Books, Arts & Manners: The American Nineteenth Century

This spring, in apparent defiance of that repudiation of patriotism and history which characterizes so-called progressive circles, some American museums are celebrating, with considerable panache, the achievements of our nineteenth-century past. The Metropolitan has filled its former European painting galleries with an encyclopedic exhibition of the nineteenth century in general, and Washington’s National Gallery inaugurated a traveling show devoted to that nineteenth-century phenomenon, the American trompe l’oeil painters. (This will be at New York’s Whitney Museum May 19-June 12; at the University Museum, Berkeley and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, July 15-August 31; at the Detroit Institute of Arts September 1-October 31.) I’m happy to recommend both displays.

The opening of the Met’s nineteenth-century effort coincided with the museum’s official hundredth birthday, celebrated with even more brouhaha than one has come to expect from that master of the headlines, Director Thomas P. F. (“Publicity Forever”) Hoving. It started with a Sunday champagne brunch for the art press (and a lot of hangers-on; I never knew there were so many of us); Monday was Open House for the Public, which looked on bemusedly as Mr. Hoving and Mayor Lindsay turned on one (the other is still unfinished) of the two concrete-imbedded fountains which replace the green grass and magnolia trees which formerly graced the museum’s Fifth Avenue entrance, and then proceeded indoors for free Coke and birthday cake, hourly concerts in the auditorium and gallery talks in English and Spanish (why the latter are not a constant feature is a puzzlement). After hoi polloi had been evicted, the (new) doors were thrown open once more to admit the white-tied elite, at $125 a couple, to a ball honoring the museum’s deficit (fountains cost more than magnolias); like everything else these days, it attracted demonstrators—black-tied!—who walked decorously along Fifth Avenue protesting the Met’s proposed expansion plans (of which more in another article).

RB

About the Author

Ruth Berenson

Featured Tags

This spring, in apparent defiance of that repudiation of patriotism and history which characterizes so-called progressive circles, some American museums are celebrating, with considerable panache, the achievements of our nineteenth-century past. The Metropolitan has filled its former European painting galleries with an encyclopedic exhibition of the nineteenth century in general, and Washington’s National Gallery inaugurated a traveling show devoted to that nineteenth-century phenomenon, the American trompe l’oeil painters. (This will be at New York’s Whitney Museum May 19-June 12; at the University Museum, Berkeley and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, July 15-August 31; at the Detroit Institute of Arts September 1-October 31.) I’m happy to recommend both displays.

The opening of the Met’s nineteenth-century effort coincided with the museum’s official hundredth birthday, celebrated with even more brouhaha than one has come to expect from that master of the headlines, Director Thomas P. F. (“Publicity Forever”) Hoving. It started with a Sunday champagne brunch for the art press (and a lot of hangers-on; I never knew there were so many of us); Monday was Open House for the Public, which looked on bemusedly as Mr. Hoving and Mayor Lindsay turned on one (the other is still unfinished) of the two concrete-imbedded fountains which replace the green grass and magnolia trees which formerly graced the museum’s Fifth Avenue entrance, and then proceeded indoors for free Coke and birthday cake, hourly concerts in the auditorium and gallery talks in English and Spanish (why the latter are not a constant feature is a puzzlement). After hoi polloi had been evicted, the (new) doors were thrown open once more to admit the white-tied elite, at $125 a couple, to a ball honoring the museum’s deficit (fountains cost more than magnolias); like everything else these days, it attracted demonstrators—black-tied!—who walked decorously along Fifth Avenue protesting the Met’s proposed expansion plans (of which more in another article).