American Wing Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing Galleries for Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Opened January xvi, 2012
Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, blueprint architects

A brief tour of the gallery titled "History, Landscape, and National Identity, 1850–75."

The approach to Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851.

All photography is past the author. All artworks are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, unless otherwise specified.

Fig. 15, Thomas Sully, Queen Victoria, 1838. Oil on sail (left); Thomas Crawford, The Babes in Wood, ca. 1850; this etching, 1851. Marble (centre); Samuel F. B. Morse, Susan Walker Morse (The Muse), ca. 1836–37. Oil on sail (right). View of next gallery, "Art in the Folk Tradition, 1800–1900," with unidentified artist, Archangel Gabriel sign, 1810–35. Painted forest. Extended loan, American Folk Art Museum, New York.

Fig. 23, Thomas Cole, written report for View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. Oil and graphite on limerick lath. Private collection (left); and Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, later on a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. Oil on canvas (right).

Fig. 28, Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas (far left); Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, 1879–80; this cast, 1910; Statuary, marble (left); Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866. Oil on canvas (center); John Rogers, "Wounded to the Rear": One More Shot, 1864; this bandage, 1865. Statuary (right); Homer, Rainy Mean solar day in Camp, 1871. Oil on sheet (far correct).

Fig. 29, Theodor Kaufmann, On to Liberty, 1867. Oil on canvas (left); Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Abraham Lincoln: The Man (Standing Lincoln), 1884–87, reduced version, 1910; this bandage, 1911, purchased in 2012. Bronze (center); and Winslow Homer, Dressing for the Carnival, 1877. Oil on canvas (right).

Fig. 33, James Earle Fraser, Terminate of the Trail, 1918; this cast, by 1919. Bronze (left); Thomas Moran, The Teton Range, 1897. Oil on canvas (middle); and Hermon Atkins MacNeil, A Main of the Multnomah Tribe, 1903, this cast, probably 1907. Bronze (right).

Fig. 34, From left to correct: William Merritt Chase, Carmencita, 1890. Oil on canvas; Edwin Lord Weeks, Rajah Starting on a Hunt, 1892?; Robert Blum, The Ameya, by 1893. Oil on sheet; Henry Ossawa Tanner, Flight into Egypt, 1923. Oil on canvass; case with Paul Wayland Barrett, Carry Cub Training, 1887. Bronze; and Barrett, Bohemian Bear Tamer, 1887. Statuary. Collection of Erving and Joyce Wolf.

Fig. 36, Mary Cassatt, Immature Mother Sewing, 1900. Oil on canvas (far left); Bessie Potter Vonnoh, A Young Mother, 1896; this cast, ca. 1906. Bronze (left); Cassatt, Female parent and Kid (Baby Getting Up from His Nap), ca. 1899. Oil on canvass (center); Vonnoh, Daughter Dancing, 1897; this cast, ca. 1906. Bronze (right); and Cassatt, Mother and Child (The Oval Mirror), ca. 1899. Oil on canvas (far right).

Fig. 45, Theodore Robinson, The Old Mill, ca. 1892. Oil on canvas (upper left); Robinson, A Bird'due south Heart View, 1889. Oil on canvas (lower left); Robinson, Evening at the Lock, Napanoch, New York, 1893. Oil on canvas (upper right); Robinson, Low Tide, Riverside Yacht Social club, 1894. Oil on sail (lower right).

Fig. 49, Homer, Northeaster; Maine Coast, 1896. Oil on canvas; and Searchlight on Harbor Entrance, Santiago da Cuba, 1901. Oil on canvas; and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan, 1883–86; this cast by 1900. Bronze. Us Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, Oyster Bay, New York.

The New American Fly Galleries for Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art (MMA) in New York reopened with much fanfare and political rhetoric on Monday, January 16, 2012. Both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York Urban center Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave remarks at the opening dinner, acknowledging the crucial part played by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in advancing American civilization on the national and international phase. Linking art to politics in a predictably hyperbolic way, Clinton ended her short oral communication with a patriotic and optimistic statement about how the New American Wing "holds the hope of what this land stands for, who we are as a people, and the kind of future nosotros will make together."[1] The newly refurbished galleries suggest that the MMA shares the Secretary of Land's sense of pride in, and thousand aspirations for, historical American art. Since its inception in 1870, the MMA has caused and promoted American art and arguably devotes more real estate than nearly, if non all, major museums to its presentation. Its newly conceived and re-organized galleries serve as a lofty setting to advance the grandiosity and masterpiece-condition of American art in what might be considered a typically extravagant and larger-than-life New York manner. This effect is most obvious in the new core or "thousand" gallery presided over by Emanuel Leutze'due south "great picture," Washington Crossing the Delaware in a spectacular, "eagle-crested" gold frame, reproduced from photographs of the original (fig. one). The aggressive grapheme of the MMA's presentation is further illuminated by comparing the installation of the Leutze with that of Thomas Sully's "great flick" of Washington, The Passage of the Delaware (1819) in the new American Fly at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). In contrast to the MMA's painting placed in an ample, arched infinite with skylights, the MFA, Boston'south Sully painting looks cramped in its gallery space, diminishing the commanding ability of the image and visually tempering the stateliness and nobility of American art.[2] The two installations expose the indelible stereotypes of these two East coast cities, known respectively for their glitzy and puritanical characters.

Returning to the MMA's galleries, I want to concentrate on their particular vision of American art in light of recent trends in art historical scholarship and museum exercise likewise as in terms of contemporary culture. How do the reconfigured galleries shape the visitor's experience and perception of American art? What artists and themes are highlighted? To what extent do the installation and its architectural setting reinforce, or depart from, conventional narratives and iconic ideas about American art? Exercise the galleries succeed in making American art "relevant" to contemporary audiences?

Architectural Layout and Design
The opening of the xx-three galleries of painting and sculpture on the second floor marked the culmination of a 3-phase renovation of the American Fly, which began with the Charles Engelhard Courtroom in May 2007. These galleries are the focus of this review.[iii] Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates gave the galleries "the best facelift on the Upper East Side" as Mayor Bloomberg wittily commented. Eliminating the disorienting and hard to navigate mezzanine level and the multi-floor organization American Wing that Roche and his firm conceived in 1980, they have designed a space where visitors can perceive and explore the history of American painting and sculpture from 1730 to 1920 in an uninterrupted fashion. To be more precise, they tin can run into what the MMA's curators deem the masterpieces from the collection, and and then if they want to see the depths of the collection, they tin visit the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art on the flooring below to continue their report of American art, an experience enhanced by new touch-screens on kiosks at the end of each alley, making the collection easier to search and specific works easier to locate.

The redesign and enlargement of the gallery space simultaneously pays homage to the past and embraces contemporary ideas about museum installations. In an endeavor to focus attending on the artworks themselves and to heighten their masterpiece condition, the American Fly galleries reconstruct the wait and feel of Richard Morris Chase's original nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts museum interiors with their high, vaulted ceilings, light-colored walls, skylights, and oak floors with limestone trim, which visually prescribes the distance that the viewer must leave betwixt her/himself and the artworks. The ordered and harmonious await of the galleries with their predominantly single-row arrangements of artworks is enhanced by hiding the HVAC organisation, then zip distracts visually from the artworks on view. The redesign likewise embraces current trends in exhibition design, about specifically the idea of the impermanence and changeability of museum installations. A sliding system for hanging and wall label holders on a rail facilitate future alterations to the works on view and their accompanying labels. Equally Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, the curator of the American Fly, explained, this presentation of the museum's collection is not permanent, but ongoing.[4] Moreover, she welcomes dialogue and suggestions for future arrangements that may reveal shifts in scholarship and, more broadly, in society.[five] Her offer echoes contempo thinking near the museum equally an institution that must remain responsive to gimmicky times, relevant, and upwards-to-date rather than entrenched in the past.

In fact, the galleries themselves are bundled and then as to encourage and foster a cross-temporal dialogue among the artworks. Consequently, sight lines play an essential office in the installation, offering views from one gallery to the next and creating an enfilade effect forth the master walkways. In ane direction, the company can trace visually the portraits of George Washington past Charles Willson Peale (ca. 1779–81), Gilbert Stuart (ca. 1800), and Emanuel Leutze (1851) (fig. 2). Then, after turning the corner to the left and walking through a gallery of genre scenes, subsequently portraits from the Gold Age to the Ashcan school come into view (fig. three). In other instances, as with the landscape painter John Frederick Kensett, a mid-career and a late work appear in adjoining rooms along the aforementioned sight line, revealing the artist's departure from conventional framing and low-cal effects in his final images of the Connecticut declension (fig. four). For those familiar with Kensett's Hudson River scenes, his Last Summer's Work may come every bit a surprise given that it predates Impressionism, yet shares the Impressionist and mail-Impressionist fascination with atmospheric lite furnishings and the flattening of the movie plane.

The well-spaced artworks and labels with contextual details as well equally overviews of each theme or menstruation in every gallery make the installation visitor-friendly. The layout also grants the viewer the liberty to progress forward or backward in time depending on which entrance is used on the second floor. The galleries, with a few exceptions, take multiple doorways, allowing visitors to construct their own path as they explore the collections. For instance, ane might opt to proceed through the primal walkway, tracing the history of portraiture from Copley to Peale to Sargent to Henri; or to wander off the primary path to investigate the folk tradition or Hudson River Schoolhouse landscape painting. The curators cleverly used William Blitz's eagle in the "John Singleton Copley" gallery to direct visitors to the left so they will turn the corner to continue their tour through the paintings and sculpture galleries (fig. v). This semaphore, however, effectively marginalizes the decorative arts in the gallery side by side to the Copley paintings, and it also repurposes Blitz's eagle, which initially was constructed to support the sounding board for the pulpit in Saint John'south Evangelical Lutheran Church building in Philadelphia.

The more than viewer-friendly and integrated space has its drawbacks. The harmonious atmosphere and similarity of the installations from one gallery to the next create the illusion of a unified and continuous history of American art. The advent of the galleries themselves, therefore, seems to threaten, if not nullify, the class, ethnic, and regional distinctions, which have become key to recent histories of American art, every bit advanced in survey textbooks, including American Encounters and Framing America.[vi] Significantly, the MMA does not deny the multiplicity of American art. Texts on the labels, not visual cues, elaborate its complexities and its local and cross-cultural influences. The question lingers whether this approach is successful at a time when attention spans are short and information seems best conveyed through visual means and outset impressions.

Gallery Overview
The artworks in the twenty-three galleries are arranged in a largely chronological way interspersed with some thematic groupings and rooms defended to ane or ii canonical artists. John Singleton Copley has his ain gallery, and Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins share a infinite, though works by all 3 artists appear in other galleries also. The installation puts detail emphasis on the genre of portraiture, Hudson River School landscapes, and American Impressionism, all regarded as strengths of the collection.

The American Wing starts with the Colonial period in the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries of Eighteenth-Century American Art. The first room titled "Colonial Portraiture, 1730–76," contains formal portraits past native-born John Singleton Copley and Robert Feke, Scottish émigré John Smibert, and British-born artists Joseph Blackburn and John Wollaston (fig. 6). While these paintings express the ethics and tastes of a wealthy East coast guild, a portrait of a Spanish colonial countess offers a related yet distinct approach to portraiture, and Matthew Pratt's The American Schoolhouse (fig. 5), which portrays members of Benjamin Due west's studio in London, introduces the themes of the creative person's studio and international art pedagogy that are explored in greater depth in the nineteenth-century section of the American Wing. The succeeding gallery continues with the genre of portraiture but focuses on Copley's depictions of men, women, and children (fig. 7). Moving into the next room means advancing into the "Era of the Revolution, 1776–1800" with its more varied group of subjects, such as Benjamin West's Biblical and literary scenes; John Trumbull's dramatic historical battle scene, The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar (fig. viii); full-length portraits of statesmen and heroes, such as Charles Willson Peale's George Washington; and marble portrait busts of George Washington by the Italian-built-in Giuseppe Ceracchi, and Benjamin Franklin by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (fig. 9).

"Portraits in Miniature, 1750–1920" occupies a small, ancillary gallery on the left. As the visitor enters the room, the space illuminates, revealing a glass wall case filled with miniatures dating from the eighteenth century to the belatedly nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when this practice was revived later on it had been eclipsed by the daguerreotype (fig. 10). The presentation highlights the work of women artists, particularly Sarah Goodridge, Laura Coombs Hills, and Lucia Fairchild Fuller (fig. 11). Beside the case with the miniatures is a vitrine containing a miniature portrait painter'southward box, ca. 1790s, showing the types of tools and materials used by these more often than not itinerant artists (fig. 12).

The next ii galleries, "Faces of the Immature Republic, 1789–1800" and "Portraiture and Still Life, 1800–1850" marker the beginning of the Joan Whitney Payson Galleries. They farther the exploration of heroic portraits, such every bit Gilbert Stuart'southward George Washington (fig. 13), and introduce centre-class portraiture by Ralph Earl (fig. 14); early nineteenth-century romantic and poetic portraiture by Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Sully; and still lifes, most notably by members of the Peale family. Prominently placed in the middle of "Portraiture and Still Life, 1800–1850," Thomas Crawford's sculpture The Babes in Wood (fig. xv), a marble of an orphaned male child and his sister embracing and lying down on the wood flooring in an eternal sleep, suggests that sculpture, like several of the paintings in this gallery, captured sentimental themes meant to elicit an emotional response from the viewer.

The side by side gallery, "Art in the Folk Tradition, 1800–1900," covers an entire century and a diverseness of pictorial and sculptural practices: from painted portraits, such as Ammi Phillips' Mrs. Mayer and Girl (fig. 16), and monumental sculpture (in forest, not marble or bronze), such as William H. Rumney's Andrew Jackson (fig. 17), to functional objects, including a sign with the archangel Gabriel originally from the Angel Inn in Guilford Middle, New York (fig. 15), a case of duck decoys by various identified and unidentified makers, and a polychromed wood, phrenological head attributed to Asa Ames (fig. 18). The curators have expanded the presentation of the MMA's folk art collection by securing extended loans from the American Folk Fine art Museum.[vii] While the attention dedicated to a type of art that has risen in prominence over the last several decades is admirable, some scholars and visitors may wonder why it has to be separated from the other art on view.

Genre paintings of city and country life line the walls of the beginning of two galleries defended to "Life in America, 1830–60." Divided roughly in one-half, one side focuses on rural, outdoor activities, including William Sidney Mount's Cider Making and George Caleb Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (fig. 19), and the other side on urban and domestic scenes, as exemplified past ii satirical New York City scenes by an unidentified creative person (fig. 20), Francis William Edmonds' The New Bonnet and Lilly Martin Spencer's Conversation Piece (fig. 21). The theme of everyday American life reoccurs several galleries away, extending from 1860–eighty. This time, still, the sense of humour found in some of the earlier works is gone. Portraits, such as Seymour Joseph Guy's The Competition for the Bouquet: The Family of Robert Gordon in Their New York Dining-Room and Eastman Johnson's The Hatch Family (fig. 22), which depicts the Wall Street broker and later the president of the New York Stock Exchange surrounded by his family, announced along with representations of women and children by Johnson, Guy, Homer, and Saint-Gaudens, which evoke both the profound shifts in club during and after the Civil War and the need for "reassuring slices of human feel," as explained in the gallery's wall text.

Three galleries explore the development of Hudson River School landscape painting: "Emergence of the Hudson River School, 1815–50"; "History, Landscape, and National Identity, 1850–75"; and "Late Hudson River School, 1860–80." Thomas Cole's View from Mountain Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (fig. 23) as well as five other landscapes past him and paintings by Frederic Edwin Church, Kensett, and Asher B. Durand are on view in the "emergence" gallery. Along with the finished oil paintings, a pocket-sized oil sketch for The Oxbow and four sketches by Church (fig. 24) reveal the practice of sketching essential to this landscape painting tradition. "History, Landscape, and National Identity, 1850–75" is the grandest space in the installation with its double-sized room, skylight, and arched ceiling; it features big, panoramic landscapes. It visually conveys that American landscape painting came to rival history painting in significance and calibration during the Ceremonious War menstruum and that American artists traveled abroad to find subject field matter. Central to the installation in this gallery is a triumvirate of "great pictures," Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains, Lander'southward Top, Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Church building'due south The Heart of the Andes (figs. 25 and 26; for a panoramic tour, see the video at the beginning of this review). The curators derived inspiration for their hanging from that at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in New York City in 1864, an outcome intended to stimulate "patriotic fervor and national pride" while raising money for volunteer efforts to support the troops in camps and hospitals.[8] To reinforce and explain this association, two, free-standing pedestals display reproductions of Mathew Brady's photograph of the North Wall of the Art Gallery, Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, 1864, and an engraving from Frank Leslie'due south Illustrated Weekly (Apr 1864). The third and final Hudson River School gallery includes landscapes past Sanford R. Gifford, George Inness, Martin Johnson Heade, Kensett, and Fitz Henry Lane, revealing the influence of the French Barbizon Schoolhouse, Charles Darwin'southward theories, and the fascination with atmospheric light furnishings, though the controversial term "luminism" is advisedly eschewed (fig. 27). In the Hudson River School galleries, the sculpture consists mostly of portrait busts of painters whose work is on view and marbles and bronzes that introduce the theme of Native Americans, such as Erastus Dow Palmer's Indian Girl or the Dawn of Christianity (1853–56; this etching, 1855–56) and John Quincy Adams Ward's The Indian Hunter (1860; this cast, earlier 1910).

The "Ceremonious War Era, 1860–eighty" gallery features Homer'south depictions of the Civil War, most notably his paintings inspired by his before work as an artist-correspondent Prisoners from the Forepart and Rainy Day in Camp along with his post-war commentary, The Veteran in a New Field. A multifariousness of perspectives on emancipation as well are represented, as exemplified past the installation of Theodor Kaufmann's painting On to Liberty, which portrays fleeing African Americans in a war-torn landscape that suggests their future remains uncertain; Augustus Saint-Gaudens' bronze Abraham Lincoln: The Homo (Standing Lincoln) with its embodiment of Lincoln equally the Dandy Emancipator; and Winslow Homer'southward painting Dressing for the Carnival, which depicts African Americans celebrating during Independence Day celebrations after emancipation (fig. 29).

Leaving behind war and turmoil, the gallery entitled "In the Creative person'due south Studio, 1865–1900" turns attention to the representation of artistic practice on one side and trompe l'oeil nonetheless lifes of studio props, well-nigh notably by William Harnett and John Peto, on the opposite wall (figs. 30 and 31). The succeeding gallery abruptly transitions to "The W, 1860–1920," ane of the few galleries where painting and sculpture are successfully given equal attention. Both paintings and bronzes of cowboys and soldiers by Frederic Remington are on view (fig. 32), and there is a poignant system of Thomas Moran'due south wilderness landscape, The Teton Range, only south of Yellowstone, designated in 1872 as a national park, flanked by James Earle Fraser'south exhausted American Indian in Cease of the Trail, and Hermon Atkins MacNeil'south proudly standing, A Master of the Multnomah Tribe, a larger version of which was used in the sculptor'southward monument, The Coming of the White Man (fig. 33).

In dissimilarity to the ethnic character of "The W," "The Cosmopolitan Spirit, 1860–1900" includes paintings past Edwin Austin Abbey, William Merritt Chase, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler and sculpture by Paul Wayland Bartlett and Olin Levi Warner, that attests to the international and cross-cultural interests of American artists and their patrons. Their increasingly piece of cake access, through travel or published images, introduced them to strange places with seemingly exotic ways of life and activities, such as bear taming and processed blowing (fig. 34). Canonical paintings past Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins fill the next gallery and distinguish Eakins equally a master of the portrait and Homer as a master of the sea, as exemplified by Eakins' The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) and Homer's Northeaster (fig. 35).

"Images of Women, 1880–1910" returns to the theme of domesticity explored in several earlier galleries, focusing on women, sometimes with children, engaging in care-taking or leisure activities in domestic spaces. Along with the usual depictions of women by male person artists, representations of female person figures by the painter Mary Cassatt and the sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh alternate on one side of the room, showing female person artists' characterizations of their ain gender (fig. 36).

Two galleries nowadays the MMA'south extensive holdings of works by so-called American Impressionists, including William Merritt Hunt, Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, John H. Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir. Their vibrant and painterly portrayals of American and European landscapes and scenes of daily life, with and without figures, contrast with the more traditional allegorical and mythological discipline matter of the sculpture by Daniel Chester French, Evelyn Beatrice Longman, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Quincy Adams Ward (fig. 37). A like contrast of painting and sculpture occurs in the next gallery, "Portraiture in the Grand Mode, 1880–1900," which every bit the title suggests, returns to the genre of portraiture though Saint-Gaudens' sculpture Victory does not fit into this category (fig. 38). Here, total-length portraits of wealthy American and European sitters by Chase, Eakins, Sargent, and Whistler supervene upon the heroes and statesmen found in earlier galleries. Even celebrated artists became the subjects of grand manner portraits. Sargent'southward representation of William Merritt Chase (1902) appears across the gallery from his society portraits of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), The Wyndham Sisters, and Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes (fig. 39).

The genre of portraiture connects the penultimate and the last galleries. Juxtaposed on the far wall, which tin exist viewed from the prior room, are two full-length portraits by the Ashcan School artist and member of the Eight, Robert Henri: The Masquerade Clothes, which depicts his second married woman, the Irish-born Marjorie Organ, and F. Ambrose Clark, which represents "a gentleman jockey," whose wealthy family commissioned this painting (fig. 40). The rest of the gallery features smaller-calibration genre paintings with New York settings and portraits by other members of the Ashcan schoolhouse and the Eight, including William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan, and Maurice Prendergast. The sculpture in this room coincides with the subjects of the paintings improve than in the prior rooms, every bit revealed by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle's statuary, Girl Skating (1906), which captures the urban poor in a manner that corresponds to that in the work of the Ashcan School artists and the 8 (fig. 41).

Analysis of Themes and Content
The MMA's new galleries adhere to the canon of American art advanced in the prior installation initiated in 1980. Artworks past white, male person painters and sculptors who rose to prominence in major cities on the East coast boss, equally do depictions of white men, women, and children. The galleries generally privilege accepted masterpieces, often lining up along ane wall at least three, and as many every bit v, works by celebrated artists, most notably Cassatt, Church, Cole, Copley, Eakins, Hassam, Homer, Saint-Gaudens, Sargent, and Stuart. Little room remains for artworks by lesser known American artists and for the introduction of visitors to a broader, more diverse range of American art. The masterpiece approach has additional shortcomings: it tends to favor the exceptions and the artists accounted more than progressive and experimental, equally exemplified by the exhibition of Copley'southward and Hassam'south works. Filling an entire gallery with Copley's revolutionary portraits does a disservice to the understanding of Colonial portraiture and misrepresents the significance of portrait painting in a civilisation that preferred aesthetically pleasing objects that also had a functional value. Similarly, showing 8 of Hassam'southward cityscapes and landscapes influenced by the French Impressionist manner exposes the curator H. Barbara Weinberg'due south preferences, as well as those of many visitors who adore all art associated with Impressionism, merely information technology denies a more balanced and heterogeneous assessment of the late nineteenth-century, giving the illusion that Impressionism was the predominant fine art motion.

However, some of the thematic groupings and label texts as well equally the private galleries dedicated to miniatures and folk fine art admit the more balanced scholarly arroyo to American painting and sculpture that has emerged during the concluding three decades. The new galleries suggest a more than inclusive idea of American fine art, both geographically and in terms of medium, simply the results of these efforts are mixed, due partly to the limitations of the MMA'southward collections and the strict divisions among the museum's curatorial departments.

Every bit in many big museums, the temporal and national boundaries of private departments established long agone limit the types of artworks on view in each section of the museum. At the MMA, the American galleries practice not present American art co-ordinate to the hemispheric concept of Art of the Americas, which has shaped recent scholarship and art historical investigation. Native American and Pre-Columbian objects do not appear in the American galleries, because they belong to separate departments in the museum.

Kornhauser and her colleagues take attempted to bridge some departmental boundaries and have attended to pregnant lacunae in the MMA's collection past securing loans from other institutions and private collectors. For instance, they borrowed from a private drove a Castilian colonial portrait of Doña Rosa Marìa Salazar y Gabiño, Countess of Monteblanco and Montemar, attributed to Cristóbal Lozano, a leading painter in Lima, Peru, and juxtaposed it with a portrait of a New Yorker by John Wollaston and a portrait of a New Englander by Joseph Blackburn (fig. 6). Although all three portraits describe wealthy sitters, exposing the elitist graphic symbol of painting during the eighteenth-century, the wall labels elaborate the complication of their cantankerous-cultural associations: the Countess' portrayal reveals the influence of French fashion in the New World while the other two paintings prove the touch on of British portraiture and fashion along the Due east declension, reinforcing the multicultural sources of American fine art in the first gallery.

Starting with the initial gallery, the vision of American art at the MMA is cosmopolitan and cross-cultural, albeit in a narrow, by and large American-European sense. In this respect, the installation dovetails with current ideas near American art and culture shaped by a post-national perspective, which disavows the notion of American exceptionalism. In "The Cosmopolitan Spirit, 1860–1900" gallery, the global and worldly outlook is nearly explicit: on one side of the room appear views of so exotic and afar locales, such every bit Edwin Lord Weeks' Indian scene, Rajah Starting on a Chase; Robert Blum'southward image of Japan, The Ameya, and Tanner's religious scene set in the Middle Due east, Flight into Egypt (fig. 34). This gallery too attests to several areas of interest in American scholarship: American Orientalism or, more than specifically, American representations of the Middle and Far East and the representation of the performing arts with British or European associations equally in paintings, such every bit Chase'southward Carmencita, a portrayal of the Spanish dancer who performed for him and his friends in his studio (fig. 42); Abbey'south King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1 (1898)(fig. 43); and Whistler's Cremorne Gardens, No. two (fig. 44), a London amusement park known for its theatrical spectacles and fireworks. Furthering the international theme, specifically the influence of French art and civilization on American artists, are the two galleries focused on "American Impressionism." Straight comparison is made of works done at dwelling and abroad by Theodore Robinson and Hassam. The arrangement of Robinson'south work consists of two paintings washed at Giverny and two paintings done in the United States, in New York State and Connecticut (fig. 45). Influenced past Claude Monet whom he met and visited in Giverny, Robinson painted landscapes in Giverny that evoke the light effects and distinctive atmosphere associated with the works Monet did there, and in comparison, his American landscapes seem bolder and brighter. The Hassam juxtaposition consists of a Parisian and a later New York City street scene, visually expressing his portrayal of both American and European urban life (fig. 46). What are missing from the presentation of the cosmopolitan and international character of American art are directly comparisons of works by American and European artists. During the reconstruction of the galleries, Sargent'due south Madame X and Cassatt'south Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly (1880) among other American works were on view in the nineteenth-century European galleries. Now, no longer can visitors run across these images in their European context; no longer tin they direct compare Cassatt'southward portrait to Berthe Morisot's representation of female figures or Sargent'south Madame X to paintings past Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. Over again, unimposing departments and galleries located in different sections of the museum stymie a total appreciation and understanding of these artworks and their cultural context.

Following recent tendencies in scholarship and museum do, attention is focused not only on the cross-cultural, hybrid nature of American art, but also on its local character, specifically on how the collection relates to its New York context. Equally described in the gallery overview, three galleries are dedicated to the development of the New York based Hudson River School, and the core gallery of the entire installation consists of a re-hanging of three "great pictures" by Bierstadt, Leutze, and Church building in the same placement as they appeared on the walls of a New York Metropolis consequence, the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in 1864. Thus, a New York context lies at the centre of the constellation of galleries despite the fact that the paintings in this room portray sites in Europe, South America, and the W. Scenes of New York Urban center street life reoccur throughout the installation: two nineteenth-century genre scenes showing the congested, cluttered, and indecorous streets of the city past an unidentified artist are found in the department titled "Life in America, 1830–60" (fig. twenty); in contrast, Childe Hassam'south Avenue of the Allies, Swell Britain, 1918, a lively and celebratory view of Fifth Avenue decorated with flags from the Allies, Great Britain, Brazil, and Belgium every bit well equally the U.s.a., looking northward from L-third Street, hangs in 2d room of "American Impressionism" (fig. 46); and William Glackens' Primal Park, Winter,an orderly image of heart-class recreation, is located in the terminal gallery of Ashcan School works (fig. 41).

Departmental divisions besides limit the range of media: no textiles are on view, and works on newspaper and photographs announced infrequently; exceptions include three Frederic Edwin Church landscape sketches borrowed from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, installed together in the "Emergence of the Hudson River Schoolhouse, 1825–50" gallery, and two daguerreotypes from the MMA's photograph collection that appear alongside the portrait miniatures to illustrate how miniature painters sought to compete with the daguerreotype. Although the number of media remains limited, more attention than in the prior installation is dedicated to the human relationship between painting and sculpture, underscoring the current accent on multi-media displays in museums and the increasing involvement in sculpture among scholars. In nearly every gallery, the curators take juxtaposed painting and sculpture. The sculptures sometimes consist of portrait busts of the artists on view. In the case of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana (fig. 47) and Paul Wayland Bartlett'south Maverick Bear Tamer (fig. 34), these pocket-size sculptures are used to link the second floor galleries to the sculpture court on the first floor where full-size versions of the works appear. Some of the painting and-sculpture juxtapositions heighten the agreement of a particular artist's experimentation with 2 distinct media, while other arrangements evidence the same theme addressed in related all the same disparate ways by a painter and a sculptor: for example, the placement of Remington's The Bronco Buster in front end of his oil on canvas painting titled On the Southern Plains, depicting American soldiers in the W, shows his arroyo to the dynamism of the American Westward in two different media (fig. 32). Similarly, Samuel Aloysius Murray'south bronze of Thomas Eakins suggests a sculptor'due south interpretation of a painter's activity in a gallery with many paintings depicting creative person's studios (fig. 48). The juxtaposition of Vonnoh's sculpture, Young Mother, and Cassatt's mother and child oil on canvases reveals the impressionistic handling and realistic emotion in both female person artists' depictions of women and children (fig. 36); and the placement of Eberle'southward bronze Girl Skating in a glass instance in front of Glackens' Central Park, Winter makes information technology appear as though the immature daughter in the sculpture has "jumped out" of the painting of children sledding in Cardinal Park (fig. 41). In other instances, the comparisons seem weak, even forced, leaving the visitor wondering about the connection. For example, Saint-Gaudens' The Puritan appears in front end of 2 Homer seascapes (fig. 49); and a display case of "American Public Sculpture" with its predominantly allegorical themes is located in the aforementioned gallery as a grouping of American Impressionist paintings by Sargent, Robinson, Twachtman, and others, emphasizing the bourgeois character of late nineteenth-century American sculpture as compared to the more progressive nature of painting at this time (fig. 37).

In add-on to reworking the conventional narratives of American art, the galleries demystify and expose creative creation. This underlying theme can be regarded every bit a response to contemporary concerns nigh "procedure" in the art world. Half of the gallery titled "In the Artist'due south Studio" is dedicated to representations of painters, sculptors, and etchers engaged in their arts and crafts. In an inspired juxtaposition of painting and sculpture, a Kenyon Cox painting depicting Augustus Saint-Gaudens at work in his studio on a sculptural relief of the creative person William Merritt Chase appears to the correct of a series of low-relief portraits of artists and friends, giving a behind-the-scenes expect at his process correct next to his bodily finished work (fig. 50). Two other rewarding commentaries on the painting process occur in the presentation of the miniature painter'south box (fig. 12) and the juxtaposition of the preliminary oil sketch and the finished painting of Cole's The Oxbow (fig. 51). The repeated references to creative process may be part of an appeal to contemporary audiences. It seems to accost the current fascination with transparency in creative production and with behind-the-scenes glimpses into the art world, as seen recently on television receiver and in documentary films as well as in videos included in museum exhibitions.

Conclusion
Despite the restrictions and limitations of a large institution like the MMA, Kornhauser and the other American Wing curators have transformed the presentation of American paintings and sculpture, departing from the prior installation by incorporating a number of new artworks and thematic groupings that embrace recent scholarly approaches and contemporary culture. The redesigned space is considerably more inviting and accessible than the awkwardly arranged rooms that existed previously, only its Beaux-Arts-inspired compages visually reinforces the status of the artworks as unapproachable masterpieces and insists on their uniformity. The appearance of the galleries, therefore, does not coincide well with gimmicky views most a broader, more than inclusive, and heterogeneous notion of American art like that advanced in the data on the wall labels and text panels. The apparent discord betwixt setting and contents seems to convey a curatorial, and perhaps institutional, ambivalence about the significance of American art and its presentation to the public. Kornhauser, however, encourages "interventions" by scholars and contemporary artists, then peradventure the galleries themselves volition become lively sites of dialogue and modify in the future.

For full general information:
http://www.metmuseum.org/americanwing

For interviews with the MMA's curators about the new installation on The New York Times website:
http://world wide web.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/06/arts/
design/20120106-met-american-panos.html?ref=pattern

Isabel L. Taube
School of Visual Arts, New York
taubeisa[at]gmail.com

---

I want to thank Emily Burns, Douglass Foundation Fellow, the American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art, for the informative and engaging tour she gave me of the new American Fly galleries. Her insights were invaluable to this review.

[1] To listen to the opening remarks of the Secretary of State and the New York City Mayor, delight visit http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/new-installations/american-wing/video-and-audio

[2] For an image of the MFA, Boston's installation of Thomas Sully's The Passage of the Delaware (1819), come across fig. nine in Emerge Webster's review of The Art of the Americas Wing, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Nineteenth-Century Fine art Worldwide 10, issue 2 (Autumn 2011), http://19thc-artworldwide.org/alphabetize.php/autumn11/review-of-the-art-of-the-americas-wing-museum-of-fine-arts-boston .

[3] The American Fly, which opened in 1924, was a freestanding, three-story structure to the northwest of the MMA's main edifice, designed by the American builder Grosvenor Atterbury (1869–1956). Then, in 1980, Kevin Roche, as part of his master program for the museum, enlarged the fly to include galleries for paintings and sculpture and created the Charles Engelhard Court to link the wing to the principal building. The current renovation, also by Roche and his architectural house, seeks to correct a number of structural problems and reorganizes the painting and sculpture galleries on a single level.

[four] Conversation with Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser on April 16, 2012.

[5] Kornhauser already has furthered this goal past organizing a symposium, "New Approaches to Presenting American Art," which regrettably was not well advertised, to which she invited Adam Gopnik, Kathleen A. Foster from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Professor Allan Wallach, and a diverse group of contemporary artists, including Chuck Shut and Kara Walker, to respond to the new galleries. Walker not surprisingly was quite dismissive, condemning the installation for advancing the "American myth of the cocky-made man and self-fabricated land." She then criticized the Colonial portraits for their flat compositions and ugly sitters and proclaimed Winslow Homer'due south paintings as the but "honest artwork." In conclusion, she asked for permission to re-install the galleries, promising to enliven them and breakdown their unified vision of American fine art.

[half-dozen] Angela 50. Miller, Janet C. Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf, and Jennifer L. Roberts, American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008); Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art, second ed.(New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008).

[7] The American Folk Fine art Museum sold its West 53rd Street edifice to the Museum of Modernistic Art in 2009 to help pay off its debt and relocated to a smaller space at ii Lincoln Square. Its extended loan to the MMA, therefore, benefits both institutions.

[8] Kornhauser stayed truthful to Leutze'due south original installation of his painting by reconstructing its frame, only in the case of Church, she departed from his option of frame. Church building's panoramic mural at present has an elaborately carved gilded frame, which once was used past the creative person and was cut downwards to fit this painting. Previously at the MMA, Centre of the Andes had been displayed in a replica of the dark wood frame with green drapery created for the Metropolitan Sanitary Off-white installation and afterward reused for The Icebergs (1861, Dallas Museum of Fine art). Kornhauser defended her selection of frame, stating that Church would simply have adopted the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair frame for special exhibitions and would have placed the painting in a golden frame for a longer-term installation in a patron's home. Conversation with Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser on April xvi, 2012.

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Source: https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn12/taube-reviews-the-american-wing-metropolitan-museum-of-art

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