National Gallery reopening provides relief
WASHINGTON: Visitors were few but their exuberance was high Monday at the National Gallery of Art, when the museum became the city’s first major cultural institution to welcome the public inside since the pandemic shuttered the city’s popular museums four months ago.
Retired couples, families and groups of friends lined up outside in the blistering heat, waiting a half-hour for the bronze doors to open and their art pilgrimage to begin.
“The gallery is always a spiritual place, but it’s a spiritual place that’s meant to be filled with people,” museum director Kaywin Feldman said after she greeted the small crowd with a joyful wave and a “come on in.”
“We’re excited to welcome people back in.”
The first visitors moved quietly through the hushed halls of the West Building’s ground floor, their conversation muffled by mandatory face masks. Groups kept a now-instinctive six feet of distance as they wandered through galleries featuring 19thand 20th-century sculpture, decorative arts, American furniture and Impressionist still life paintings.
Two special exhibits - “Degas at the Opéra” and “True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870” — have been extended through the fall.
They drew the most interest but were not crowded as they were before the shutdown, a rare and splendid consequence of the new normal.
“There’s an old saying, ‘ Life without art doesn’t make much sense,’ “said visitor June Humbert of suburban Bethesda, Maryland., who with her husband, Richard, was among the first to enter.
Humbert said she felt “just relief” to be back in the museum she regularly frequented before the global shutdowns.
“Art is very important to me and the National Gallery is an important thing to us,” she said.
“You hope the end [of the pandemic] is coming. Maybe it will come in parts, but we desperately need the rest of our lives back.”
That sentiment was repeated often among the first 500 visitors, who were admitted in half-hour intervals throughout the day.
The visit was a milestone, they said, and a reminder of a happier past.
“We always come to the museum. Its absence was devastating to us,” said DC resident Belinda Perry, who was taking in the impressionist gallery with her friend David Cumberbatch, also a DC resident. “It’s a major selling point of DC, its endless supply of exhibits.”
Cumberbatch, who works in the nearby courthouse complex, would come to the gallery at lunchtime.
Monday’s late-morning visit was a hopeful sign.
“It’s the first time I got up and showered and got dressed in four months,” he joked.
“It is normalizing to be here.” In keeping with DC and federal guidelines, the museum restricted the number of visitors to about 100 per hour from 11am to 4pm Visitors were required to wear masks as they entered through the Sixth Street doors, where they showed their passes to staff members seated behind glass shields before walking through newly installed metal detectors.
Passes required for entry are distributed on the gallery’s website every Monday at 10am for the following Monday through Sunday.
All of the passes for this week are gone, and more than half of the passes for July 27 to Aug 2 were snapped up within hours of their release, a museum spokeswoman said.
The museum’s Sculpture Garden is open, and passes aren’t required. The museum’s cafe is selling prepackaged food and beverages, and its shop is open with limited inventory.
Purchases must be made by credit card.
Additional galleries in the museum’s West Building will welcome visitors after DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, D, announces the next phase of the city’s reopening plan.
The East Building remains closed for construction until the fall. Colleen Gibbons of suburban Alexandria, Virginia, wasn’t optimistic when she looked for passes last week, but she was able to snap up four for the first day.
She visits museums four or five times a year, she said, but it took the shutdown to remind her of their value.
“We’re lucky to have this,” she said.
Safety was top of mind for many visitors. Wayne and Irene Wittig of suburban Arlington, Virginia., obtained passes for 11 am on opening day because they thought it would be safer to be among the first to enter a space that was newly cleaned.
“We go grocery shopping. This can’t be any different than going to Harris Teeter.
“And it’s way more fun,” Irene Wittig said.
Barbara and Bill Lynch of suburban Silver Spring, Maryland., decided that the Degas exhibit was worth “a calculated risk.”
“We said if it doesn’t look like they’re doing it right, we’ll go home,” Barbara Lynch said, adding praise for the staff.
Arlette Jassel, an artist who lives in Bethesda, expressed delight in finally being able to return to the museum, which she described as inspirational.
“Being in the space is very empowering,” she said.
“It is not religious, not political. That is rare and we need it. We need it so much.” — The Washington Post