At the Brooklyn Museum, a Polemical History Lesson In its overhaul of its collection of American art, the Brooklyn Museum fixates on everything that’s shameful in the country’s past. By Lee Rosenbaum
http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-the-brooklyn-museum-a-polemical-history-lesson-1474405606
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Anne Pasternak, the public-art impresario and museum neophyte who one year ago became director of the Brooklyn Museum, quickly set about unraveling much of what her predecessor, Arnold Lehman, had done over his 18-year tenure. Her concept was commendable—to simplify and clarify installations that many visitors had regarded as chaotic, confusing and cluttered. But the results—particularly as seen in the sweeping overhaul of the encyclopedic museum’s distinguished permanent collection of American art in a mere seven months— suggest that Ms. Pasternak’s ambitions may have exceeded her know-how.
Brought to fruition by assistant curator Connie Choi, a month before Brooklyn’s new full curator of American art, Kimberly Orcutt, arrived on the scene, the reinstallation displays 35% fewer objects than before, eliminating the practice of double-hanging works (one above the other). This means that you no longer have to strain to see works that were hung too high, but it also means that certain artists are no longer shown in depth: For example, Marsden Hartley, an American Modernist painter whose styles ranged from realism to abstraction, was formerly represented by four paintings; now there’s only one.
More problematically, the new installation is sabotaged by political polemics: It seems perversely fixated on what’s shameful in our country’s past. While it’s legitimate to raise uncomfortable issues, the relentlessness of the negative critique makes the installation sometimes seem less a celebration of American culture and achievements than a recitation of our nation’s faults.
The introductory wall text fires a warning shot: “Some of the objects . . . raise difficult, complex issues, since many works were made for and collected by racially and economically privileged segments of society.” In our “Occupy” era, which takes aim at the disparities between the 1% and the 99%, “privilege” attracts potshots.
In the opening section, “The Americas’ First Peoples,” overseen by curator Nancy Rosoff, we are reminded of the “massacre of millions” that haunts our nation’s past. The gold, ceramics and carvings of Native Americans from North, Central and South America take their rightful place at the beginning of this chronological story of American art, with other American Indian objects interspersed throughout the galleries. Latin American artists are included under the rubric of “American Art” and integrated with their U.S. contemporaries.
John Singleton Copley, born poor but risen high on the strength of prodigious talent, is caught in the net of “Pan-American Privilege” in the next section. His portrait, c. 1772, of New England monarchist Abigail Pickman Gardiner, dressed in “the height of London fashion,” is one of three depictions of “privileged Americans” leading off the display devoted to the Colonial era. The label for Charles Willson Peale’s 1776 portrait of George Washington recounts how our nation’s leader was thanked by John Hancock (who had persuaded Washington to sit for Peale) for “the attention you have shown to my property” during the liberation of Boston.
Even the heroic stature of Abraham Lincoln gets eroded: Close by his pensive portrait bust in bronze, derived from an 1887 statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, two Cheyenne ledger-book drawings, c. 1890, document the “fierce battles” in opposition to “government pogroms” and the “relentless U.S. Army massacres” that continued to victimize Native Americans, even after Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves. CONTINUE AT SITE
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