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Met Museum Reopens American Wing After Extensive Renovations

By Amy Zimmer | January 13, 2012 7:34am

UPPER EAST SIDE —The Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing will reopen on Jan. 16 after a major four year renovation that included an overhaul of the way it displays its vast collection of home-grown masterpieces.  

The third and final phase of a $100 million overhaul of the American Wing completed 26 galleries and created a chronological installation of the American paintings and sculpture.

The new galleries, comprising 30,000 square feet, celebrate Colonial portraiture, the young Republic and the Civil War Era. The Hudson River School, the West and American Impressionism also get their due.

But the splashiest installation is of one of the most iconic images of the American history — Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

"The museum’s encyclopedic collection offers visitors the broad sweep of American history as told through great works of art," Met officials said. The installation with the Washington painting "focuses on the themes of freedom, exploration, and expansion that pervaded America during the mid-19th century."

Leutze’s 1851 work of the famous surprise attack General George Washington led on Christmas night in 1776 against the British during the American Revolution has an ornate new frame, painstakingly recreated from a newly uncovered 1864 photo of the painting. 

It is "among the top 10 tourist attractions in the museum, if not the city," the Met's associate curator, Carrie Barratt, said in a podcast for the installation.

The image is flanked by two restored works — Frederic Edwin Church's "Heart of the Andes" from 1859 and Albert Bierstadt's "The Rocky Mountains" from 1863.

The three were displayed in the same way at the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, an event to raise money for the Union Army.

Museum gems from the 18th through the early 20th century will now be shown in light-filled rooms that have been redesigned in a contemporary interpretation of 19th-century Beaux Arts galleries. 

For the first time, the museum's painting collection for the American wing — including such famous works as John Singer Sargent's "Madame X," Thomas Eakins' "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull" and Winslow Homer's "Prisoners from the Front" — will be displayed on a single floor, spread out across 21 of the new galleries. 

Museum officials said the reconfiguration will enhance the display's coherence and accessibility.

Interestingly, "Washington Crossing the Delaware" wasn't painted in America but in Germany, where the government was in upheaval when Leutze, an American who went abroad for training, painted the image.

"This was precisely the time in American history when George Washington, who had been dead for 50 years — Washington died in 1799 — rose to prominence," Barratt said,.

"Not only as a memory of being a great president and the commander of our forces during the American Revolution, but as a leader among leaders, a man among men, the kind of mythologized leader that almost any country in the world would have been happy to have."

Leutze sent the painting to America, hoping to "represent American art at its highest levels" and, after being bought by private collectors, the piece ended up at The Met in 1897, Barratt explained.

As the Met looks back at American history, it is also looking ahead — toward the future of museum technolgy. The installations include new touch-screen case labels and improved computer access to allow for in-depth information searches about objects throughout the American Wing.

Other parts of the renovated American Wing opened in 2007, focusing on the classical arts from 1810 to 1845. The period rooms reopened in 2009.

The Met had a record 5.6 million visitors in the fiscal year ending in June 2011, thanks to the wildly popular Alexander McQueen show, according to Bloomberg News.