The new classical galleries in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of art

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2007 by Peter M. Kenny

During the first half of the nineteenth century American architects, artists, and artisans faithfully followed, often in their own distinctive ways, the dictum of the eighteenth-century German archaeologist, scholar, and leader of the classical revival in Europe, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), who wrote: "There is only one way for the moderns to become great and perhaps unequalled: by imitating the Ancients." (1) The fascination with the classical past has left a prodigious legacy of art and artifacts, from templelike Greek revival buildings to paintings and sculpture imbued with symbolic mythological references and decorative arts that followed the forms and ornament of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts, often with surprising archaeological accuracy. A splendid array of objects drawn "from the stores of antiquity," an apt phrase borrowed from Wendy A. Cooper, one of the principal scholars of this period, has recently been permanently installed in the newly renovated Israel Sack Galleries in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. (2) With the official reopening of these galleries last month, the first phase of the American Wing's ambitious five-year renovation is complete. The next phase, beginning later this year, will be a dynamic new reinstallation of the Charles Engelhard Court and the period rooms and galleries in the original 1924 building. This second phase is scheduled for completion by the end of 2008.

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The Metropolitan Museum brought the arts of the Federal and Jacksonian eras in the United States to the attention of the public at a surprisingly early date. When the American Wing opened in 1924, an entire floor of period rooms and galleries was dedicated to the early phase of neoclassicism in the United States, roughly between 1790 and 1810. Within two decades, the final phase of the style, roughly between 1810 and 1845, was covered, albeit temporarily, in a loan exhibition entitled The Greek Revival in the United States, (3) which was mounted in 1943-at the height of World War II and one year prior to the publication of the seminal work of Talbot Hamlin (1889-1956), Greek Revival Architecture in America (1944). Organized by Joseph Downs (1895-1954), the exhibition was wonderfully experimental and inclusive in nature, and featured large-scale photographic murals of Greek revival buildings vivified by the inclusion of architectural elements from houses no longer extant, paintings, prints, architectural drawings, pattern books, sculpture, furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, textiles, and costumes (see Figs. 13, 14). This comprehensive show was the forerunner to two later and better-known exhibitions, Berry B. Tracy (1933-1984) and William H. Gerdts's Classical America, 1815-1845, at the Newark Museum in 1963, and Cooper's Classical Taste in America, at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1993, and served ultimately as an impetus to develop a permanent and comprehensive presentation of the arts of the period between 1810 and 1845.

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Despite the manifold benefits brought by a major expansion of the American Wing in 1980, there was a disjuncture between the original 1924 building and the new galleries, especially on the first floor. Ample new space was provided to extend the American Wing's chronological survey of architecture and interior decoration to the early twentieth century, but the connecting galleries were narrow, corridor-like, and hardly ideal for the presentation of the collections. Stepping down the set of stairs out of the Jenrette Gallery in the old American Wing into the 1980 addition was a disorienting experience, not only because of the change from period woodwork, paint, and floor treatments to unarticulated modern oak strip moldings, drywall wall partitions, and granite floors, but also because the classical furniture displayed in these galleries suddenly seemed radically disconnected from any period context (see Fig. 15). This approach to the display of American furniture was considered avant-garde at the time and seems to have followed the lead of Charles Montgomery's (1910-1978) innovative method of display at the Yale University Art Gallery, where furniture was intentionally removed from its period context and celebrated for its own formal and aesthetic qualities.

The main challenge in redeveloping the 1980 galleries was how to divide and articulate them in a way that brought interest, variety, and something of the monumental character of Greek revival architecture. Critical to achieving this objective was the enlistment onto the project of the architect Thomas Gordon Smith, a professor and former chairman of the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, the only architecture program in the nation that trains students in the classical tradition. Smith received a challenge not so unlike what Robert Adam (1728-1792) might have faced in the eighteenth century when asked to bring neoclassical order, balance, and symmetry to an ancient English country house. (4)