One can enter the new wing from any level and from unrelated galleries, which can be disorienting.
The principal galleries on all the floors have the same layout-a strong central spine, which features the level's major ideas with flanking, subsidiary galleries (fig. The floor plans are the same with the exception of the middle two floors that have extensions or pavilions to the east and west, which house special rotating collections, and what are termed "Behind the Scenes Galleries" that give visitors glimpses into curatorial and conservation practices. Art is displayed on four levels and organized chronologically, the earliest art being on the ground level art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is on the second level nineteenth century paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts are on the third art of the twentieth century through the mid–1980s is on level three. 1).Īll told, there are fifty-three galleries, more than most museums have collectively, so this is a huge commitment to American Art, but then again the MFA has a large and important collection to showcase. I disagree the color of the stone and the rhythmic and symmetrical divisions of the new walls echo the classical dignity of the old parts of the museum, and the melding looks just fine (fig. Some critics remarked that the new walls look blank and seem at odds with the old building. On the exterior, the new wing runs along the north and east sides of the building, closer to downtown Boston and the Fenway. Designed by the London-based firm Foster + Partners, the addition houses the museum's unparalleled collection of American art that has been amplified by objects from Central and South America.
It was a snowy morning in Boston when my husband, two friends and I set out for the Museum of Fine Arts to see the new Art of the Americas wing. The first endeavor is wonderfully successful the second less so.įig. Another part of the story told by the Art of the Americas wing is how the influence of European and other traditions were manifested hemispherically. However, this is only part of the story visually enacted in the new wing. The focus on Sargent signals a thesis-that is only now beginning to gain traction-that the American fine arts tradition is based almost exclusively on European precedents. The recent efforts to resuscitate Sargent's career are huge and include Richard Ormond's multi-volume survey of the artist's career as well as several landmark exhibitions. Instead, it presents an alternate reading that is most fully articulated in the wing's central core-the second level (third floor)-where the art of John Singer Sargent becomes the defining artist for nineteenth-century Boston. This is not the story told by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in its new Art of the Americas' wing.
#FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH MFA BOSTON FREE#
Employing a thesis developed by the social critic Lewis Mumford in The Brown Decades, which condemned the excesses of the Gilded Age, the museum sought to establish the modernist roots of an American tradition and ceded primacy to those artists whom they regarded as proto-modern their work free of European influence, and their personae typifying the lonely genius (even the perennially popular Homer was cast in this mold) working against the grain of genteel taste and Victorian sentimentality. They were anointed with this distinction by the Museum of Modern Art with an exhibition organized by its director, Alfred Barr, shortly after the museum's founding. Ward.ģ59 pp 257 color illustrations suggested reading index.ĭuring the second half of the twentieth century three artists were regarded as the heroes of nineteenth-century American art: Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Thomas Eakins.
Quinn, Dorie Reents-Budet, and Gerald W.R. With contributions by Elliot Bostwick Davis, Dennis Carr, Nonie Gadsden, Cody Hartley, Erica E. The Art of the Americas Wing, Museum of Fine Arts, Bostonįoster + Partners, London, design architectsĪ New World Imagined: Art of the Americas.
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