by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times:
David W. Scott, an artist and art historian who served as founding director of the National Museum of American Art, played a key role in expanding the National Gallery of Art and shepherded the Corcoran Gallery of Art through a difficult time after a controversial exhibit, died of multiple organ failure March 30 at a hospice in Austin, Texas. He was 92.
Scott joined the Smithsonian Institution’s staff in 1963 as assistant director of what was then known as the National Collection of Fine Arts after teaching art history at Scripps College in Claremont. At the time, the National Collection was such a staid, conservative institution that he was warned he would lose his job if he didn’t take down abstract works from the walls of his own home — works he had painted.
Sophy Burnham, author of “The Art Crowd” (1973), a muckraking inquiry into the New York and Washington art worlds, wrote that Scott discovered that the National Collection included only two pictures painted after World War II. One was of a U.S. Navy vessel that remained because the staff worried that its removal would be construed as destruction of government property.
“Scott determined to build the NCFA into a museum of consequence,” Burnham wrote. “He wanted it to be the equivalent of the Whitney or the Tate — vital, vibrant, fashionable, discussed, a force in the art world” …
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