From post-colonial to post-modern: a new YUAG

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH This is the drawing of the Age of Aquarius.

The reopening of the Yale University Art Gallery's (YUAG) collection of American art marks the first major new installation at the museum since the early 1970s. The collection contains an impressive assortment of paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts ranging from the Colonial period to the present. Housed on the third floor of YUAG, the exhibit has both variety and depth, supported by exceptional pieces from all periods of American history. The collection's most recognizable names fill the large, skylit main gallery—newly renovated to accommodate the largest of the collection's nine chronological divisions, Painting and Sculpture: 1830-1960. Smaller, period-specific rooms and the impressively large Trumbull Gallery branch off from this main space, presenting a most exquisite portrait of American art and history.

Three paintings by Edward Hopper hang just past the entrance into the Galleries of American Art. In Western Motel and Room by the Sea, Hopper presents beautifully rendered interior spaces, modulated by natural light. His concern for light's interaction with immediate, familiar objects—a component of most of the paintings in the collection—is well augmented by the adjoining rooms of decorative arts. These rooms display in tangible form what often fills the paintings' compositions. The teapots, clocks, spoons, mirrors, and Electrolux vacuums are undeniably works of art, portraying supreme ingenuity and craftsmanship. More interestingly, they resuscitate a complex dialogue between functionality and aesthetics: how luxury, necessity, and mass production relate to America's materialistic culture. Some of the decorative arts' more striking pieces include Frank Gehry's Easy Edges Lounge Chair (1970) made from corrugated cardboard, and a white pine Bust of Ben Franklin (1787) made by William Rush.

General historical information is provided for each room, sometimes including connections to the architecture, philosophy, and politics of the time period. However, overly extensive interpretations accompany many of the paintings—perhaps a symptom of the YUAG's ambitious attempt, as it says itself, to "create a fresh presentation of Yale's renowned collections of American art that relates more closely to current art history teaching." Contemporary Design by Yale Alumni, the current exhibit in the wing's Matrix Gallery (a room devoted to rotating exhibits), is also somewhat problematic. This attempt to show trends in the contemporary design world seems greatly stifled and without much purpose, especially when compared to something like Workspheres at the Museum of Modern Art, which has the space and resources to pull off an exhibit of this sort.

This criticism is minute in comparison with the pleasurable novelty of stepping into the renovated Trumbull Gallery. The soft-red painted room is the American version of a room of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence; the walls are covered with paintings from the artistic and political birth of our country. There are portraits of Ezra Stiles, George Washington, and Bishop George Berkeley, a copy of which hangs over the fireplace in Berkeley College's dining hall—the real thing, one would guess, being too valuable to stand the chance of being defaced by green beans and mush amandine.

One always comes back to how each painting is distinctly American in its own way. The museum's European art takes on new meaning in the context of America's less progressive but more distinctly individual styles. John Trumbull, Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, and Winslow Homer, though stylistically different, all attempt to express that same American spirit: individualism tempered by the expansive natural environment. One marvels at idealized portraits of American war heroes, supremely satisfied by the beauty of rain approaching our homes, as in Martin Johnson Heade's Sudden Shower—Newbury Marshes; or the dry heat, and how it makes the clay of adobes look, as in Worthington Whittredge's Sante Fe.

Complementing the opening of these galleries are a number of talks and performances, including one by Jules Prown, professor emeritus of art history, who will speak on "American Paintings in the New Galleries" this coming on Wed., Apr. 18, and a "Concert of American Music" on Sun., Apr. 29. But I would recommend waiting to visit the new galleries until Art for Yale: Defining Moments opens next Fri., Apr. 20. Many of the American Collection's best pieces, including a Fredrick Edwin Church, Joseph Stella, Winslow Homer, and John Singleton Copley, are only being put up in this temporary exhibit, which is aimed at swelling the pride and loosening the checkbooks of well-to-do alumni. While the purpose may be somewhat troublesome, the renovated American galleries provide an appropriately beautiful setting to enjoy Yale's beautiful collection.

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