musuem

Dumbarton Oaks Collections

By Gary Tischler

MAY 2008

They’re back. The Pre-Columbian masks, the tapestries, the music room, the bust of Meander, the bliss of what the Blisses collected, architect Philip Johnson’s airy construction for those strange, powerful sculptures from ancient America.

Yes, the Dumbarton Oaks Collections, after three years of renovations, have re-opened  to the public, as wondrously strange as ever, changed, but not so much as to change the nature of the whole and its individual parts.

The Dumbarton Oaks Collection is housed in the museum (the entrance is at 32nd Street between S and R Street), once a Federal style house purchased by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, he a career diplomat, with all the habits, intellect, taste and style of that profession, she an heiress. The collection is in reality THEIR collection, and their monument.

It’s hard to categorize a collection that has some unwieldy, if spectacular components: the Byzantine Collection, the Pre-Columbian Collection, the art of and in the Music Room, which includes medieval and renaissance tapestries and sculptures, and the House Collection, best described as a very top-notch collection of odds and ends, including a Degas and Renoir.

So what do you call it, besides the Dumbarton Oaks Collection? Well, you could try calling it spectacular, original, and really different from any other collection in this city. 

In terms of focus, you might suffer a little bit of whiplash. I can’t think of two more different experiences than to wander through the Byzantine section, with its flat-faced figures, its singular religiosity of a very specific kind, its age, in Western terms. 

The Byzantine collection is housed in enclosed spaces, rooms and galleries. There are objects here that stop you in your tracks: the time period here is both the beginning of Christianity and the place where it took a divergent road that looked different, worshipped differently, saw things in a different way, facing East, not West, when Rome stopped being the center of the world, and a kind of shift in the axis occurred and ended up in Constantinople and Byzantium.

But nothing quite explains how this Arabian horse sculpture, bronze and rearing fits into all this other than it’s from of the late 2nd century. It was discovered in Yemen in 30 pieces and put back together. It is astonishing, as is, to me, the bust of Meander, the Greek poet, the sculpture of the emaciated man.

This is also the case in the Music room, redone, restructured, it has the feel, the sense of medievalism in it, with its tapestries, and with the sculpture of Virgin Mary and Jesus attributed to Tilman Rimenschneider, who was the 15th Century genius of wood sculpture.

But how different a world you enter when you enter the transparent halls and curved walks of the Pre-Colombian collection. The design keeps the outside world at bay but also brings it in. It’s almost a schizophrenic effect. You’re in the presence of the powerful totems and the last vestiges of a lost civilization or two. They practically burn through what contains them. Take your pick: the thick sculpture of Xiuhcoatl, alias the fire serpent, from somewhere between 1200-1500, the height of the Aztecs, or from the same period the encounter with the head of Xipe Totec, which isn’t quite so shocking until you translate it – “The Flayed One”. 

Gold, flint, silver, marble, jade, stone, it’s a solid world beckoning here, a rich world, strange and enticing, an exhibition, a collection that has bite and teeth. But as you walk, you can see the breeze hitting garden flowers, further on cars in a street, the lulling of the present. The collection is like the deep blue sea, its hypnotizing in the light, suggesting an altogether different way of imagining and remembering.

What’s different here now? The galleries have all been renovated, some European art works have been returned to the confines of the music room, a painted beam ceiling has been restored. There’s an enlarged gift shop, and a gallery on the life and times and collecting of  Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, and an orientation gallery which is useful.

And there’s a quote from Bliss which may explain why the Dumbarton Collection is what it is, why it seems so original and why there’s nothing like it. “I have collection ... objects that gave me pleasure – a sculpture boldly conceived; a gold object delicately wrought; a fabric of good design well woven; ceramics with interesting iconography; metal work of quality – a rhythm here, a form there.”