissance-style building, which would reflect his faith in America’s own turn-of-the-century rebirth.

Freer collected in depth the work of four American painters: Whistler, Thomas Dewing, Abbott Thayer and Dwight Tryon. Like Whistler, if in a rather more saccharine way, the other, lesser-known Americans depicted nature, often personified in the form of a dreamily languorous woman, as an idealized, eternal world of elegant, agreeable formal balance. These Freer placed in gilded, pseudo-Renaissance frames, designed by architect Stanford White.

In these artists’ paintings, Freer saw resonant echoes of the formal harmonies of nature that were also given form in works of Near Eastern, Southeast Asian, Korean and, especially, Chinese and Japanese art.

By assembling extraordinary collections on extended trips to Asia and the Near East, and by juxtaposing them with contemporary American paintings in a Renaissance palace built in the heart of the U.S. capital, Freer’s poetically didactic aim was plain: American civilization was taking its place within the ancient, international community of world cultures; and Freer’s aesthetic conception was to be a guiding model.

The myth of artistic universality, in which Freer devoutly believed, was European in origin. It had arisen in the 18th and 19th Centuries, during the tumultuous age of revolution, as one way to establish cultural standards that would be common to all. Universality spoke of a profound need to unite an increasingly factional social order.

By the turn of the century, a cultural form was emerging from a number of such oppositions. In the face of burgeoning industry, nature rose in significance. The blunt materialism of the Gilded Age was countered by intellectual aestheticism. Descriptive social content was edged out by abstract formal values.

Freer, like Albert Barnes after him, was instrumental in transplanting this philosophy to American shores. That he was a wealthy, self-made industrialist--he made his fortune building railroad cars, retiring to collect art in 1899 at age 45--played its part in enshrining a certain taste as ostensibly universal.

Nature’s rhythms were aestheticized in works of art because the rapid industrialization of the United States had forever disrupted the natural harmony that preceded it. And at the very moment Uncle Sam became an aggressive overseas adventurer, that highly particularized aesthetic formed the basis for an “international” way of seeing.

Perhaps the most far-reaching of these oppositions was one that still endures in America. After all, the ruler over the elegant universe of porcelains in Whistler’s Peacock Room is a princess, not a prince.

As an antidote to the crude masculinity associated with mercantile industry, Americans began to conceive of art as a species of refined femininity. Ironically for Charles Lang Freer’s vaunted aspirations, thus were sown the seeds of the lowly status in which Americans have held art ever since.