National Gallery Unlocks a Door for Art’s Sake

The National Gallery of Art opened one of its doors for hundreds of freezing, mostly wool-capped admirers of an exquisite Dutch master Wednesday, but the door opened too late for a Venezuelan couple, a painter from England, a Cleveland State University professor and thousands upon thousands like them.

Nothing can be done now to reverse the disappointment that the partial government shutdown has brought many people who came to Washington in vain to see one of the most heralded and rarest exhibits of these times--a collection of 21 of the 35 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer, who worked his subtle portraits, landscapes and scenes in Delft in the 17th century.

The exhibition, which moves to Holland in February, is unlikely to be restaged in the foreseeable future, and many of those who failed to see it in Washington during the shutdown probably will miss seeing such an assemblage of Vermeers forever.

The Vermeer exhibit, in fact, has become a symbol of the unexpected fallout of the shutdown caused by the failure of President Clinton and the Republican majority in Congress to agree on a budget.

Many of the effects of the government shutdown are annoying and troubling, but expected: passport deliveries only in an emergency, furloughs of workers, stunted paychecks for civil servants, somnolent government offices, a halt in the processing of Federal Housing Authority mortgages, outsiders with government contracts unable to proceed with work because there is no one in federal offices to sign authorization slips.

But there is little doubt that no one in the jockeying and tugging between the White House and Congress over the budget had thought about Vermeer.

The Venezuelan couple showed up at the gallery right on time with their tickets at noon, Saturday, Dec. 16. But the shutdown had come into force only minutes before and the way to the exhibit was barred to the couple, who had to return to Venezuela after the weekend was over, their tickets unused.

The Cleveland professor of English took advantage of a cut-rate air fare to spend Christmas with her grandchildren. She had only one request: a ticket to Vermeer. Her son dutifully picked one up, but on the appointed day the gallery was closed. In a similar way, the English artist flew back to London on Tuesday, a day before the exhibit reopened.

Deborah Ziska, the National Gallery spokeswoman, estimated that more than 60,000 people missed seeing the Vermeers because the government shutdown kept the exhibit closed for six days in November and 9 1/2 days in December.

Faced with this loss--an anguished one for curators--and unable to extend the exhibit beyond its closing date of Feb. 11 because the paintings were to be returned to Holland, National Gallery Director Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, former director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, found $30,000 in private funds in the gallery’s account and decided to use it so that the Vermeer exhibit could reopen for a week even while the rest of the museum remained closed.

A single door--the basement entrance to the west wing of the gallery--was opened at 10 a.m. even though a sign by the door announced: “The National Gallery of Art is closed today because of a lack of federal funding.”

There was a good deal of confusion as a crowd formed with ticket-holders for the day, ticket-holders for past shutdown days and many people without tickets at all. All were told to wait in the same line in the 28-degree temperature. A woman showed Jim Davis, chief of the gallery’s security, that she had a ticket for 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Speaking in a soft, modulated voice, his words as clear and precise as those of a classical actor, Davis told her: “You have that ticket but there are probably 400 others here who have tickets for the days that the gallery was closed. Please go to the end of the line.”

One tourist in line, reading from notes he had made, assured another tourist that the two would surely see the exhibit. “They are extending the closing hour to 7 p.m. because of the problem with our Congress,” he said.

A Washingtonian explained why he was in line, accompanied by his daughter, an artist from New York. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I didn’t know about this until my daughter came to town and told me about it. If she had told me about it before, of course, I would have gotten tickets and we would have come here on one of the days it was closed and I would have been cursing all night.”

By early evening, excited members of the gallery press staff called newspaper offices to say that 4,000 people had come to the exhibit during the day, about the same as the average before the shutdown.

Despite the long lines at the National Gallery of Art, the scene at the Mall, usually bustling during school holidays with children and their parents rushing from one federal museum to another, was nearly desolate. The Smithsonian Institution, using private funds like the National Gallery, managed to open the National Museum of American History. But almost everything else was closed tight.

Tourists could enter the doors of the Smithsonian’s immensely popular National Air and Space Museum but only because the Imax movie theater and gift shops, the museum’s profitable enterprises, were open. Visitors, however, could look at some of the permanent fixtures hanging and standing in the main foyer, like the Wright brothers’ 1903 plane and an imposing Pershing missile.

An entrance exhibit--under a sign “Touch a piece of the moon”--showed a piece of moon rock picked up by the astronauts of Apollo 17 in December 1972. But despite the sign, a rope prevented anyone from coming near the hard, fine-grained basalt. At a time of government shutdown, visitors could look but not touch.