The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: Part 3, "Making Choices"

The extraordinary timelessness of this place is very humbling. It's humbling to be one of those people who hangs the works of art and makes the choices. In the 19th century, paintings were hung salon-style, frame to frame, floor to ceiling, with the most important works at eye level. In today's American salon, take a turn and suddenly there it is, Immanuel Leutze's vision of Washington crossing the Delaware. It really does become the icon of the American way. It's shown again and again and again and reproduced probably more than any other picture in our collection. A work of art in the gallery follows, for your average visitor, what I like to call the precious object tradition. That is, it's in the Metropolitan Museum, it's on a pedestal, it's clean and shiny, it's beautiful, it must be a masterpiece. You walk into the Luce Center and we like to think that we've sort of thrown a wrench into that. The Henry Luce Center for the Study of American Art is a visible storage area. The Luce Center is interesting because it allows people up front, right away, to know the collection from which we're making our choices. The range of objects is staggering. An endless wall of empty picture frames, statuary, row after row of paintings of all kinds. The cases are crowded with silver from all periods. Chairs of all styles, tables, clocks, china, shelves of Tiffany glass. From one generation to the next, from one curator to the next, with a different eye, with a different bias, what may be relegated to the Luce Center for one curator is pulled out and put in the primary galleries for another. Richly displayed in the American Wing are masterworks by John Singer Sargent. If you go back and forth between the Luce Center and the galleries, you get a sense of the range in his work from student productions and studies from murals all the way through finished society portraits. The concept behind the Luce Center goes back to the whole notion of connoisseurship, connoisseurship being the study of works of art comparatively. In the primary galleries, a comparison of 19th century landscape painting, American style, shows an evolving preoccupation with the effects of light and atmosphere. Note the opalescent sky and water in George Caleb Bingham's Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, and the exciting contrast of gloom and light in Martin Johnson Heade's Coming Storm. There are little narratives all over the American Wing, carefully placed objects meant to tell you some sort of story or to give you some bit of information. In a gallery filled with Winslow Homer's later works, his Northeaster blows and bellows with raging energy. Nearby, in a quiet corner, John Tuchman's River Scene, a masterwork of American Impressionism, provides a safe harbor. There is never a painting hung next to another without some consideration of what the two might say to each other. Repose, by John Alexander White, captures a carefree moment in which this languid figure seems to float away. She shares a gallery with this bold beauty, by Thomas Anschutz, titled The Rose. And the rose, although a small component, a mere prop, really becomes a personification of her, doesn't it? There are over 17,000 works in the Met's American Art Collection. From colonial times through the early 20th century, throughout the American Wing, two dozen period rooms provide context for the paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts on display. In our field of American art, we have the right to call ourselves the most comprehensive collection of American art in the world.