Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts opens its new Art of the Americas Wing with a free admission day on Nov. 20. The MFA’s $345 million expansion and renovations, of which the new wing is just part, now add 53 new galleries to display more than 5,000 objects, more than twice the number of American works that the museum had displayed. Among them are (above) Thomas Sully’s 17-foot-wide 1819 painting of George Washington astride a white horse after crossing the Delaware.
Photos by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.
Maya funerary urns anchor the basement Mesoamerican gallery, representing a collection of Maya art that the MFA bills as the best late Maya ceramics outside of Guatamala.
Three rooms–including this pink parlor–are displayed from Salem architect and carver Samuel McIntire’s 1800-1801 Federalist mansion “Oak Hill,” originally built in Peabody, Massachusetts. MFA curator Elliot Bostwick Davis says they’re the “finest Federal rooms in any museum in the nation.”
18th century bureaus.
The John Singer Sargent gallery offers some three dozen paintings and drawings by the Italian-born, American expatriate, from what the MFA calls the most comprehensive Sargent collection anywhere. It includes his 1882 masterpiece “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” Strangely the sumptuous new gallery makes this 7-foot-square painting feel smaller than the more snugly fit gallery in which it used to be housed.
The salon-style hanging of the “Americans Abroad in the 19th Century” gallery.
The MFA’s story of American art concludes with a gallery showcasing abstraction by (from left) Cesar Paternosto, Louise Nevelson (Maine native), Frank Stella (grew up in Malden, Massachusetts, studied at Andover), Alexander Calder and Philip Guston (taught at Boston University).
The MFA argues that this gallery of works by (from left) Alice Neel, Walker Hancock and Scott Prior “demonstrate the continued viability of the figurative tradition” in the 20th century. MFA preview materials had suggested the new galleries would showcase Boston Expressionism, but the group is represented by a single painting by Hyman Bloom. It’s worth noting, though, that several other artists in this gallery, including Hancock, Prior, George Bellows, Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, lived or summered in New England.
The new Alford Auditorium.
I can’t wait to go check it out, Greg. Possibly on the Nov. 20, free day. Strange reflection, btw, of those urns in the Sargent painting.I like them better in the painting, half hidden, looming. Out front like that they look like two trees left in a clear-cut landscape. Or a couple of Beetles in a specimen box, or, as someone’s mother will soon say `an accident waiting to happen’ hahaha
Todd