The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the District of Columbia’s oldest privately held museum, announced last February its entry into a collaboration agreement with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University—a “collaboration” that effectively terminated the Corcoran, which ceded its rich collection of 17,000 artworks and its landmark Beaux-Arts building in the deal. By and large, the press treated this development as the final chapter in the Corcoran’s long history, bemoaning its loss and tut-tutting its board for perceived financial missteps. Few raised the question of how this event fit into the ongoing history of the National Gallery. But readers of Neil Harris’s book, Capital Culture, would have seen this “collaboration” coming, knowing that as far back as 1989 the National Gallery’s then-director, J. Carter Brown, was said to be measuring the Corcoran for drapes.

How did the National Gallery of Art—a relative newcomer, founded in 1937 and opening its massive doors in 1941—come to assume the role of “have” to the Corcoran’s “have-not”? If we accept the premise of Harris’s book, the credit (or the blame, depending on your point of view) goes to Brown. Carter Brown, as he was called, devoted his entire career to the Gallery, starting in 1961 as personal assistant to its then-director, John Walker, and assuming the directorship from 1969–1992, just less than half of the museum’s lifespan at that time. During those years, as Harris would have it, Brown transformed not only the National Gallery but also the American museum writ large. Along with his contemporaries S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1964–1984, and Thomas Hoving, the Metropolitan Museum’s controversial director from 1967–1977, both of whom feature prominently in this narrative, Brown introduced a series of activities and features that now serve as the industry standard: “blockbuster” exhibitions with timed-entry tickets, acquisitions of works by blue-chip artists, continuous physical expansion and renovation, the proliferation of shops, and the introduction of aggressive marketing campaigns. In other words, Brown helped to create the paradoxical identity of the late-twentieth-century museum, suspended uncomfortably between money and ideals, between exclusionary elitism and crass commercialism.

In his introduction, Harris ties these developments in museum management to larger trends. The rising tides of postwar affluence and leisure time, the exponential growth of the federal government, and the increasing desire to match America’s geopolitical might with cultural majesty all played a part in making the National Gallery what it is today. But Capital Culture never fully capitalizes on the sorts of broad insights we might expect from a historian of Harris’s stature. The book is long (sometimes interminably long) on details but surprisingly short on analysis. Full of amusing anecdotes, insider scoops from long-forgotten memos, and biting critical reviews, it is often entertaining. But the further one wades into the book, the clearer it becomes that the onus is on the reader to piece together the larger stakes of this history. We should come away from this book feeling not just that we know more about the museum, but also that we understand it differently, especially given the enormous effort that Harris put into researching this genuinely significant theme. Capital Culture lacks the passion and the trenchancy that many art historians bring to the subject of the museum, the institution they both love and love to hate. More problematically, its central premise—that the National Gallery served as a model for the sweeping changes in museums everywhere—may underestimate the anomalous character of a “national” gallery, both here and abroad.

Harris calls his book an institutional biography of the National Gallery of Art, but he is clearly fascinated by Brown, whom he describes as “simultaneously well-born and self-made.” The more one learns about Brown, though, the more apparent is the mileage he got from the “well-born” part. Born in 1934 into one of the most privileged situations imaginable, Brown was one of those Browns—the ones who founded a school in Rhode Island, where Carter was raised. His family background makes his appointment to the directorship of the National Gallery seem like almost a foregone conclusion. His father, John Nicholas Brown, studied art history at Harvard, joined the Museum of Modern Art’s Junior Advisory Committee at the ripe age of twenty-nine, and worked with the now-famous “Monuments Men” while serving as assistant secretary of the Navy during the Truman administration. Though Carter Brown followed his father to Harvard, he chose to study history and literature and, with seeming prescience, then acquired an MBA—a degree that connotes the business savvy now prized in museum directors, but was rarely seen in those ranks at that time. Though Brown subsequently enrolled in New York University’s prestigious Institute of Fine Arts to study art history, John Walker almost immediately plucked him from the academy and installed him in the museum world.

When Carter Brown arrived in Washington for his apprenticeship, the National Gallery of Art was only twenty years old, its distinctive identity still in the process of forming. Like the National Gallery in London, after which it was modeled, it was founded on the transformation of a private hoard into a public collection. The Gallery’s core holdings were given to the nation by Andrew Mellon in exchange for congressional funds to maintain the grand marble structure on the National Mall whose construction he had funded. While many American art museums originated as private collections, the National Gallery is unique insofar as it remains umbilically connected to the federal government, which still has a hand in its financing and its oversight. (Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Gallery’s founding charter, as Harris informs us, is the stipulation that its board of trustees be chaired by the chief justice of the United States.) The other distinctive aspect of the Gallery, of course, is its name—a name that, like its placement on the National Mall, connotes both a special status and a symbolic obligation. Though Harris raises this issue from time to time, he never fully grapples with the question of what a “national” gallery means in the American context, including the complexities of its reception in a country with such great skepticism about the merits of a public sphere.