Donald R. McClelland; Smithsonian Curator
Hyfler/Rosner
By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 1, 2004; Page B06
Donald Roberts McClelland, 74, a retired Smithsonian
Institution museum curator who viewed art as a cultural
connector between countries, died Sept. 25 of cancer at his
farm in Upper Fairmount, Md. He had lived in Washington.
During his 35-year career, Mr. McClelland organized
exhibitions as diverse as drawings from Sri Lanka to major
artworks from Russia and the Vatican. From 1980 to 1996, he
worked for Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition
Services.
One of his first large international showings was the
American Impressionism exhibition that opened in Paris at
the Musee du Petit Palais and traveled through the former
Eastern Bloc countries, ending in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1982.
This display brought the first major showing of such art to
France and exposed Eastern Bloc countries to American art
and culture.
In the mid-1980s, with the memory of the U.S. boycott of the
Moscow Olympics still lingering, Mr. McClelland oversaw the
first bilateral cultural exchange between the Soviet Union
and the United States. It was designed to demonstrate what
the two countries had in common in the late 19th century.
The exhibitions -- "New Horizons: American Painting
1850-1920" and "Russia: The Land, the People -- Russian
Painting 1850-1910" -- sought to develop a mutual
understanding between the Soviets and the Americans. Raisa
Gorbachev opened the New Horizons exhibition in November
1987 at the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow.
Mr. McClelland also helped select art from museums in Moscow
for the 1990 show "Moscow: Treasures & Traditions," said to
be one of the most comprehensive art exhibits to come to the
United States from the Soviet Union. The exhibit was part of
the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle and later traveled to
Washington.
It had 200 icons, porcelain teacups, embroidered costumes,
folk art, maps, 16th-century armor and portraits.
Mr. McClelland wrote in the exhibition catalogue about
Moscow's art traditions and new influences on them:
"Certainly as we stand on the brink of this era of
'glasnost,' Moscow will once again preserve the glories of
its past as well as shape the challenges of its future."
Among Mr. McClelland's other exhibits was "Views of Rome
From the Thomas Ashby Collection of the Vatican Library,"
which opened in Rome in 1988. Other exhibitions included
major artworks from Austria, Germany, Ireland and Mexico.
His last exhibition was "Voyages and Visions: 19th Century
European Images of the Middle East From the Victoria and
Albert Museum."
Mr. McClelland was a native of Hinsdale, Ill., and served in
Army intelligence after the Korean War.
His interest in the museum field began after he joined a
University of Michigan/Princeton University archaeological
expedition to St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai,
Egypt, in 1956. There, he worked with the monastery's monks
to restore the chapel of St. Catherine.
He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in art
history from the University of Michigan and in the early
1960s was a research assistant at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London.
In 1963, he moved to Washington to work at the Corcoran
Gallery of Art.
Later that year, he took a position at what is now the
Smithsonian American Art Museum. His responsibilities
included overseeing the lending of paintings and decorative
arts to the White House during the administrations of
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mr. McClelland once commented about an international
exhibition he organized: "As audiences view a body of work
that challenged the established conventions of its own time,
they will find themselves students not only of art, but of
social history, politics and psychology, as well."
Survivors include his wife of 37 years, Janet Legendre
McClelland of Washington, and two daughters, Sylvia Marina
McClelland of Washington and Janet Newbold McClelland of San
Francisco.