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THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART HAS GIVEN THE PEOPLE A PARK FOR ALL SEASONS AND ALL AGES
CROWDS OF SIGHTSEERS ARE COMING upon a magical garden on the National Mall these days, a garden that reflects the power and beauty and tragedy and laughter and illusion of art. Their find is the long-awaited National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, an oasis among some of the best-known museums and monuments in America. As visitors rest in its coolness, they can behold an array of spectacular sights, from a giant spider to an enormous typewriter eraser to a dynamic mass of circles, beams and triangles that pierce the sky.
Since May 23, when the gates of its six entrances opened to the public for the first time, the 6.i-acre garden has hosted parents and toddlers, touring groups of teens, well-dressed foreigners, government workers on lunch break and a host of admirers of modern sculpture. The dizzying variety of the sculptures reflects the dizzying number of movements in the modern era of sculpture. Maria Prather, the gallery's curator of 20th-century art and a key member of the team that selected the garden's pieces, describes them as "some of the greatest sculptures of the century." All 17 sculptures (an 18th, by American artist Frank Stella, is due in the fall) are post-World War II, and most are American.
The- garden was conceived in the 1960s, but plans languished under red tape and red ink. The National Gallery, in any case, would not have had enough pieces to fill more than a sliver of a modern sculpture garden in the 1960s. When the museum's original, neoclassic home (now known as the West Building) opened in 1941, the gallery's rules prohibited the ownership of any work by an artist who had not been dead for at least 20 years. Happily, the trustees realized that this was a foolish rule (under it, the museum would not have owned a Picasso until 1993, a Miró until 2003) and ended the ban in 1963.
During the 19705, the gallery focused its attention on building the modern I. M. Pei-designed East Building, which opened in 1978. For almost three decades, little was done for the site of the future garden save construction of a...