Introduction - New York Metropolitan Museum, American Wing

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by John K. Howat

On November 10, 1924, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City opened the American Wing to the public, presenting the first permanent installation in an art museum of American colonial and early Federal decorative arts and architecture. In 1980 the museum inaugurated a new expanded American Wing with extensive additional galleries and period rooms housing decorative arts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as American paintings and sculpture. These enlarged facilities, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates of Hamden, Connecticut, made possible for the first time within the museum a consistent and coordianted display of American visual arts of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

Seventy-five years after opening the American Wing, the museum is marking the anniversary with an exhibition entitled Celebrating the American Wing: Notable Acquisitions, 1980-1999, which highlights the collecting accomplishments realized since the new American Wing opened nearly twenty years ago. In the exhibition American decorative arts, paintings, sculpture, and works on paper are installed throughout the American Wing galleries with labels explaining the importance of each object within the American collections.

As is made manifest in the articles that follow here, the museum's interest in American art long preceded the creation of the American Wing, going back to the very beginnings of the museum in the late 1860s. The growth of the American collections during the ensuing years has resulted in the largest and most important holding of historical American visual arts in existence. The growth of the collections has been accommodated first by the establishment of the American Wing (now called the department of American decorative arts) and then, years later, by the formation of the department of American paintings and sculpture. These departments were brought together under the umbrella of the chairmanship of the departments of American art in 1982. The curators of these departments take great pleasure in offering in this issue of The Magazine ANTIQUES a glimpse of the contents and history of the American Wing.

JOHN K. HOWAT is the Lawrence A Fleischman Chairman of the departments of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.