Manhattan's grand, grey Metropolitan Museum used to amuse expatriate Henry James as the "so aspiring" museum of his native city. Nursed by the great fortunes and public pride of Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers, its aspirations to own ancient and Old World art have been well satisfied in the last half century. Lately the Metropolitan has turned to art at home, and since 1934 has actually bought 73 contemporary U. S. paintings. Last week, with positive enthusiasm, it performed another service to U. S. art.
Hung in nine lofty galleries were 290 paintings, beginning with a portrait of Pocahontas and ending with a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, comprising the biggest show the Metropolitan has ever had and a unique collection of pictures. The museum had combed 145 public and private sources, from Boston's (public) Latin School to Missouri's State Historical Society, for paintings illustrative of "Life in America" to 1914. The result was a visual chronicle, period by period, frontier to frontier and back again, of human beings engaged in the conquest of a continent.
Carefully chosen, the pictures gave a solid demonstration of Tradition in U. S. art. This Americanism was nothing grandiose: just a persistent modesty, candor and good workmanship. Despite all European influences, U. S. art kept its character through the work of the Colonial portraitists, the obscure artists of the Western settlements, the sketchers who rode with the troops and Indian fighters, the thoroughly capable, salty and serious realism of George Caleb Birmingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins. Even in Sargent's bravura there was a kind of innocence.
The show successfully showed that U. S. artists have done well by their country. Its catalogue, also, was a triumph, as few exhibition catalogues ever are (see col. 1). Slight, scholarly A. (for Alpheus) Hyatt Mayor, Associate Curator of Prints, and efficient Josephine Lansing Allen, an assistant curator of paintings, put it together with sparkling good sense and humor. For each picture they provided background information, illuminating quotations, graceful homilies. In their observations on portraits of the late John D. Rockefeller (by John Singer Sargent) and J. P. Morgan (by Carlos Baca-Flor), they achieved a tone of perfect respect.
The Metropolitan's own trap for visitors to the New York World's Fair, the exhibition will stay open until October 29. Notable U. S. paintings which many a U. S. citizen will see for the first time:
Staircase Group (c. 1795), by Charles Willson Peale, an almost "modern" design, showing two figures on a winding stair. Note: "the canvas was originally framed in the woodwork of a doorway . . . [and] Washington once absentmindedly bowed to the young gentlemen represented."
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (see cut, p. 63), painted about 1845 by George Caleb Bingham.
Submarine Torpedo Boat H. L. Huntley (1863) by Conrad Wise Chapman. One of the submarines built by the Confederacy during the Civil War. "She could be submerged, but had a nasty trick of plunging to the bottom and drowning the men within. . . ."
Emigrant Train (1870) by Samuel Colman (see cut, p. 63). "A train of Conestoga wagons is shown fording Medicine Bow Creek, near Laramie, Wyoming. . . ."