Exhibit of the week: The New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Permanent collection

“These are thrilling times at the Metro­politan Museum of Art,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. First came the brilliantly redesigned galleries for Islamic art; now, the Met’s grand collection of American art has received its own dazzling upgrade. Relegated previously to “lackluster back rooms and dusty caverns,” the holdings unfurl today across 26 well-lit galleries in a display that “tells the complex story of America’s cultural maturation with nuance and clarity.” It’s a delight to reconnect with various masterworks by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt, and especially with the museum’s most popular painting: Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). The iconic 21-foot-wide canvas “practically qualifies as the country’s national artwork,” and it’s been painstakingly restored and mounted with a grandeur befitting its station.

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“Right on time for the election year,” the reopening offers us all the chance to look at America’s story with fresh eyes, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. If you assume that our current challenges are new, think again. The elite Bostonians in John Singleton Copley’s 18th-century portraits are the original “1 percenters”—and many wound up joining the Revolution to fight “for the freedom to stay rich and get richer.” How about environmental worries? Thomas Cole’s serene View on the Catskill—Early Autumn (1837) turns out to have been a “conservationist cry of anguish” for an arcadian forest that had already been leveled by a railroad. Stories about race are everywhere, from the slave who stands beside George Washington in a John Trumbull portrait to certain sly commentaries that William Sidney Mount embedded in his “seemingly laid-back genre pictures.” Together, these paintings reveal a culture that was forever torn by impulses “pitting progress against preservation, the material against the spiritual, and I against we.”

Visitors don’t get the whole story, said The Economist. Instead of embracing the opportunity to give the concept of American art a “radical rethink,” the Met has left its Native American art downstairs in an “aboriginal ghetto” and found no space for images of—or by—the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who remade the nation during the 19th century. The Met’s new American galleries have only been open since mid-January, yet the curators’ “white-bread, processed-cheese vision of America” already feels “terribly old-fashioned.” New York, and America, deserved better. “What a shame.”