Book Review: Print Version

Book Review: American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Volume 1. A Catalogue of Works By Artists Born before 1865
by Caterina Pierre

American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Volume I. A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1865. Edited by Thayer Tolles. Catalogue by Lauretta Dimmick, Donna J. Hassler and Thayer Tolles. Photographs by Jerry L. Thompson. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999]. ISBN 0-87099-914-1; $95., $85 for museum members.

Although I consider myself to be a voracious reader, rarely do I have the patience to sit down and actually read a collection catalogue. At best these volumes often should be consulted only when one desires information on a specific work or art or its artist at a given moment. Never before have I found such a catalogue with which one can curl up on the couch (the place where I do most of my reading and writing, the scholarly and not-so-scholarly work). These books are usually cumbersome and laden with archival minutiae so mind-numbing that the clutches of boredom seem to bring upon the reader a sleep similar to death, its hold one fights to be released but cannot escape. This was, however, by no means the case with one of the most significant publications on sculpture to be recently published, a text entitled American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Volume I. A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1865, edited by Thayer Tolles, assistant curator in the Metropolitan Museum's department of American Painting and Sculpture, and with catalogue entries by Lauretta Dimmick (an independent scholar), Donna J. Hassler (Executive Director of the Rensselaer County Historical Society in Troy, New York), and Tolles.

This book, the first of two volumes, was published in late 1999 (available at the Metropolitan and its on-line gift shop on its website) and begins with a history of the Metropolitan Museum's American Sculpture Collection. The first American sculpture to enter the museum's collection was in 1872, Hiram Powers's California, as a gift from W.A. Astor. In fact, according to Tolles's informative essay on the Collection's history, all of the Metropolitan's American Sculpture entering the collection before 1905 was acquired by gift. One also learns through the reading of this essay the vast role played by Daniel Chester French between the years of 1903 and 1931, when he was a trustee at the Metropolitan and the main collector of American sculpture for the museum during those years. (Artists' roles in helping to build particular collections is extremely interesting and to my knowledge is a vastly understudied phenomena. Yet the Metropolitan has pointed out in recent years another important artist who helped to form a collection they later acquired by gift, that being the Havemeyer collection, built in large part on the advice of the American painter Mary Cassatt).

The catalogue is organized chronologically by the year of the artist's birth, then alphabetically when more than one artist was born in the same year. It begins with the earliest modern American sculptor, Horatio Greenough, born in 1805, and ending with Charles Marion Russell, born in 1864. Between these two are included some of the most significant sculptors of the nineteenth century: Henry Kirke Brown, Thomas Crawford, Daniel Chester French, William Morris Hunt, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Some may find the organization of the book confusing, especially if one is not an Americanist and/or is unfamiliar with the year of the birth of the artists they are looking for; but the index of artists and titles cures this easily and quickly. Each entry contains a short selected biography on the artist, which is then followed with a brief bibliography for that artist. Following this one finds the entries for each specific sculpture by that artist in the Metropolitan's collection, beginning with the earliest. The entries are intelligent and scholarly and contain a brief exhibition history for each sculpture (after its entry into the Met's collection) and informative endnotes in most cases. Jerry L. Thompson's photographs, incorporated for each object and which include many in color, are quite exquisite; they are in and of themselves a valuable resource, equally as useful as the written entries within the text. The book concludes with a selected bibliography, a list of catalogue numbers with their corresponding accession numbers (useful for researchers), and the index.

Although my criticisms of the text are few, there are two items that I feel compelled to mention. First, the selected bibliography, although tight and succinct, fails to list a number of general books on sculpture which are of major importance to the medium's history. Missing among them is Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr.s' The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914 (1992), which contains substantial essays on the importance of Rome for sculptors during the nineteenth-century. (Stebbins' book is mentioned in a footnote within one of the entries, but I think it is important enough to have been included it in the back, lest it be otherwise missed.) Various general books on the medium itself would have been helpful to a reader unfamiliar with various technical processes and terms; Malvina Hoffman's Sculpture Inside and Out (1939) is still a useful and widely cited text on technique that could have been listed and was not. Kirk Savage's Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (1997) is also absent from the selected bibliography, and this is unfortunate because although the text deals mainly with public monuments, many American sculptors born before 1865 are discussed in depth within its pages. However, the select bibliography, I am sure, was kept short as to not repeat many of the texts listed after the biographies for each artist, (as with the Stebbins) which are often informative and lead the reader to other important texts about each artist and his/her work.

Secondly, oftentimes collection catalogues tend to illustrate, obviously without trying to do so, various holes or gaps in the collection's holdings. This is certainly not a criticism of the catalogue itself, but I found it interesting how few works by women sculptors born before 1865 the Metropolitan actually holds. Of the 61 sculptors included in the catalogue, only two are women: Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830-1908) and Adelaide Johnson (1859-1955). This seems to perpetuate the gravely incorrect idea that women artists were not making sculpture in the nineteenth century, when in fact they had an important history involving struggle and success. Thus an entire significant portion of American sculpture history, the contribution of women sculptors, is missing. Artists such as Anne Whitney, Mary Edmonia Lewis, Louisa Lander, Emma Stebbins, Vinnie Ream Hoxie, Margaret Foley, Blanche Nevin, and countless others born before 1865, whose work was an important part of vast, rich history of American neoclassical sculpture, were not collected. Obviously this is not the fault of the authors of the text; it is simply a reminder of the history of collecting in America during a particular time period - work by women was just not being actively collected by any museums in the first half of the twentieth century, and the book seems to blatantly remind some of us of that fact without really wanting to do so. (One can only dream that maybe someday in the future works by such sculptors will come up for purchase and the Met will seek to acquire them.)

Yet the upside of collection catalogues is that many under-appreciated jewels of the collection are brought together with the more famous works. Works such as J. Stanley Connor's Cain (text pages 369-70), a wonderful marble which can be found in the Luce Center cases on the second floor of the museum (the Met's "art zoo" as such organization of works behind glass on shelves is often affectionately referred,) is wonderfully photographed by Thompson and given an excellent entry by Tolles. She had little information to work with, as not even Connor's year of birth is concretely known, but was able to make certain to the reader the effectiveness of this relatively unknown artist's work. Although John Quincy Adams Ward, then a museum trustee, found the work disagreeable in subject (being an image of the first human murderer), it was accepted as a gift from Conner's mother in 1883. Tolles notes that the work is a testament to "·a new strain of emotion in sculpture not incompatible with the Victorian penchant for overwrought drama." (p. 370) Certainly a sculptor who was this accomplished, who could draw out from a block of stone this level of expression and emotion, deserves to be sought out and discussed and Tolles entry, like many of the others by her co-authors Dimmick and Hassler, leaves the reader's appetite whetted.

Rarely can a catalogue of a museum's collection be read with real interest. Thayer Tolles' American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Volume I. A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1865, is a welcome exception. The book is insightful, clear, concise, beautifully designed, useful to researchers and above all readable, as few such catalogues tend to be. The text is necessary reading for any scholar of nineteenth century sculpture and a necessary addition to any sculpture library. Volume two, currently entitled A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Between 1865 and 1885 and due to be published in 2000, promises to be equally stunning. I, for one, remain on the couch eagerly awaiting this second volume