The first acquisitions in American Art were made almost immediately after the Museum was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. When they opened in October 1924, The American Wing’s dedicated space included sixteen period rooms, three exhibition galleries, and several alcoves and caused a sensation. A unique arrangement at the time, American antiques were presented in an orderly, chronological way. In the period rooms, furniture, silver, paintings, glass and other objects of more or less the same date were arranged together in spaces whose wood- and plasterwork were also of that date. As the Museum grew through the years in size and importance its holdings in American art grew in proportion. To accommodate its ever-increasing wealth of material and popularity, The American Wing underwent new construction to enlarge the galleries in the mid-1980s, directed by the design firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkaloo and Associates.  The 1980s incarnation of the American Wing embodied colonial home life and early Federal America by encompassing a wide-range of American art with sophisticated taste and variety of materials. Little and big treasures of American history are photographed and discussed in this book in order to celebrate the vitality and richness of American heritage. Masterpieces of painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, interior and exterior architecture, furniture, and other decorative arts are illustrated and explained in terms of their style, quality, and historical interest; it is not just a tour of the galleries, but of the collection as a whole, including objects not necessarily on display. The Museum's large selection of outstanding and typical examples provides a fair opportunity to judge the true nature of our rich and distinctive artistic heritage. [This book was originally published in 1985 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

The American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Arts & Photography

Stillinger, Elizabeth

DAVIDSON, Marshall B.

History & Criticism

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Like New. 1972 stated first edition. Tight, square, and clean. Unmarked. Remarkably nice copy. ** (Note:Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed. If you are not completely happy, we will refund your money immediately...no questions asked. Books purchased before 11am EST normally shipped same day.)

The Antiques Guide to Decorative Arts in America, 1600-1875

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Dutton

Historic Deerfield -- A Portrait of Early America -- First Edition First Printing -- 1992

Historic Deerfield: A Portrait of Early America

Photography & Video

Avery

This beautifully illustrated book commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the National Gallery of Art's acquisition of the Index of American Design. Widely regarded as one of the New Deal's most important art projects, the Index began in 1935 as a unit of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Its aim was to compile and eventually publish a visual archive of American folk, popular, and decorative art from the time of settlement to about 1900. The approximately 1,000 artists involved in the project created more than 18,000 meticulous watercolor portraits of Americana. The book presents 82 of the finest watercolor renderings along with a selection of the artifacts they represent. The original objects range from quilts, weather vanes, and hand-carved toys to carousel animals, stoneware, and cigar-store figures. Three essays explore the history, operation, and ambitions of the Index of American Design, examine folk-art collecting in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, and consider the Index's role in the search for a national cultural identity in the early twentieth-century United States. Drawing on America's Past is the companion publication to an exhibition that runs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from 27 November 2002 through 2 March 2003.

Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design

Doss, Erika

Chotner, Deborah

Clayton, Virginia Tuttle

The University of North Carolina Press

The fanfare that accompanied the reopening of the American Wing in 1980 sparked renewed inteest in American fine and decorative arts. Davidson and Stillinger have woven the research produced by the museum's expert curatorial staff into a lively survey of selected room settings and stellar objects. The subject matter is divided into such sections as period rooms, decorative arts, and fine arts and covers the 17th to the early 20th centuries. Unlike most catalogs of art museum collections, this offering devotes many more pages to decorative than to fine arts. The more than 500 photographs are of high quality and many benchmark objects are shown from new angles. This introduction to the American Wing surpasses nearly all surveys in its content and beauty.

The American Wing

Davidson, Marshall

American Antiques: The Hennage Collection, Williamsburg, Virginia

Antiques & Collectibles

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

This book explores the world of American folk art collectors―people who saw the beauty and value of the folk-art portraits, weathervanes, and carvings that mainstream America had hitherto relegated to attics, barns, and dust bins. Although pioneer collectors sought out and preserved objects that are today regarded as icons, little has been known of their motivations, aesthetics, or display techniques. Unlike the mainly white, professional, male collectors of furniture, silver, and other traditional decorative arts who were the subject of Elizabeth Stillinger's classic study The Antiquers, the earliest folk art collectors were a bohemian crowd made up of women, artists, immigrants, oddballs, and outsiders. They were drawn to folk art not by its prestige value but by its artistic, instructive, and ethnological significance. A Kind of Archeology begins by examining the evolution of the concept of folk art, relating it to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements such as romanticism, nationalism, arts and crafts, and colonial revivalism. Four sections follow, each presenting a category of collector―antiquarian and ethnologist, modernist, decorator and aesthete, and patriot and nationalist―and offering portraits of individual collectors and dealers. The book closes with the exhibition The Flowering of American Folk Art, 1776–1876, which opened in 1974. The show was so successful that prices shot skyward, and folk objects, after a century of being disregarded, misunderstood, then championed by a few enthusiasts and gradually accepted in a small segment of the art world, finally entered the realm of highly desirable and collectible art.

A Kind of Archeology: Collecting American Folk Art, 1876-1976

University of Massachusetts Press

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