As 2024 unfolds, it brings with it celebrations to mark the centennial anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing. These will culminate publicly with a Met community day on November 10, but the opening salute to the centennial is represented by an engaging reinstallation of the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries of Eighteenth-Century American Art, unveiled in early April. The Met’s project team—headed by Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American Wing—has approached this most auspicious of birthdays with a light touch and a thoughtful gaze, offering multiple vantage points from which to view the last few hundred years. Connoisseurship, here and there eclipsed by a narrative-driven approach to objects, is back, but in updated form, reflecting our increasingly nuanced understanding of the past.
Alyce Perry Englund, associate curator of American decorative arts, supervised the reinstallation, which takes hold near the elevator entrance on the wing’s second floor and snakes through six rooms, ending just beyond the Van Rensselaer Hall. Since 2012 these spaces have evolved from a showcase for paintings to a mixed display of paintings and decorative arts. In their latest incarnation they champion furniture.
In envisioning The Calculated Curve, as the reinstallation has been titled, Englund sought contrast with the contextual displays in the wing’s period rooms, which remain intact. Her aim was to elevate furniture as an artistic medium, emphasizing technical and aesthetic considerations. As she notes, “baroque and rococo styles are about the curve, about furniture makers engaged in problem solving to produce almost gravity-defying forms.”
The presentation of roughly forty-five examples of seating and case furniture, clocks, and looking glasses, plus two finials presented as sculptural elements, is both visually compelling and intellectually accessible, even for visitors unaccustomed to looking critically at furniture. Gallery text is minimal and the installation itself is dramatically austere. Raking light accentuates carved surfaces and shapely silhouettes. Among the first of many gutsy pieces that visitors will encounter is a rare triple-top New York gaming table of 1760–1790. The geometric precision of its inlaid playing surface for backgammon and chess offers a striking counterpoint to the whiplash curves of its serpentine front and cabriole legs.
1691–1702. Sansbury-Mills and Richard Hampton Jenrette American Funds.
The Calculated Curve conveys the duality of eighteenth-century furniture, with its Enlightenment mix of scientific exactness and exuberant artistry. The installation moves through four distinct sections—“Movement, Mathematics, and Material,” “Nature and Narrative,” “Silhouette and Surface,” and “Design Inspiration”—before reaching its final grouping, “The Art of Many Hands.” Here and in the introductory text Englund acknowledges over-looked contributors to the story of American furniture: makers of color, indentured immigrants, women, and teens.
Wing aficionados are treated to some recent acquisitions, among them an armchair of about 1781 attributed to Connecticut maker Eliphalet Chapin, the gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf, and a Philadelphia card table of about 1750–1755, the promised gift of the Wangs. A lantern clock made in Leek, England by Peter Stretch and a tall-case clock created by the craftsman after he immigrated to Philadelphia are from the holdings of clock collector and historian Frank Hohmann III.
Reflecting new research by Englund and shown together in the galleries for the first time are a bonnet-top high chest and dressing table likely made by the same hand in New Hampshire or Maine that came to the Met through different sources thirty-two years apart. Together they are a marvel of provincial New England design and craftsmanship.
The Calculated Curve hints at more to come. Three examples of japanned case furniture, a japanned tall-case clock, and a japanned mirror made in Boston between 1730 and 1760 flag Englund’s longtime research interest in the subject. Her findings will be published in the Winter 2025 edition of the Met Bulletin.
Audio recordings narrated by woodworkers Sharon C. Mehrman and Leslie Dockeray, and intern Coumba Diagne, provide additional perspectives on the furniture on view. Englund also collaborated with Met furniture conservator Marijn Manuels on a video discussing treatment approaches to a heavily carved Philadelphia marble-slab table once owned by General John Cadwalader (1742–1786).
The Calculated Curve implicitly honors all who have made the American Wing an essential institution over the past century. Indeed, several of the included objects are familiar from R. T. H. Halsey and Charles O. Cornelius’s Handbook of the American Wing, the publication that
accompanied the wing’s opening exhibition. Of that pioneering venture, the wing’s then chairman John K. Howatt wrote in 1985: “When they were opened in October 1924, the American Wing’s sixteen period rooms, three exhibition galleries, and several alcoves caused a sensation. Here, virtually for the first time, American antiques were presented in an orderly, chronological way.” A century later, the taxonomy is no less important, just more evolved.
