Bates Lowry, Building Museum Founding Director, 80
DGH
Bates Lowry, a leading art and architectural historian who was
founding director of the National Building Museum and oversaw its
birth in the 1980s, a longtime Boston, Massachusetts, resident, who
had just had moved to New York the week before his death, died March
12, 2004, at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, of complications from
pneumonia, at the age of 80.
Dr. Lowry spent years in academia, holding teaching positions at
colleges from Massachusetts to California. He also wrote books on
subjects ranging from Renaissance art to the early photographic craft
known as the daguerreotype. On many projects he worked with his wife,
art researcher and mathematician Isabel Barrett Lowry.
His professional profile grew in the mid-1960s after he raised money
to salvage and restore art damaged by extensive flooding in Florence.
Recruited in 1968 as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
Dr. Lowry spent less than a year in the job because of differences
with key museum officials about expansion plans; many of his ideas
later were implemented.
In 1980, Congress chartered the National Building Museum, and Dr.
Lowry came to Washington to turn what had been the old Pension
Building near Judiciary Square into a museum and research center about
American architecture, construction and urban planning.
The building was a decaying structure dating from the 1880s, and Dr.
Lowry spent his first five years lobbying politicians to fund the
rehabilitation. Some members of Congress, the executive branch and the
General Services Administration, which financed the renovation and
maintenance of the museum, spent years debating the necessity of the
project and the time and money needed to complete it.
Dr. Lowry helped overcome much of this early skepticism with his
vision for the museum, which now has about 320,000 visitors annually.
When the museum opened in 1985, Dr. Lowry told The Washington Post:
"Americans have been more apt to study the great palaces of Europe
than our own architecture. This museum will try to see to it that at
an early stage in their education, Americans know what our important
buildings are, and what a record those buildings are of their own
society."
The first large exhibit was the well-received "Building a National
Image: Architectural Drawings for the American Democracy, 1789-1912."
The show explored the significance of federal building design from the
earliest days of the country.
"No one had ever gone to the National Archives and looked at drawings
of American building surveys there and to see what they would tell us
of our national image," said Judith Lanius, the museum's former
curator. "Everyone thought of them as working drawings."
Robert A. Peck, who in the early 1980s worked for Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan (D-N.Y.), a museum champion, said Dr. Lowry "was determined
at a time when the museum had almost no resources. His vision was to
have the highest museum and academic standards."
At the same time, Dr. Lowry's strength was not the daily management
aspects of working within a limited budget, and he did not seem to
enjoy the back-slapping nature of the political world.
Peck, now president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade and a
museum board member, said: "Some people found [Dr. Lowry] hard to
approach. . . . He was first and foremost an academic and not a
fundraiser or politician."
Dr. Lowry left the museum in 1987 and returned to his research and
writing.
A Cincinnati native, he attended the University of Cincinnati until
his college career was interrupted by Army service at the end of World
War II. While he was in France and Germany, his interest in art
history took hold.
Back in the United States, he graduated from the University of
Chicago, where he also received a master's degree and a doctorate,
both in art history. He wrote his doctoral dissertation about the
architectural history of the Louvre museum, which he visited on a
French government fellowship. He then held teaching positions at the
University of Chicago, the University of California at Riverside, New
York University and Pomona College in California.
While Art Department chairman at Brown University in the 1960s, he was
president of the Committee for the Rescue of Italian Art, for which he
raised money after the floods in Florence.
Impressed with his organizational skills, Rene D'Harnoncourt, the
legendarily smooth director of the Museum of Modern Art, hired the
largely unknown Dr. Lowry to succeed him. Within weeks, D'Harnoncourt
died after being hit by a car.
Dr. Lowry did not have the benefit of a longer transition. Issues
about a daunting fundraising project and persuading departmental heads
to work in closer conjunction with one another led to some strains,
said William S. Lieberman, a former MOMA colleague who is now chairman
of the modern art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York.
Dr. Lowry had the support of some trustees but not the museum's
president, CBS founder William S. Paley. Within a year, Dr. Lowry
resigned, citing "personal considerations."
He became Art Department chairman at the University of Massachusetts
at Boston. He and Isabel Lowry founded the Dunlap Society to develop
teaching materials, such as slides and fact sheets, to promote
American art and architectural history for schools and universities.
The business was named for the early American art historian William
Dunlap.
Dr. Lowry's books included "Visual Experience: an Introduction to Art"
(1961), "Renaissance Architecture" (1962) and "Silver Canvas:
Daguerreotype Masterpieces from the J. Paul Getty Museum" (1998), the
last co-written with his wife.