On Art

...It is largely a series of period rooms—parlor studies—the Metropolitan gives us...

...Below this, a large patch of enamelized magnolia blossoms creeps down the side of the vase like a malignant growth...

...Loaned by the Museum of the City of New York, it is one of several treasures borrowed from friendly institutions and private collectors...

...Obviously, the Met has also searched through its own attic and rummaged in its storage basement to come up with some of the choice items in the exhibition: Quite a few, one suspects, have not seen the light of day since they were first donated to the museum by well-heeled and well-meaning 19th-century patrons...

...Unfortunately, no serious student of the period is likely to buy the 19th century the Met is selling...

...Two fully illustrated catalogues (distributed by the New York Graphic Society at $6.95 and $5.95 in soft cover) document the show's more than 200 works of painting and sculpture, and over 300 examples of 19th-century furnishings and decorative arts...

...That says a good deal about 19th-century American sculpture...

...There is little point in expecting a concise outline of 19th-century American history from the Metropolitan's centennial show...

...A Neoclassic tribute to the Greek resistance against Turkish tyranny, it attracted international attention when exhibited at London's Crystal Palace in 1851...

...And beneath this, a network of silver fern fronds is highlighted by sprays of somewhat pustular gilded goldenrod...

...The marine painters (Fitz Hugh Lane and Robert Salmon, with their luminous seascapes and harbor views) manage to enlarge one's impressions of the period...

...The Rise of an American Architecture is the most significant and useful part of the Metropolitan's 19th Century America, and a subject I hope to discuss in more detail in a later article...

...The panoramic landscape of Thomas Moran and Thomas Worth-ington Whittredge relate to the course of westward expansion...

...The paintings of George Catlin and John Mix Stanley recall the fate of the Indian...

...its intention is to document and display the strictly American aspects of those competitive, hardworking, acquisitive years, their high-minded aspirations and eclectic tastes...

...Its charms are chiefly historical...

...It consists of several rooms of photographic blow-ups and enlarged color transparencies of commercial buildings, private residences and public parks, plus a few architectural fragments...

...For some reason, the great mothering instinct of the period seems to have had a deep and durable affinity for stone—usually a highly polished, sugary-white marble...

...The Crown Princess of Germany, on first examining it, was moved to remark: "Oh Miss Hosmer, you have such a talent for toes...

...One catches glimpses of city ways and country conventions...

...Quite generally, the minor but competent painters come off best in this exhibition...

...A contemporary account describes its decorations as "composed of flowers and plants representative of the north, south, east and west, making the vase in its entirety a characteristic American piece...

...Entitled 19th Century America, the show is another in the series marking the museum's centennial celebrations...

...Viewing John Singer Sargent in juxtaposition with the usual mediocrities of the period, one can see how good a painter he managed to be, without ever becoming quite good enough...

...It has dusted off the bric-a-brac and polished up the furniture, but in the main, the Met has left the 19th century pretty much in its storeroom state—unexamined...

...Even that singular mother, Medea, is represented in William Wetmore Story's dramatic reversal of the maternal theme...

...Most of the really horrendous examples, it appears, were donated to the museum—the "Magnolia Vase," for instance, designed for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893...

...When it was shown in mid-century it, too, achieved international renown...

...I admit that among the examples of bad or indifferent painting and sculpture—the highly idealized pictures of little flower girls and sturdy newsboys, the stuffy portraits of long-forgotten worthies, the attitudinizing statuary—there is an interesting range of minor work...

...Visitors to the exhibition will have to bring along their own ideas as to what was significant in American art—and, indeed, in American political and social life—during the time...

...Saint-Gaudens' Diana has a sleek simplicity to recommend it amid the coy sentimentality and theatrical gesturing that characterize most of the sculpture on view...

...All of these works afford an insight into the customs of the 19th century, even though they cannot boast the psychological acumen or the formal abilities of a Thomas Eakins...

...It is one of those nice places to visit that one wouldn't want to dwell on or in for any great length of time...

...Including essays by such eminent architectural historians as Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Vincent Scully, it ranges over such subjects as the influence of American architecture abroad, the history of the skyscraper and the development of American houses from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen...

...For myself, one of the more engaging pictures is William Sidney Mount's Cider Making, a sparkling rural landscape that illustrates every step of the process from the squeezing to the tippling...

...The latter item, dated 1904—a 20th-century specimen of gaudy late Victorian taste—features an engraved map of the subway line with an ornamental border of subway tracks and laurel-wreathed vignettes of construction sites along the route...

...Eastman Johnson's thorough and substantial portrait, The Hatch Family, with the members secluded behind the red fringed draperies of their Park Avenue parlor...

...The major section of the exhibition occupies 25 rooms...

...George Gray Barnard's Struggle of the Two Natures in Man displays a forceful talent and a large debt to Michelangelo in its depiction of the vertical aspirations of mankind rising from its reclined brute self...

...Aside from Bierstadt's laconic view of The Bombardment of Fort Sumter and a Rogers statuette of a wounded soldier, however, there is nothing to indicate that the crucial national event of the century was the Civil War...

...On Art CENTENNIAL KITSCH BY JAMES R. MELLOW The 19th century—that great attic-lode of solid virtues and solid vices—is the subject of a mammoth exhibition on view now and through the summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art...

...From the evidence of the Metropolitan's exhibition, one would have to conclude that 19th-century American sculpture is a wasteland of petrified sentiment...

...Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave is represented in one of its several copies...

...I noted with some interest (and a good deal of awe) that not only this item but the porcelain oyster plates with sculptured skates' eggs, seaweed and lobster claws, the pseudo-Egyptian marble and ormolu mantel set, the grandfather's clock with domes and minarets in the Turkish fashion, and the armchair made of curved animal horns, all derive from Tiffany and Company—surely the 19th century's most prodigious and expensive source of bad design...

...She stands, knife in hand, contemplating the murder of her children...

...To be sure, the important artists of the period—Eakins and Homer, Bingham and Ryder—maintain their excellence, but they are nearly buried in an avalanche of knick-knacks and gewgaws and hideous furniture...

...Aside from several merely anonymous mothers and children, there are imaginary portraits of the mother of Apollo and Diana and the mother of Achilles...

...There are, as well, genre painters who contribute something special to the occasion: Henry Sargent's meticulous little vignette of a bachelor soiree, The Dinner Party...

...the Met's show is simply too limited and special in its view...

...These decorations consist of a neck-band of sculptured silver pine cones and pine needles...

...The catalogue for this portion of the show (published by Praeger at $4.95 in a paper-bound edition) is actually a book on the American contribution to 19th-century building and design...

...Probably the best example of its peculiar qualities is the little marble statue of Puck by the sculptress Harriet Hos-mer, one of the tribe of American artists who colonized Rome while studying their craft...

...All too often, 19th Century America represents the triumph of Kitsch and Camp...

...In the decorative arts—particularly in those items intended for the luxury trade now on exhibit at the Met—the 19th century displayed an equally remarkable talent for bad taste...

...It depicts a good-natured, smiling, curly-headed, winged little youngster sitting on a toadstool...

...A distinct and more modest segment of the exhibition, called The Rise of an American Architecture, completes the three-part survey...

...These are crowded with representative paintings and sculptures that span the age—beginning with Gilbert Stuart's sketchy portrait of President James Monroe and ending with Augustus Saint-Gaudens' gilded-bronze Diana...

...There is very little decent sculpture...

...Of the base, with its scroll designs, sculptured silver burrs and cartouches set with semiprecious stones, one need give only the bare descriptive account...

...A second aspect of the show, intermingled with the painting and sculpture, is the furniture and decorative objects of the period, everything from ornately carved rosewood sofas to a silver tray commemorating the completion of the Interborough Rapid Transit line...