The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Crystal

Bridges, Alice Walton’s contribution to the heritage of

American art, are two magnificent antidotes to the credo, in

some quarters, that Arkansas is little more than a repository

for much that is backward, or deficient, or perverse in this

country – a place, to hear the snobs tell it, that lacks sophis-
tication, that worships the crude and the uneducated, that

holds no place for the pursuit of excellence in any matter

of public import, especially when it comes to finer things in

education, the arts, liberal senses.

In mid-February, we motored south and east to have a

look. We were startled.

ARKANSAS has leaped light-years from the days of Jim

Crow, Ozark moonshine and Orval Faubus jamming the

schoolhouse door. As a governor defying federal orders to

admit blacks to public schools, Faubus beat George Wallace

by nearly a decade, forcing President Eisenhower to send

federal troops in 1957 to de-segregate Central High in

Little Rock. Arkansas is home to such notables as Martha

Mitchell, brassy wife of John Mitchell, Nixon’s former

attorney general and criminal célébre. It also was home to J.

William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, among the earliest opponents of the Vietnam

War, a celebrated scholar and author (“The Arrogance of

Power” among his books), a senator in the era, not that

long ago, when legislators were literate, thoughtful, self-
less, well-read and tuned to the mission of country above

else. An east-west stretch of Interstate 630, in Little Rock,

is named the Wilbur Mills Freeway, honoring the late,

powerful and beneficent chairman of the House Ways and

Means Committee (1958-74) who served in Washington

from 1939-1977; Mills may be remembered for his dalliance

with Fanne Fox, the stripper, but should not be forgotten for

ensuring the funding for such historic measures as Medicare,

the Interstate highway system, and for later adding farmers

to Social Security and disability.

THE CLINTON Presidential Library and Museum, a $160

million post-modern glass and metal monument, is the

crown jewel among Little Rock public improvements proj-
ects. The building, opened in 2004, is a long, three-story

rectangle cantilevered along a bluff above the Arkansas

River downtown.

It’s among 14 institutions in the presidential library sys-
tem administered by the National Archives. The libraries,

from Herbert Hoover (1929-1933), in West Branch, Ia., to

George W. Bush (2001-2009) at SMU in Dallas, are hardly

libraries in the usual sense. They are archives and museums

that preserve the written and recorded record and physical

history of presidents. Noting this, and the special programs

and exhibits that serve communities, the libraries once were

described by Ronald Reagan as “classrooms of democracy”

that belong to the American people.

The Clinton Library holds the largest archival collection

of American presidential history – 80 million pages of paper

documents, 2 million photos, 13,000 videos, 83 million arti-
facts and personal memorabilia. It exhibits the president’s

personal, private and political history. On the third floor, an

exact replica of the Clinton Oval Office and Cabinet Room,

each of the 19 chairs at the table with brass nameplate for

cabinet officers and top presidential aides (chief of staff,

U.S. Trade Representative, the vice-president…)

Presidential libraries remind us that America once had a

government that worked and presidents who could lead. The

Clinton presidency prompted a time of unprecedented peace

and prosperity; an expanding American economy lifted even

further our highest standard of living on the planet as the

country experienced both low inflation and low unemploy-
ment. It was a golden age in science and technology (the

Internet), in medicine and in military power. The cold war

had ended and America had entered a period of unprecedent-
ed zeal, in risk-taking entrepreneurships flourishing at the

millennium, enterprises that created new businesses, mas-
sive consolidations, and vast fortunes, most of them new.

The Clinton Library is a monument of timeless social and

political history, a portrait of a president at his best and a

nation of unprecedented prosperity, with both at a turning

point.

CRYSTAL BRIDGES, opened in November 2011, in north

Bentonville, Ark., is the brainchild of Alice Walton, daugh-
ter of the late Sam Walton, who founded the Walmart retail

empire. We were there on a cold, gray morning in mid-
February, and were struck immediately by the energy and

nobility of the place: architectural majesty like no other, and

within it a stunning survey of American Art from the colo-
nial period to the present. Here is one of the best collections

of American art in any museum.

The name of the place comes from the land, the base

of a natural ravine in the heart of the Ozark Forest. The

scene embraces it all – a stream flows into and through a

pit flanked by two convex, ribbed-roof bridge structures, as

though armadillos had straddled the pooling of two ponds.

The ponds are fed by the inflow of Town Branch Creek

and Crystal Spring; the spring, and the stunning glass and

copper-backed bridges (armadillos) gave the place its name:

Crystal Bridges.

One of the armadillos is home to two galleries, the other a

restaurant. At the far end of the pit is another gallery space,

a curved concrete structure with a concave roof over eight

concrete pavilions inlaid with wood, all linked by bridges

and walkways offering visitors views of trees and water.

It comes together as a 200,000 square foot cultural palace

nestled below the tree line of 120 acres of Ozark forest, the

latest addition to the institutions of American Art.

It no longer matters that Alice Walton’s leadership here

flies against the image of her family’s retail dominance

in the seamy underbelly of American commerce; Crystal

Bridges offers a deep and compelling view of creativity

at the footing of American culture and its history, a living,

breathing legacy that, as the museum’s brochure tells us,

puts art “at the center of what it means to be human.”

The collection here spans five centuries of American art

from colonial times to today, all arranged chronologically

with text that provides the guest, easily, with an overview of

the art and its place in history; in a way, the art portrays his-
tory in America – “The Gross Clinic,” for example, Thomas

Eakin’s masterpiece, an oil, depicts Prof. Samuel D. Gross

removing a tumor from a man’s leg. This was before pho-
tography and anesthesia, and important for recording medi-
cal advances. In 2007 Alice Walton paid Thomas Jefferson

University in Philadelphia $68 million for the painting.

Money: The cost of the museum and how much, exactly,

Alice Walton has spent collecting for it, are not quite known,

except in terms of hundreds of millions. And in 2011, the

Walton Family Foundation gave $800 million to Crystal

Bridges, whose endowment now is more than four times

the giant Whitney Museum. Alice is thought to be the

world’s third wealthiest woman, at roughly $22 billion; her

sister-in-law, Christy Walton, is tops at $26 billion, followed

by Liliane Bettencourt, the L’Oreal heiress, at $23 billion.

Alice is a longtime collector, beginning decades ago

with water colors (Childe Hassam, Sargent, Homer…). She

entered the family business in 1971, was never truly inter-
ested, left, then increased her civic work with development

groups in Bentonville, lobbying for new highways, airports

and other improvements. By the early 2000s, she began to

think of building a large collection of art, and, eventually

connected with architect Moshe Safdie, who put the mag-
nificence of Crystal Bridges on a drawing board.

HOW ODD, in this magnificent place, that there is nothing

– not a stroke – of Birger Sandzén, among the world’s most

important mid-20th century painters. Ron Michael, director

of Lindsborg’s Sandzén Memorial Gallery and curator Cori

North say that early last winter a couple of members of the

Crystal Bridges board of directors visited the Gallery, unof-
ficially, and remarked that their museum needed Sandzén’s

work.

Michael said the Gallery would be interested in discussing

a proposal from Crystal Bridges, but neither he nor North

have heard from the museum.

A pity. Without Sandzén, Crystal Bridges in all its glory,

remains incomplete, and not quite the finest collection of

American art.

*

– JOHN MARSHALL