The Crystal Palace

The Megarich don’t build pyramids anymore–labor costs and all. But for the past century, the next best thing for them has been to establish art museums with their names attached. Henry Clay Frick, one of the most ruthless plutocrats of the Gilded Age, left behind the incomparable Frick Museum in New York City. Isabella Stewart Gardner, a much more benign soul, gave us hers in Boston. J. Paul Getty founded two in Los Angeles.

Alice Walton, the 62-year-old daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton and one of the wealthiest women in the U.S. ($21 billion and counting), has chosen not to put her name on her new museum in Bentonville, Ark., where her father started Walmart in 1962. That can be called an act of exemplary self-restraint, because the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is one terrific specimen of art-institutional splendor–the most impressive to appear in the U.S. since the Getty Center opened its doors 14 years ago.

The museum is Alice Walton’s personal project, not Walmart’s. But it’s bound to strike some people as a chapel in honor of an older America that big-box stores are devouring–and perhaps an attempt to soften the image of her father’s company, the retail behemoth that steamrollered traditional downtowns. However one feels about Walmart, though, Crystal Bridges–nestled in a wooded ravine within a 120-acre park–is beautifully achieved, as both a building and a collection. Walton’s chosen architect, Moshe Safdie, provided her with a supple sequence of eight interconnected pavilions of concrete and inlaid wood. They surround a man-made reflecting pond crossed by the crystal bridges, two glass-walled spans with arching ribbed roofs. One holds the museum restaurant; the other contains two masonry-walled galleries that sit within like minimalist cube sculptures.

And then there’s the art. The highest ambition of any museum is to be encyclopedic: to have choice examples from every major artist and period. Walton’s museum opens in something close to that condition. She’s been collecting for decades to get there, sometimes in a blaze of unwanted publicity. In 2005 she made a well-publicized purchase from the New York Public Library of Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, reportedly for $35 million. Two years later her attempt to buy The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins from a Philadelphia medical school failed when two Philadelphia art institutions rushed in to buy it jointly rather than let it leave the city. And Walton’s effort to acquire art from cash-strapped Fisk University–in the kind of fire sale disallowed by museum professional associations–has been tied up in court challenges.

But most of her collecting has been much quieter and well targeted. The museum’s greatest strength is in 19th century landscape painting, where American art made its first plausible claim to a power and originality rivaling the art of Europe. All the big names are here–Hudson River painters like Durand and Thomas Cole, masters of light and atmosphere like Fitz Henry Lane, and the composers of the crashing visual chord Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. But Crystal Bridges is also a museum that finds room on its walls for neglected artists like the grimly fascinating surrealist George Tooker. And it smartly declines to separate high art from the kind connected to magazine illustration and other mass media. Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter, his Pallas Athena in overalls, rubs shoulders with an Arshile Gorky abstraction conducting a high-minded conversation with Cubism. By the time you get to the monumental head of Dolly Parton by Andy Warhol–an artist who started as a fashion illustrator–it’s clear that contemporary life has made the whole divide between high and low pretty hard to sustain.

There are patchy spots in the collection, especially after World War II. There’s no big pulsing Mark Rothko, no blooming Cy Twombly. But with an acquisitions endowment of $325 million, part of a $800 million gift from the Walton Family Foundation, those will probably come along in time. The pyramids weren’t built in a day.