The Lives of Dillon Ripley by Roger D. Stone

Author:Roger D. Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

Genteel Warfare on the Mall

Big questions about power and control remained open. The Hirshhorn episode marked the onset of tensions between Ripley and the National Gallery of Art that to some observers labeled him not as a profound thinker but as an audacious opportunist. Said Franklin D. Murphy of Los Angeles, the former UCLA chancellor and Times-Mirror Company chair and a National Gallery board member: “Dillon Ripley was the greatest empire builder in the history of Washington. You can see the Mall—it’s Dillon Ripley.”19 Friction broke out soon after Ripley’s arrival in 1964 and continued until the early 1970s, when both sides helped bring about an unspoken truce.

The act of Congress that established Washington’s National Gallery of Art in 1937 specified that it would become a “bureau” of the Smithsonian along with eight other institutions. The Smithsonian’s secretary would, ex officio, occupy one of four public seats on the Gallery’s board. But if technically the Gallery could be seen as a Smithsonian bureau, its board also included five private or “general” trustees, constituting a majority, and was empowered to be self-perpetuating. With the balance of power in its hands, this group could hire the Gallery’s director and deal directly with Congress in setting and managing its budget. Each year a brief summary of Gallery activities would appear in the Smithsonian’s annual report, but the Smithsonian lacked the authority to control the nature of these activities. In his memoirs, published in 1992, the president of the Gallery during this period, Paul Mellon, expressed doubt that “anyone these days thinks of the Gallery as being part of that Institution’s immense, albeit prestigious bureaucracy.”20

The relationship worked fine as long as the Smithsonian remained benign and little concerned with art matters. But Ripley’s more aggressive approach brought a reaction. With rumors circulating that Ripley wanted to annex the National Gallery, and the Gallery fighting hard to protect its autonomy, its director, John Walker, and president, Paul Mellon, became “quite antagonistic towards myself,” said Ripley, “and towards our doing anything positive in the field of art. They felt there was only one art museum in Washington. Period. And it should do everything for culture, art, the world . . . and this was a rather hard rock attitude. . . . John Walker in later years told me that he did everything in his power to oppose anything we suggested about the advancement of art and culture for the Smithsonian, because they viewed it as a rival effort to their hegemony.” The National Gallery had a “very glacial atmosphere . . . a cloistered atmosphere . . . like a very, very big bank, ” Ripley recalled.21 “You felt that something about the Mellons had traveled all the way from Pittsburgh to Washington to the National Gallery. It was awesome and rather frightening, I think, for some people, and slightly off-putting for me. It just excited my more liberal, more democratic tendencies, so that I would occasionally speak up at the meetings in a way that might make them uncomfortable, but I couldn’t help it.

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