New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts
The Metropolitan Museum’s collection of American art, one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, returns to view in expanded, reconceived, and dramatic new galleries on January 16, 2012, when the Museum inaugurates the New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. The new installation will provide visitors with a rich and captivating experience of the history of American art from the 18th through the early 20th century. The suite of elegant new galleries encompasses 30,000 square feet for the display of the Museum’s superb collection. The Museum’s holdings are particularly rich in the works of the great masters, including John Singleton Copley (Daniel Crommelin Verplanck), Gilbert Stuart (George Washington), Thomas Cole (The Oxbow), Church (The Heart of the Andes), Winslow Homer (Prisoners from the Front), Thomas Eakins (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), and John Singer Sargent (Madame X). The centerpiece of the new installation is one of the best-known works in all of American art, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. For the re-hanging of this magnificent work, a large and stately gilded frame has been painstakingly recreated by Eli Wilner & Company from a recently discovered photograph of the painting from 1864. The renovated galleries afford a dramatic vista toward this monumental canvas, which hangs in the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation Gallery. This double-sized gallery showcases Leutze’s iconic work alongside two other masterpieces—Church’s Heart of the Andes and Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains—just as they were displayed at the famous 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. These three paintings have been beautifully restored as part of the renovation project. The Museum’s encyclopedic collection offers visitors the broad sweep of American history as told through great works of art. The aforementioned central gallery focuses on the themes of freedom, exploration, and expansion that pervaded America during the mid-19th century. Other subjects, themes, and periods presented in the new galleries include: Colonial Portraiture, the American Revolution, the Young Republic, the Civil War Era, Art in the Folk Tradition, the Hudson River School, the West, the Cosmopolitan Spirit, and American Impressionism. B. You are the reporter of the CNN channel. You have to prepare a report devoted to the Metropolitan Museum’s 150th anniversary. Interview the authorities of the Museum about its history, departments, collections, exhibitions, events. Summarize the received information and highlight it in your prominent report. C. You have some friends who are stopping in New York for 24 hours on their way to San Francisco. Since you are more familiar with New York, they ask you what museums and galleries they should visit there. Write a one-day itinerary for your friends. Trade itineraries with a partner. Take turns roleplaying the person going to New York and the person giving advice. Discuss and explain itinerary you have prepared.
[1] rotunda I rou'tunda ] — ротонда, круглый зал c куполообразным потолком. [2] The Hudson River School — «Школа річки Гудзон» — група митців на чолі з Томасом Коулом, що була заснована в 1825 р. І яка створила великі романтичні полотна, пейзажі, типові для Нового світу. [3] The Ash Can School — «Школа ящика сміття» — група митців (Дж. Слоун, Дж. Беллоуз и др.) разом з Робертом Генрі, засновником реалістичного мистецтва XX сторіччя. [4] The Eccle des Beaux Arts [ei'kolda,bou'za:r ] — Школа изящных искусств (в Париже). [5] The Gross Clinic— «Клиника доктора Гросса».
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