A hinterland beauty

THE Ozarks are America’s least appreciated mountain range. Lacking the majesty of the Rockies, the breadth of the Appalachians or the mournful grandeur of the Cascades, there they sit, somewhere in the middle of the country, south of the Midwest, north of the south, east of the mountainous west. They have long drawn fishermen and hikers; until now, however, art fanciers have had little reason to visit.

That changes with the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on November 11th. With 120 acres (48.6 hectares) of forests and gardens and long hiking trails connecting it with downtown Bentonville, Crystal Bridges is not just in but also of the Ozarks. Its patron, Alice Walton, is the scion of the Ozarks’ first family: her father, Sam Walton, opened a discount store called Wal-Mart in nearby Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962. Today Walmart (which officially went hyphenless in 2008) is America’s largest private employer. The Walton Family Foundation gave the museum a $1.2 billion endowment and Ms Walton and the museum have been on something of a buying spree for several years.

The museum is not simply Ms Walton’s own private collection. Like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller she has been the driving force behind its creation. Ms Walton has long spoken of wanting to bring art to a region that has little of it, and in that ambition she has without question succeeded. Though admission is free thanks to a $20m bequest, the museum sells membership; roughly 4,600 of the 5,000 memberships have been bought by Arkansans.

Crystal Bridges takes its name from Crystal Spring, which flows on the grounds, and from the multiple bridges around which the museum is designed. The architect is Moshe Safdie, best known for his half-brutalist, half-playful Habitat 67 complex in Montreal. Crystal Bridges comprises several discrete but linked structures that meander around and above two spring-fed reflecting ponds, a design that Mr Safdie says is meant to echo the surrounding topography. Much of the museum’s roofing is copper, which currently has the umbral hue of the foliage around it—the leaves dying in autumn, the copper brand new—but which will of course gradually darken, turning a deep rust red and then dark brown before taking on the familiar light green patina in years to come.

And just as the buildings nestle into and hug their surroundings, with few right angles, so the roofs arch and swoop and fall, mimicking the region’s mountains. Trees surround the museum; as they grow they will enshroud it with leaves in full summer and expose it in winter. Crystal Bridges does not look like a traditional Japanese structure, but something of the Japanese aesthetic—simplicity and cleanness of design, reverence for nature, the impulse to build in harmony with rather than atop the natural world—pervades it.

The museum’s collection manages to be both thorough and surprising. Those who wish to see works by major American artists such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Hart Benton and Robert Rauschenberg will not be disappointed. But Don Bacigalupi, the museum director, says that in building a collection at this late date he looked at “identifying new scholarship and new research that led us toward artists and moments less well discovered”. That has inspired a particularly strong focus on women in American art—as patrons, subjects and creators. Janet Sobel, who made drip paintings several years before Jackson Pollock, gets her due. Among the museum’s first-rate collection of portraits, nothing exceeds Dennis Miller Bunker’s sombre, haunting image of Anne Page (pictured above); and in its contemporary galleries Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s marquetry “Room” is, like the museum itself, a chamber of wonders in an unexpected place.