Journey through American Art at the Met

Today I went to the Met for the first time in a year. My boyfriend, his parents and I braved the holiday crowds to see two exhibits, which taken together, provide examples of social commentary through art throughout American history. In addition, they provide a good example of how social commentary has also changed form through the years.

"American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915," is a heavily curated show that traces American figure painting for two centuries. The exhibit features all the American greats from Copley to Homer to Sargent. Since so many of the featured pictures are already iconic (Morisot's Little Girl in a Blue Dress, Homer's Snap the Whip), it's helpful for the curation to cast a new light on these paintings by accompanying each picture with ample texual description. I probably spent more time reading than I did looking at the images in this exhibit. The text maps American painting closely to American history. Paintings from the early 19th Century, for example, commented on the idea of rural versus urban America. One painting shows a woman choosing between a country suitor and a city suitor; another visualizes the campaign slogan "Tippacanoe and Tyler Too," favoring the western Harrison to the refined van Buren. The late 19th Century, on the other hand, featured Americans experiencing the glamours of Europe at a time when Americans were becoming more worldly. Each room of the exhibit highlights a particular era. Going through all the rooms in order evoked the sense of walking through an American History textbook, minus any of the awful memorization.

"Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans" is an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's photography book, The Americans. In the 1950s, the Swiss Frank drove across the US taking over 700 rolls of film along the way. He condensed his pictures to an 83 image book called "The Americans." While it was viewed as subversive --even anti-American--at the time, it's been rehabilitated since. This exhibit displays all 83 photos in order, along with some explanation about the themes that Frank was trying to illuminate. Some of the most memorable photos include a black nurse holding a white baby, and a diner bar full of working men on a lunch break looking skeptically at the camera. At first glance, the value of these pictures seem to lie in their ability to capture a bygone time. After all, the picture are all black and white and features such mechanisms as drive throughs and jukeboxes. Frank's social commentary is the second most noticeable thing. He grouped his pictures carefully to comment on America's racial segregation, consumerism, and hard-working spirit. One series of pictures uses the titles "Parade" and "Founding Fathers" ironically. They depict several forlorn people looking out of a window with a flag on the building and a group of men looking on at the betting track in derbies -- not exactly a typical parade or typical founding fathers. Indeed, Frank's is social commentary by arrangement. His grouping abilities sometimes surpass his photographic abilities.

What's most interesting about looking at Frank's pictures fifty years after he took them is to think how similar America is. If someone went around the country and tried to capture the same themes and images, they would be able to do it, nearly frame for frame. There is still plenty of despair, patriotism, and hope.