The History, Landscape and National Identity gallery of the new American Wing, featuring 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' (1851) by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze.
New York
In case anyone has forgotten, in the rash of overwrought, over-the-top museum additions following but never equaling Frank Gehry's spectacularly successful Bilbao Guggenheim, the art and architecture of museums should have more than an adversarial relationship in which a game of one-upmanship is played between the two. The newly reconfigured, greatly enlarged and totally reconceived American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened to the public this month after a three-stage, eight-year period of planning and reconstruction, achieves a reconciliation that bypasses pyrotechnics for a solution that enhances, rather than overwhelms, a spectacular collection.
The deliberately low-key character of the new wing is the result of a close collaboration between the department's chairman, Morrison H. Heckscher, and the architect, Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, the firm that has been involved in the museum's almost total transformation over the past 40 years. Mr. Roche has made all the right moves.
They are so right, in fact, that most visitors won't even notice them. Those who do may see this as the evolution of a 20th-century hard-core modernist into what might be called a kinder and gentler eclectic modernist of the 21st century. Mr. Roche's landmark Ford Foundation headquarters in New York, designed in the 1960s with a single strong, unifying concept of a full-height, central garden court surrounded by tiers of open, glass-walled offices, retains a rational beauty not found easily today. But architecture progresses, or regresses, depending on your point of view, and appropriateness is never out of style. Since doctrinaire modernism was declared dead, more traditional elements are acceptable again. A subtle, stripped-down version of wall moldings and the skylighted cove and barrel-vaulted ceilings common in the past have been reintroduced in the American Wing galleries to provide the natural light and modified scale best suited to the size and spirit of 18th- and 19th-century paintings.
The New American WingMetropolitan Museum of Art
www.metmuseum.org
When the plan's second phase was completed in 2009, the period rooms had been relocated on a mezzanine level, and most of the shrubbery in the Engelhard Court that had conveniently concealed what has long been considered the embarrassingly sentimental American sculpture favored by more elevated 19th-century tastes was banished for a raised marble floor. A revised installation of neoclassical and Beaux Arts statuary invites us to see this work more sympathetically or, at least, to respect its historical and aesthetic credentials. In the current arrangement, it is surprisingly seductive and easy to like. On the court's north side, a sleek glass elevator serves as the American Wing entrance, uniting the court, mezzanine and second-floor galleries for vastly improved accessibility and circulation.
The grand reopening of this third and final phase of the American Wing renovation has come with the completion of the second-floor galleries, where all the paintings can be seen together for the first time. An additional 3,300 square feet has been gained by raising the roof and extending the floor plates on the west side of the building, for a total of 30,000 square feet in the new wing. Four of the 25 galleries are devoted to furniture and the decorative arts.
The paintings are arranged chronologically and thematically, reflecting a progression of periods and styles. Otherwise the galleries are conspicuously empty except for a few carefully selected, strategically positioned sculptures with the most relevant relationship to the work on display. Each picture takes its proper place against well-lighted walls painted a uniform soft cream-beige, in defiance of a current trend for richly colored backgrounds. Everything has a freshly cleaned radiance and ineffable logic; there are no histrionics or theatrical tricks, nothing aggressively or distractingly interactive. The immediate appeal is to the eye; you are expected to meet the art on its own terms. Understatement prevails; less is definitely more.
More- Opening the Book of American Art
Well, not quite—there is calculated drama in the carefully planned vistas of stellar works that beckon you through a maze of intimate galleries that offer a somewhat confusing choice of routes. But you are deliberately and irresistibly drawn to iconic (the right word here) paintings like Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851), with its elaborately gilded, long-lost frame reconstructed from an 1864 photograph. The painting occupies a specially designed double-height gallery visible from a distance as you enter. A masterwork of the Hudson River School beckons you to a banquet of sublime 19th-century landscapes in another room. You will be lured to a gallery of Gilded Age portraits, including John Singer Sargent's legendry "Madame X."
Mr. Heckscher explains his reconception and reinstallation of the collection without apology. "I am conservative," he says with a smile. But to be conservative implies either cautious uncertainty or the confidence of an assured taste informed by decades of knowledge and experience, undisturbed by any need to make waves for their own sake. He is unwavering in his embrace of connoisseurship over short-attention-span novelties and trendy populism. It's all, and only, about the art.
In the furniture galleries, handsome chests stand solemnly side by side and chairs by master craftsmen are lined up in straight rows for serious inspection. Cozy domestic arrangements are restricted to the period rooms, with their ever-popular and timelessly appealing combination of fantasy and authenticity. The only suggestive restaging of the past is in the use of doorway fragments from long-gone mansions to frame some gallery entrances.
The real significance of the new American Wing transcends its role as the latest in the Met's dramatic reinstallations. It shows us the flexibility with which modernism is responding to changing architectural tastes, times and needs. But it also redefines and re-evaluates American art and art history and documents the enormous evolution in its acceptance and understanding since the founding of the Met's American Wing in 1924 as a collection of early American rooms saved from demolition. Later, the orphaned facade of Martin Thompson's 1824 Branch Bank of the U.S. was moved from Wall Street and attached to the back of the museum, where it had a forlorn service-yard look until it was enclosed by the Engelhard Court. Much of the unpopular 19th-century painting and sculpture stayed in storage and is being shown for the first time.
It is instructive to compare how similar material has been dealt with in New York and Boston, where changes were taking place at about the same time. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts reorganized its American collections based on geographical proximity, bringing the arts of many different cultures and time frames together, from pre-Columbian to 20th-century American modernism, under the omnibus heading of Art of the Americas, housed in a new wing by the English architectural firm of Foster + Partners.
The early galleries in Boston are incomparable; nothing beats the legacy of Paul Revere and the amazing portraits of the patriots and patrons of the American Revolution, a period in which the holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts are particularly rich. But any insights into the later 19th-century American work are finessed for a nostalgic re-creation of a period installation with paintings hung close and "skied" to the ceiling, and a crowd of heroic figures and marble maidens on the floor.
Skillful installation using paint, wallpaper and intimate groupings of furniture, decorative art and paintings rescues an efficiently planned, expertly executed, standardized container from high-tech anonymity. Boston's own version of "Washington Crossing the Delaware," by Thomas Sully, a subject that always seems to demand enormous canvases and wall space, had to be accommodated by cutting a hole in the ceiling. An outdoor court turned into an indoor atrium for food service and special events remains resolutely corporate cool.
In contrast, New York's Engelhard Court is a magic mix of 19th-century sculpture and architecture that goes beyond visual delight to convey a sense of the uniqueness of American art. Carefully controlled connoisseurship breaks loose into an eclectic wonderland. A graceful, gilded Diana balances delicately on one foot, aiming her arrows at nymphs, dancing fawns and chaste marble nudes below. At the court's periphery, the flower-topped columns and golden glass lanterns of Louis Comfort Tiffany's garden loggia at Laurelton Hall evoke a lost world of decorative magnificence and sumptuous style. The filigreed ironwork of a stairway saved from Louis Sullivan's demolished Chicago Stock Exchange leads unexpectedly to the second floor. A LaFarge stained-glass window glows nearby. This is American art and history in all of its glorious and puzzling variety, presented with the perspective of time, impeccable scholarship and a wonderful eye.
Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.
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