Yet her mission is unlike those of her predecessors, or of more recent art patrons like Ronald S. Lauder and his Neue Galerie. They set out to put great works on display in cultural capitals like New York and Boston. Instead, Ms. Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — the first major institution dedicated to American artists in 50 years, to be housed in a building more than twice the size of the current Whitney Museum of American Art — seeks to bring high art to middle America here in this town of 35,000 that is best known as the home of Wal-Mart.
Ms. Walton, the daughter of Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, has worked on the museum for nearly a decade, but has said little about it in public until now. In a recent interview at Town Branch, her family home here, she said she wanted to turn Bentonville into an international destination for art lovers when the museum opens on Nov. 11. At the moment the most significant nearby cultural attractions are two hours away: a museum of Western and American Indian art in Tulsa, Okla., and, in the other direction, the country-music magnet of Branson, Mo.
“For years I’ve been thinking about what we could do as a family that could really make a difference in this part of the world,” said Ms. Walton, who is 61. “I thought this is something we desperately need, and what a difference it would have made were it here when I was growing up.”
The 201,000-square-foot museum was designed by the Boston architect Moshe Safdie for a site around two ponds on 120 acres of former Walton family land. Named for the nearby Crystal Spring, the museum will display top-flight works by American masters from the colonial era to the present, with the largest concentrations coming from the 19th and 20th centuries. Although the collection — currently about 600 paintings and sculptures — is still small by the standards of big museums, it is growing at a steady clip.
“She has not just been concentrating on what could be perceived as the greatest hits in American art,” said John Wilmerding, an art historian and professor at Princeton University, who has been advising Ms. Walton for seven years and is now on the Crystal Bridges board. “She has collected the work of some of these artists in depth,” quietly amassing substantial bodies of work by figures like Martin Johnson Heade, Stuart Davis, George Bellows and John Singer Sargent.
Ms. Walton, who has been an art collector most of her life, turned to buying art specifically for the museum in 2005, resulting in a years-long spending spree that has made her a recognized force in the art market. She has been one of those mysterious anonymous buyers at auctions and at galleries who often pay top dollar and has spent many tens of millions of dollars on works like Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington from 1797 ($8.1 million), Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” from 1849 ($35 million) and Norman Rockwell’s 1943 “Rosie the Riveter” ($4.9 million).
She has also bought more recent works, including a Jasper Johns “Alphabets” painting from 1960-62 (priced at $11 million) and a 1985 Warhol silkscreen of Dolly Parton and a 2009 Chuck Close triptych depicting Bill Clinton (prices unknown). (She is hoping that both Ms. Parton and Mr. Clinton, a friend, will attend the opening.)
Her museum has commissioned several major site-specific works, including a giant silver tree by Roxy Paine that sits at the entrance and a hypnotic large-scale light installation by James Turrell. (The museum’s director, Don Bacigalupi, recruited nearly two years ago from the Toledo Museum of Art, is a specialist in contemporary art and has been encouraging Ms. Walton to expand the museum’s holdings by living artists.)
Museum officials said they were planning for about 250,000 visitors in their first year and expect an annual operating budget of $16 million to $20 million. In addition to the 120 full-time jobs the institution is creating, they said, it will pump millions of tourist dollars into northwest Arkansas.
Ms. Walton first started thinking seriously about building an art museum on family land in the late 1990s and brought it up a few times at the meetings the family holds three times a year. She felt she needed the backing of her nieces and nephews, she said, because the land would have eventually become theirs. (Ms. Walton, who is divorced, has no children.)
“That decision brewed for a year and a half,” she said in her Arkansas drawl, before there was unanimous agreement.
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