Many of the best-known and most beloved works from the Metropolitan Museum's preeminent collection of American art will remain on view in various locations throughout the Museum for the duration of a four-year construction project – scheduled for completion in winter 2010-11. The project will reconfigure, renovate, or upgrade nearly every section of The American Wing. A major goal of the plan is to improve public access to, and visitor flow within, The American Wing's galleries.
While construction continues, visitors may view American art in three locations in the Museum: a series of first-floor galleries and period rooms and the mezzanine-level Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, all located in The American Wing; the central gallery on the main floor of the Robert Lehman Wing; and a section of the New Galleries for 19th- and Early 20th-Century European Painting and Sculpture temporarily dedicated to American paintings.
• On the first floor of The American Wing, a suite of galleries devoted to American art created between 1810 and 1840 remains on permanent view. These galleries (which opened to the public in 2007) feature works in all media that reflect the early 19th-century fascination with classical antiquity, especially ancient Greece. The style – known variously as Greek Revival, neoclassical, or classical – was particularly popular in America, because of a symbolic association with the tradition of democracy. A highlight is the monumental silver presentation vase crafted in 1824 by Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner. Although the form of the vase is based directly on a classical model, the engraved decoration includes scenes of the recently completed Erie Canal.
• The adjoining gallery contains a single work on a grand scale: John Vanderlyn's Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (1818-19), popularly called the Vanderlyn Panorama. This rare survivor of a form of popular entertainment that flourished in the 19th century is displayed "in the round," to suggest its original setting in the Rotunda – a building in City Hall Park constructed to house it.
• Adjacent to the Panorama is The Martha Fleischman Gallery, a space dedicated to mid-19th-century decorative arts. Arranged thematically, the room features a section on the interaction between art, literature, and the decorative arts, a section on the New York Crystal Palace Exposition of 1853, and several groupings of high-style American parlor furniture and paintings. Among the prominent New Yorkers to whom these works once belonged are the statesman Hamilton Fish, who served as Governor of New York, United States Senator, and United States Secretary of State; the financier Jay Gould, who became a leading American railroad developer and speculator; William Cullen Bryant, the dean of American poets and editor-in-chief of the New-York Evening Post; and John Taylor Johnston, the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum.
In addition to works from the Museum's permanent collection, the gallery will feature several important institutional loans. A deeply carved marble mantel made by Fisher and Bird for Hamilton Fish depicts scenes from Paul et Virginie – a French novel that promoted equality among the social classes (Museum of the City of New York). An ornate cabinet was commissioned by Jay Gould from Herter Brothers – America's premier cabinetmakers at the time (Lyndhurst, a National Trust Historic Site, Tarrytown, New York). Kindred Spirits, Asher B. Durand's painting of 1849, shows William Cullen Bryant with his friend Thomas Cole – the literary and artistic fathers of American landscape culture – on a promontory in the Catskill Mountains (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas). Kindred Spirits is considered the defining work of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting.
• Six first-floor period rooms will remain open: the Shaker Retiring Room, Renaissance Revival Parlor, Rococo Revival Parlor, Greek Revival Parlor, Gothic Revival Parlor, and McKim, Mead and White Stair Hall. Styles of furnishings range from the austere elegance of traditional Shaker design, to the luxurious curves that typify the work of Duncan Phyfe and his shop, and elaborately carved forms of John Henry Belter.
• The historical progression of American domestic interior styles culminates in the Deedee Wigmore Gallery. Works from the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements of the late 19th and early 20th are shown, as are a selection of works by the American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany.
• Many masterpieces of American fine and decorative art have moved to The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, the wing's much-emulated visible storage gallery. The Luce Center typically hosts a display of the entire reserve collection of American art. For the period of construction, the curators have also installed the highlights of the collection in this space, rather than put them in closed storage. Works by American masters such as John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Frank Lloyd Wright remain on view until their renovated galleries reopen. As always, the computerized collection catalogue is available for all visitors in The Luce Center, and provides up-to-date locations for all American Wing collections.
• Nine important American landscape paintings, ranging in date from 1836 to about 1897, will be on view in the Museum's Robert Lehman Wing until winter 2010-11. The centerpiece of the installation is the magnificent 1836 canvas View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow by the noted American painter Thomas Cole, who is often called the father of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes, 1859, and Albert Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863, will also be shown, along with works by William Bradford, Jasper Francis Cropsey, George Inness, and William Lamb Picknell.
• A selection of the greatest and most popular paintings by 19th-century American artists who studied, lived, or worked in Europe is temporarily on view in the Galleries for 19th- and Early 20th-Century European Paintings and Sculpture. This unprecedented arrangement at the Museum offers a rare opportunity to see John Singer Sargent's celebrated portraits Madame X, The Wyndham Sisters, and Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes in a gallery near Édouard Manet's portraits, which are related in their date, scale, and association with the legacy of Velázquez. Other highlights include works by Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and James McNeill Whistler.
The American Wing
The Metropolitan Museum has acquired important examples of American art since its establishment in 1870. On November 10, 1924, the Museum's American Wing – the first permanent installation in an American art museum of American colonial and early Federal decorative arts and architecture – opened to the public.
The collection is supervised by two curatorial departments: American Paintings and Sculpture, established in 1948, and American Decorative Arts, organized in 1934. (Paintings and sculpture created by artists born after 1876, as well as decorative arts created after 1916, are in the Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.)
Construction Overview
The last major construction project in The American Wing was in 1980, when
spacious galleries designed to house American decorative arts, as well as American paintings and sculpture, were opened.
With the opening of the New Classical Galleries in 2007, the first of three phases in the current construction project was completed. Phase Two involves improvement of the display of works in silver, ceramics, and glass on the balcony of The Charles Engelhard Court and a reconfiguration of the sculpture as well as architectural enhancements to the Engelhard Court itself. In addition, a number of the colonial period rooms will be reinstalled and a new example in the 17th- and early 18th-century New York Dutch tradition from the Albany area will be added. Completion of Phase Two is expected in April 2009.
Phase Three will involve a total renovation of the paintings galleries with the addition of eight completely new galleries for the display of the Museum's unparalleled collection of American paintings and sculpture. Public access to all the new galleries will be greatly improved by a new public elevator. Completion of the final phase is scheduled for winter 2010-11.
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May 27, 2008
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