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MUSINGS ON THE AMERICAN WING by
Morrison H. Heckscher
Nevertheless, there was one really dramatic (and positive) change, a defining moment, in the history of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan, and that occurred back in 1910. For forty years, beginning in 1870, the Museum had acquired and displayed contemporary "applied" (i.e., decorative) art. Then suddenly all this was cast aside, to be replaced by furnishings of the colonial and early Federal eras. The plus was that the Museum was now at the cutting edge of an abiding new popular interest; the negative that the existing collections, and all they stood for, were unceremoniously cast aside. It is a well known story, the quest for the colonial reining supreme for six decades before the resurgence of Victorian vigor. Fifteen years of rapid growth culminating in the opening of The American Wing in its own building in 1924 was followed by forty-five years of discrete consolidation. In 1970 the landmark exhibition 19th Century America signaled a renewed interest in the later nineteenth century and in the arts that the Museum had so studiously avoided since 1910. In 1980, the fruits of this new focus were incorporated in a greatly enlarged American Wing, a structure that now also housed the Museum's holdings of American paintings and sculpture. (The arts of the Twentieth Century are housed in a separate department.) Discrimination based upon period or style was finally a thing of the past. We do well, on occasion, to reflect on the work of our predecessors. We can still learn a thing or two from the original organizers of the American Wing - curator Charles O. Cornelius and amateur, par exellence, R.T. Haines Halsey. Together they authored the Handbook to the American Wing, a model of concise, accessible, scholarship that no one reads today; and during the twenties Cornelius wrote groundbreaking monographic studies of both Duncan Phyfe and John Townsend, the latter still one of the best things on the Newport master. The brilliant career of Joseph Downs, the curator during the thirties and forties who single handedly orchestrated a series of fine scholarly exhibits and laid the groundwork for numerous significant bequests, deserves more recognition. In 1950, not long before his death, he was wooed to Winterthur. What should we be looking to do in the new millenium? Certainly more of the same: improving the permanent collections, upgrading their display, and publishing them; mounting scholarly and popular exhibitions. After all, our mission as part of an art museum remains unchanged: to showcase the best of American art. But we also need to embrace the new horizons offered by modern science (the new diagnostic technologies) and the new communications media (the internet, virtual reality). And to engage a broader audience, we need to ask the how and the why as well as the what of works of art: their manufacture, their original function, their historical context. The past fifty years, the precise period of the Winterthur Program, has been the golden age of museums in America: hundreds of new museums and historic houses established; myriad works of art acquired; curators and conservators professionalized; and specialized knowledge greatly expanded. But while many of the best, rarest, and most irreplaceable treasures are now in public collections, there is no guarantee of long term public support for these institutions. The responsibility of caring for this heritage for future generations, in times that will not always be peaceful and prosperous, is daunting. The challenge for next fifty years is not growth but consolidation and rationalization. And the best defense for these objects is a cadre of wise and knowledgeable and committed professionals. The role of the Winterthur program, of which we are all graduates, in the training of the future keepers of our artistic patrimony has never been more crucial. |