A Monitored Engagement:
Paths, Cells and Scrutiny
at Glenstone

Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment
Glenstone, Potomac, MD
05.05.18 – 01.20.18

I misstep twice during my second visit to Glenstone, a private art museum nestling in the bucolic wooded suburbs of Potomac, Maryland. I am first approached by a guide, dressed in the museum’s iconic, slightly futuristic, grey uniform, while walking along the enormous driveway connecting entrance gate to main gallery. She scales the hill at a slight jog, and I wonder if she has been alerted to my mistake by way of a camera hiding in a surrounding tree. The museum is preparing for a month-long hiatus in anticipation of the final stage of its multimillion-dollar expansion, and the grounds are mostly empty; I can’t imagine an alternative to CCTV that would warrant such a prompt response. ‘You can head in there, you know’, she says, catching her breath and gesturing towards a small path leading up to Jeff Koons’s mammoth Split-Rocker in the distance. I thank her for the effort and the information, explaining that the three white cones obstructing the path had deterred me. ‘Oh, those are just to prevent cars from driving onto the grass. You can head in on foot.’

The guide is friendly, genuinely, but her voice, maybe her posture too, are officious; I don’t feel strongly about seeing Split-Rocker up close, but now I’m not sure I have an option. She stands by the cones, as if she is holding a door open, and waits for me to walk up the path. The view from the lookout reveals the vast acreage of the property, including a cluster of new buildings of pale grey stone and glass, mid-construction. I look at the giant head of Split-Rocker, a hybrid of rocking horse and toy dinosaur covered in thousands of colourful flowers, until the guide seems satisfied. I’m embarrassed that I can’t come up with something to ask her about the work, since the Glenstone guides have been trained to answer questions rather than offer unprompted analysis, but it’s just so big that it doesn’t seem to merit any further discussion. We turn around and walk back along the path, onto the main driveway: she leading and I a dawdling puppy dog several feet behind. I am not sure if I am meant to follow, but she seems to be matching my pace, slowing when I slow so as not to leave me unattended again. A few more visitors come into sight and call her over to ask a question, granting me temporary seclusion once more.

Now, to my left, is another winding path leading down the hill to Richard Serra’s Contour 290, a curving sheet of steel embedded in the hillside. The same white cones separate the grassy path from the driveway. I descend the hill into the vast field.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me!’ Turning around, I find that another guide has appeared, again seemingly out of nowhere. He has paused his tour and looks perturbed, as he extends a third ‘Excuse me’ down the hill in my direction. ‘You can’t go down there, that is closed!’ I manage a flustered apology and make my way back up to the main driveway, the momentary confidence in proper etiquette instilled by the first guide immediately vanquished. I decide it’s safest to stay on paved roads until I make it to the Louise Bourgeois survey exhibition in the main museum pavilion.

Perhaps it is not surprising that on an estate prioritising the ‘seamless integration [of] art, architecture, and landscape’ the sign of a simple white cone has to double up on its wayfinding duties, signifying both come in and stay out.¹ Everything on the Glenstone property has been precisely planned and placed, to the extent that an Ellsworth Kelly obelisk overlooking the central pond feels equally like a sculpture and a HVAC ( heating, ventilation and air conditioning ) unit from the future. Accessibility becomes comprised by such an emphasis on design: the nameplates on the uniforms, I notice, are actually blank, metallic surfaces.

I follow the trail to the main patio, mostly empty except for another massive Serra. The private home of the museum’s founders, the billionaire couple Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales, is just across the pond. Maybe it is this sign, a building aesthetically similar to the open museum yet completely inaccessible, that undermines every ‘come in’ with a ‘stay out’. Glenstone is free, and in theory anyone is welcome but, in practice, reserving timed tickets and venturing out to this area, one of the wealthiest in the United States, requires transport, time and, most of all, knowledge of its existence.

Inside the museum, a palm-sized, marble sculpture of a simplified, curving home introduces Louise Bourgeois: To Unravel a Torment. Featuring roughly thirty works by the artist over a fifty-year span, the exhibition brings together sculpture, embroidery, drawing and installation, and Bourgeois’s psychologically charged work feels oddly at home in the sterile building of Glenstone. Even pared down to this manageable grouping of works, it is overwhelming in its breadth, richness and material tactility. The Curved House is an appropriate, digestibly scaled opener, treading the space between tenderness and anxiety that Bourgeois navigates so nimbly in her practice. The small, pink home is precious in its scale, and yet the unnerving bow to its foundation exudes peculiarity. A space that should be grounding and solid has been stretched and deformed.

This uncanny chill sits in many of the works on view, particularly in Bourgeois’s ballpoint-pen drawings of nervous spirals and the Cells, a series of enclosed rooms holding furniture, embroidered textiles, marble limbs and dim lights. In Cell ( Choisy ) a guillotine perches menacingly above a cube fabricated from steel and soiled windows. A miniature, marble building balanced on four legs and sealed inside becomes a lone body, isolated and imprisoned. In another, Cell III, a carved leg emerges from marble and a small figure lifts her torso, in a simultaneously erotic and pained gesture, under the suspended blade of a paper cutter. These dioramas have become emblematic of Bourgeois’s practice, capturing the turbulent psychology of a childhood marred by trauma, death and infidelity, and translating it into a poetic exploration of memory-infused architecture. In the context of the eerily empty galleries of Glenstone, an expansive property where even the most secluded nooks feel surveilled, another layer of unease begins to surface.

Glenstone has come under scrutiny several times since its opening in 2006, most recently from a lawsuit levelled against its foundation for ‘breach of contract and mismanagement’ by the contracting firm currently executing the expansion.² Like many private foundations – The Menil Collection, The Broad, the Rubell Family Collection – the ethics of Glenstone are murky. By housing the Rales’s collection in a separate building, just a few minutes’ walk from their private residence, the museum receives recognition as a philanthropic exercise, and its collectors receive hefty tax breaks. Because private foundations do not require visitors in order to qualify for these tax exemptions, there is little accountability, as far as the actual benefit to the public is concerned, beyond the recognition extended to it by isolated circles of art lovers.³ Sincere attempts to build substantial education programmes or even promote visitor numbers tend to be rare in these types of spaces; on days when the museum is open, Glenstone welcomes an average of only fifty visitors.⁴ It should be noted, too, that enormous sums of money are at stake – public tax returns reveal that, as of 2014, the foundation’s total assets exceeded a billion dollars.⁵

In one of the final works in To Unravel a Torment, an untitled soft sculpture from 2007, three ochre heads are placed nestling together on a geometric pillow. Although their features have been mostly omitted, small gaping mouths animate each face. It seems as if they might exhale or whisper at any moment. Interwoven into Bourgeois’s surreal imagery is an underlying framework of tenderness, a feeling I am missing in this place. It is undeniably present in the gestures of the museum staff maintaining the grounds and collections, but it feels markedly absent from the museum’s namesakes as I walk through the final room of the exhibition.

There are undoubtedly positive aspects of Glenstone that reflect the need for similarly structured institutions: private foundations expand the sheer quantity of art available to the public, especially when the majority of public museum collections remain indefinitely in storage; they offer an alternative institutional structure, in an era when federal funding to the National Endowment for the Arts has been repeatedly threatened by the current administration; and they occasionally fund fellowships and professional development programmes for aspiring museum workers, as in Glenstone’s two-year Emerging Professionals Program. However, the same level of care bestowed on the collections of these foundations should also extend to the public, if private museums are to continue claiming that these institutions are built for the public. As Glenstone prepares for a grand reopening, a greater emphasis on ‘Come in!’ should be at the forefront of its mission.

1. Glenstone’s mission <glenstone.org/about/mission>.

2. Colin Moynihan, ‘Contractor Sues Glenstone Museum Foundation for $24 Million’, New York Times, 6 September 2018.

3. Patricia Cohen, ‘Writing Off the Warhol Next Door’, New York Times,

10 January 2015.

4. Sarah Cascone, ‘A Frick for the 21st Century? Glenstone Is About to Become One of America’s Largest Private Museums’, artnet, 30 November 2017.

5. Internal Revenue Service, 2015, Return of Private Foundation, 990-PF <https: //projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/205938416>.