Contemporary art comes to the American capital

WHEN David Hammons’s massive portrait of the Rev Jesse Jackson as a blue-eyed blond man, “How Ya Like Me Now?”, was shown in Washington in 1989 it was attacked by assailants wielding sledgehammers. They thought the African-American politician was being insulted. Mr Hammons incorporated the damage into the piece, but for almost 20 years afterwards he refused to sell it. Until he met Mitchell Rales.

One of the founders of Danaher Corporation, an industrial-design and innovation conglomerate, Mr Rales has quietly become one of America’s most energetic collectors of modern art. Now he and his wife Emily, a gallery director, are putting some of their artworks on show at their newly enlarged Glenstone Museum, which opens on October 4th. One of the centrepieces of the display will be Mr Hammons’s portrait, which in the maelstrom of America’s racial politics seems only to have grown more relevant.

Apart from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington does not have much in the way of must-see contemporary-art galleries. That is one reason why Glenstone, 18 miles (29km) from the city centre in what used to be Maryland’s fox-hunting country, is likely to prove a hit with Beltway art-lovers and tourists. Entry will be free, but only 400 visitors will be admitted each day. Tickets for the first two months were snapped up almost as soon as they were released.

In contrast to Crystal Bridges, the imposing museum that Moshe Safdie designed for Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress, in Arkansas, the 11 galleries in Glenstone’s $200m extension are set low in the landscape, in a circle looking over a central pond. The picture window at the Beyeler Foundation near Basel was an inspiration, as were the proportions of the Menil Collection in Houston. The architect, Thomas Phifer, is known for his use of natural light and his choice of materials. At Glenstone there is only concrete, glass, wood and stainless steel. On bright days no electric lighting will be needed.

In a collection that focuses on the post-war period, especially German and American Expressionists, the Raleses’ acquisition policy is as rigorous as Mr Phifer’s design. Each artist they buy has to have been exhibiting for at least 15 years. For example, they identified Wade Guyton as a rising post-conceptual artist early in his career, but waited until he had completed a decade and a half of shows before acquiring any of his work. They do not buy at art fairs and rarely at auction. Instead they rely on well-known dealers, such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner.

If those rules seem conservative, the underlying aspiration is bold. The couple want each work to represent a pivotal moment in the development of a particular artist, or in the history of art itself. Alighiero Boetti, an influential member of the Italian Arte Povera movement, made more than 150 versions of his embroidered “Map of the World”. The one at Glenstone is the first. If key works are not available—as, for instance, they have not been in the cases of Vasily Kandinsky or Kazimir Malevich—they do not buy that artist at all.

The resulting collection is less edgy than those assembled by Charles Saatchi in the 1970s or (more recently) by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, an up-and-coming collector from Turin. Instead Glenstone offers top-quality work by established names. For example, Cildo Meireles is probably the most important living Brazilian artist. Glenstone has two magnificent works by him: “Red Room” and “Glovetrotter”, both of which have been shown at Tate Modern in London. Similarly, Louise Bourgeois, a Franco-American sculptor who died in 2010, spent decades probing her relationship with her father in psychoanalysis. One of the most celebrated works that resulted is the uncanny installation called “The Destruction of the Father” (pictured), which Bourgeois made in 1974 and Glenstone recently acquired.

Brice Marden, an American minimalist, had never undertaken a commission before the couple invited him to respond to the monumental Rothko chapel next to the Menil Collection. Mr Marden wanted his painting to be exactly 39 feet (11.9 metres) long, with precisely six feet of white wall on either side. So the Raleses built him a gallery all of his own, exactly 51 feet wide, not an inch more or less.

Correction (September 28th 2018): A previous version of this piece said that David Hammons’s portrait of the Rev Jesse Jackson was vandalised in New York. The incident in fact took place in Washington. This has been corrected. Sorry.