Art

...By the time we get to the Met's spectacular collection of Thomas Eakins paintings, the American Wing narrows to a long balcony gallery that offers a fresh view of Central Park, then surprises us again by dropping a level to a mezzanine floor that takes us from a series of elegant John Singer Sargent portraits, through American impressionism, to a small twentieth-century gallery that offers still another glimpse of Central Park...

...At the heart of the display are Frederic Remington's bronzes of cowboys, outlaws, and cavalry...

...The Charles Engelhard Court, the most spectacular part of the new American Wing, is a perfect case in point...

...But most importantly, Engelhard Court is not an isolated example of how often the Met's new Wing does not come to terms with the political and theological implications of American art...

...But what is not clear is how much of a break with the past the new American Wing represents or what the relationship between the Wing's vastness and the Museum's American holdings is...

...Art AMERICA ON DISPLAY LESS THAN VISIONARY SPACE THE last year and a half has been an extraordinary time for American art: an "American Renaissance" show at the Brooklyn Museum, a luminist show at the National Gallery, an "American Impressionism" show at Seattle's Henry Gallery, and most recently, an Edward Hopper retrospective at the Whitney...

...NICOLAUS MILLS Commonweal: 662...

...Although the Met's guide tothe American Wing declares, "Since its opening in 1870the Museum has been a consistent patron of American art," the Museum's purchasing history tells a different tale...

...Rather what it points up is that the Met's past lingers on in a fashion that still leaves much to be desired and that the spaciousness of its new American wing, unlike the traditionalism of the 1924 Grosvenor Atterbury Wing, belies...

...It is not a source of leisure but a place where man encounters God, where settlers created a democracy in the midst of wilderness, and what the Met has done with its new space time and again fails to live up to this ideal...

...Every nation that has tried it has found that every wise investment in the development of art pays more than compound interest...

...But the event most likely to affect the way American art is seen in the future is none of these nor anything so transitory as an exhibit...

...As designed by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, the American Wing has not only used light and space with stunning results, it has opened itself to the hills and surrounding foliage of Central Park...

...In the early 1920s money earmarked for American purchases was allowed to pile up unused, and in 1929 the Met refused an offer of what was then the largest private collection of American art, that of Gertrude Whitney...

...More typical are the views of the turn-of-the-century Met trustee who observed, "There is nothing American worth notice...

...The Met has chosen to exhibit American folk art but done so in a way that it is crammed together in one small room with everything from Edward Hicks's The Falls of Niagara to Shaker baskets and Amish quilts competing for space, and the same kind of thinking applies to the Met's display case featuring art from the American West...

...Were the Court an addition to Kevin Roche's Ford Foundation Building, there would be no question as to its purposes...

...As Calvin Tomkins points out in his history of the Met, Merchants and Masterpieces, the men who were the first patrons of the Museum wanted art that was indisputably important, and in the name of prestige the Museum turned to Europe with its Old Masters rather than to America...

...The space that Charles Olson describes as an American fact of life, like the space American artists from Thomas Cole to Georgia O'Keeffe have painted, is—whether one is speaking in religious or political terms—essentially visionary space...

...Yet in the same case we also find Albert Bierstdat's The Merced River, Yosemite Valley, as though it, too, conveyed a sense of American expansionism and the conquest of the West...

...Sad to say, it is not difficult to imagine Joseph H. Choate, one of the Met's founding trustees, touring the new American Wing and remarking as he did a century ago...

...But at the Met the vastness of the Court, the links it makes with Central Park are contradicted by what it contains...

...In one of the few critical evaluations of the new American Wing, Ada Louise Huxtable has described it as possessing both "impressive amounts of space and a creeping corporate veneer," and it is precisely in this tension that the new Wing's problems lie...

...Choate would be wrong in applying such commercial metaphors to the Met's American Wing, but not so wrong that their implications can be ignored...

...For the Met to have committed $18 million to a six-fold expansion of its American Wing is particularly significant, not only for what it says about the current status of American art but for what it reveals about the past...

...Despite its failed merger with the Whitney Museum in the late 1940s, the Met has come a long way from its early thinking on American art, and the new American Wing provides dramatic illustration that the Met is willing to spend money to continue its break with the past...

...The main galleries are not only large enough that Emanuel Leutze's enormous (12%' by 21') Washington Crossing the Delaware can comfortably share wall space, they are designed so that, as we move from room to room, we do not simply go from one horizontal rectangle to another...

...During the Met's first half-century this European emphasis remained, and even in the 1920s matters did not change significantly...

...The north wall is dominated by the neoclassic facade of Martin E. Thompson's 1824 United States Branch Bank...

...The entrance to the American Wing is the 12,000 square foot Charles Engejhard Court, where light pours in through the glassed-in west wall and a skylight 5% stories above the floor, and from this point on the feeling of openness that Engelhard Court achieves pervades the rest of the galleries...

...If ever a Museum addition seemed built to illustrate Charles Olson's declaration,' 'I take space to be the central fact to man born in America," it is the Met's new American Wing...

...Everywhere the 21 November 1980: 661 Museum-goer turns in Engelhard Court, he finds a monument to affluence...

...It is this summer's opening of the new American Wing at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art...

...What all this says about the Met and its new American Wing is not, of course, that in the name of egalitarianism the Museum should begin a program of radical de-acquisition or that its American holdings are anything but spectacular in quantity and quality...

...The south wall by the loggia of Louis Tiffany's turn-ofthe-century Laurelton Hall, and the west wall by a marble and mosaic mantelpiece that John LaFarge, George B. Post, and August Saint-Gaudens did in 1882 for the Cornelius Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue...