Metropolitan Museum of Art to show "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915"

Written by Metropolitan Museum press office Sunday, 01 May 2011 21:13

NEW YORK, NY.- From the decade before the Revolutionary War to the eve of World War I, many of America's most revered artists captured the temperament of their respective eras on canvas. They recorded and defined in their finest paintings the emerging character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities. Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall, American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 will bring together for the first time more than 100 of these iconic works that tell compelling stories of life's tasks and pleasures. The first overview of the subject in more than 35 years, the exhibition includes loans from leading museums and private lenders—and many paintings from the Metropolitan's own distinguished collection. On view 12 October through 24 January, 2010.

American Stories features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, John Sloan, and George Bellows, and notable works by some of their key colleagues.

The exhibition examines stories based on familiar experience and the means by which painters tell their stories through their choices of settings, players, action, and various narrative devices. The artists' responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations are examined, as are their evolving styles and standards of storytelling along the central themes of childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the production and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes towards race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of art making.

The exhibition is arranged in four chronological sections. The first—Inventing American Stories, 1765–1830—begins with artists who told stories through portraits. Serving their sitters' self-conscious interest in how they appeared in the eyes of others, American portraitists often emulated British compositions. Although these artists focused on individuals and particular locales and relationships, the cleverest of them responded to broader narrative agendas and to the natural impulse to tell stories.

In the second section of the exhibition—Stories for the Public, 1830–1860—American artists responded to an expanding and increasingly diverse audience for public exhibitions; new mechanisms for selling and reproducing art; and middle-class patrons' growing cultural literacy and wealth. They almost invariably looked to precedents in European genre painting to help them tell their stories, drawing inspiration from Old Master Dutch or more recent French and English examples, known through popular prints. Genre painters preferred domestic scenes, lighthearted narratives, clear settings, stereotyped characters, and obvious gestures and details so that viewers could read their pictorial dramas easily and recognize themselves in relation to them.

The third section of the exhibition is Stories of War and Reconciliation, 1860–1877. Fought mainly by non-professional soldiers, the Civil War was essentially democratic, as was implied by Winslow Homer in his paintings of daily life at the front, including Pitching Quoits (1865, Harvard University Art Museums). To assuage the sorrow provoked by the war and to heal the nation's fractured spirit, painters in this period turned away from political content toward domestic and leisure-time subjects. As women gained prominence after the loss of so many men in the war, artists portrayed them in new roles. 

In Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877–1915, the exhibition's fourth and final section, American artists redefined national identity in an international context. They were as likely to paint people in Paris or the French countryside as in New York or New England. They revealed in their works an appreciation of the journalistic, fragmented narrative that inflected foreign examples, and they evaded even more than their predecessors the harsh realities of modern existence. American painters also operated in a newly complex art world, which broadened their opportunities for displaying and marketing art on both sides of the Atlantic and altered their professional standards. Paris resident Mary Cassatt told of the daily routine of sophisticated urban women and indicated her own appreciation of female empowerment in Woman and a Girl Driving (1881, Philadelphia Museum of Art). John Singer Sargent, also an expatriate, frankly recorded an encounter with ordinary Venetians in A Street in Venice (ca. 1880–82) and a visit to a well-to-do American family in An Interior in Venice (1899, Royal Academy of Arts, London). William Merritt Chase escaped from the city to a tranquil suburban retreat in Idle Hours (ca. 1894, Amon Carter Museum), depicting fashionable figures relaxing on a placid greensward along a beach in Southampton, Long Island, and in Ring Toss (1896, Marie and Hugh Halff) showed three of his daughters at play in his nearby summer studio. Some painters examined men at work and leisure and celebrated new heroes such as cowboys, who became emblems of American masculinity and the receding frontier. Visit The Met at : http://www.metmuseum.org/

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