Our Lives, Our History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting a rich, fulfilling new show, “American Stories:  Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915.†There are 103 paintings hanging in nine galleries.  

   Many iconic works of American painting hang side-by-side with lesser known, splendid examples of genre painting.  It is tumultuous, informative, beautiful and moving.

  This is a show of paintings that tell stories about America and Americans, as the title specifies.

   Every work is figurative; every artist trained.  No landscapes, no fantasy nor idealized visions of the country, no myths.  No folk nor primitive art.

   The works are mostly arranged chronologically, and each time period is given a theme:  “Stories of War,†“Cosmopolitan Stories†and so forth.  An exception is in the first gallery, where you confront John Singleton Copley’s monumental, haunting “Watson and the Shark,†the injured sailor floating pale and bloodless as his comrades strive to rescue him from the giant beast (they succeed).

   The picture is joined by five others — including Winslow Homer’s dark “Gulf Stream†and George Caleb Bingham’s serene yet telling “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.†These works symbolize the ocean separating Americans from their origins and the European experience. The young man in the boat is said to be the French trader’s half-Indian son.

   Within the organizing chronology, themes recur:  business and commerce, family life, war, class and race among them.  But there are subtler themes, too. For example the shift of art buyers (and thus artists) from portrait painting to representations of everyday life, no matter how patrician or idealized. Thus well-to-do families at home hang next to not-so-well-off people at work and at play.  

   Sometimes these pictures are mesmerizing — Eastman Johnson’s “Negro Life in the South†— sometimes cloying and sentimental.

   But there are so many great works that demand your attention, often by supreme use of color and

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Bingham, Homer, George Bellows, Thomas Eakins and William Sidney Mount are incomparable.  Often they are so overwhelming that you see only them in a room when you enter — especially true of three Homers in gallery 5.  His “Croquet Scene†alone dares you to look elsewhere.

   This is a show that ranges over too many years and too many periods in American art history to be  taken in at once.  A viewer has so much to see and consider, to admire and wonder at that you soon pay less attention to the epochs and simply immerse yourself in the stories and the many marvelous works. There are insights into the development of the national consciousness, national painting and great artists who happened to be American; there is the continual theme of slavery and race — the most important fact in the American story.  This show is both accessible on first viewing and, I suspect, even more revealing on repeat visits.  

   “American Stories†runs through Jan. 24, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Call 212-535-7710 or visit metmuseum.org.  Remember, admission fees to the Met are “suggested,†not required.