Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878," Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon: Cassat showed this painting of a young girl sprawled out on an plush chair with the Impressionists in 1879, marking the beginning of the first of her four exhibitions with the group.

BY  CAROLINE LAGNADO

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915, now in its final days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explores the development of this young country’s identity, and the role artists played in defining it. Culled from 45 prestigious collections, the exhibitions  presents some of America’s fundamental themes: family, community, citizenship, race, and the rural and urban landscape, while gaining a better understanding of the creative shift made in depicting them as artists moved away from their early reliance upon patrons to an increased freedom and ability to make references to everyday life.

Curatorial decisions were made to further reflect this diverse range of style and subject. The show’s audio guide includes not only the comments of the Met’s curatorial department, but notable non art-experts as well-such as the restauranteur  Danny Meyer,  political columnist Jonathan Alter, and the writer Elizabeth Strout. A blog for the exhibition, while not a first for the Met, has also gained notice for continuing the learning and conversation for visitors.

Old Masters New Perspectives recently spoke over the telephone with H. Barbara Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Met to discuss this monumental show and its relationship to the canon of Old Masters. The term “old master” is quite confounding for its various definitions, many of which exclude American artists and female artists. We discussed this lack of accord as well as the role of American artists from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century and the rise and fall of their reputations:

Weinberg: How do you define “Old Master? If it were a Jackson Pollock show, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.

OMNP: That’s true…

Weinberg: Our guys aren’t necessarily old like Rembrandt and they aren’t necessarily masters if they’re women—they could be mistresses but we won’t go there..

OMNP: So how would you define an “Old Master”?

Weinberg: From what we can see at this point, [we’re dealing with] artists who have unassailable reputations. In 2010, artists who will remain highly esteemed in the realm of the exhibit, you could say Sargent, certainly, Whistler, I’d be comfortable saying (Mary) Cassatt, you could safely claim (John) Copley is an American Old Master, (George Caleb) Bingham, William Sidney Mount. William Merritt Chase, though I don’t think he has an international reputation. Do you think I’m missing anyone?

OMNP: How about Eakins?

Weinberg: (Thomas) Eakins, there’s an interesting instance, he sort of bridges that divide between national and international, his shows have gone abroad. There was one organized by the National Gallery of London [but] it didn’t do all that well attendance-wise. (John Singer)Sargent, Whistler, Cassat, and Eakins, are the crème de la crème and they all spent time as expatriates.

OMNP: So let’s go through our top American Old Masters in the vantage point of the exhibit.

Weinberg: It’s a pretty big list now, in terms of reputation and international visibility. In descending order: Sargent, Whistler, Cassat, then Eakins and Homer and Chase and the three more locally esteemed: Copley, Mount and Bigham. With Sargent, Whistler, and Cassat, since they made their careers in Europe they command a more international opinion.

OMNP: How did this exhibition come about?

Weinberg: We started out about four years ago realizing there had not been an exhibition of serious American genre painting in a long time.

OMNP: Can you talk a bit about how you arranged the exhibit—the subgroups, the chronological divisions?

Weinberg: Our years of 1765-1915 cover a new way of storytelling, painting as narrative, the paintings of portraits, scenes that start with everyday life, have stories of everyday life embedded in them. [For example,] we can look at images of women and children at midcentury with later images by Cassat. Or Bingham’s boatmen with Eakins’s swimming scene—both start with everyday life but the approach is different. Bingham is explicit, funny, Eakins allusive, subtle.

We have 150 years and a variety of styles showing how American stories got told. A chronological presentation made sense [to us], though we had a momentary flirtation with doing it thematically but the interpretive headaches were insurmountable and visually it would be textbookish and repetitive.

OMNP: Let’s talk about the loans—there are a fair number—

Weinberg: We knew we had to have works of exceptional quality so we set the bar very high for our loans we wanted to concentrate on high, high quality works. An exhibition of this quality probably won’t occur again in the foreseeable future.

OMNP: The department has been keeping an exhibition blog—what is the intended purpose of this blog?

Weinberg: Our goal is for it to bring in broadest possible audience. Some people prefer to work online and those people have the opportunity. Using a blog is not unique at the Met, but it’s fairly new. We can use the blog to cut across themes, like the recent post on shopping. Or if you’re interested in how these paintings show up in print, you feel free to explore that aspect online.

We also put a lot of information on the website, including podcasts from the outside commentators like Jonathan Alter from Newsweek to talk about political paintings, and Mark Bittman from the New York Times talking about food.

OMNP: What has audience reaction been like?

Weinberg: When I walk through the galleries I see people very engaged with the works and the wall texts.

OMNP: Do you think you’ve received positive public attention because of the times we’re in now?

Weinberg: When we started this four years ago we could never have foreseen how appropriate this reassuring look would be. We never would have spun the story but it’s extremely reassuring how upbeat that entire aspect of the exhibition is. Artists—partly because they knew they had to sell—took a very upbeat approach. We didn’t avoid the blood and gore, but the artists of this period did, even in the Civil War artists avoided the blood and gore.

“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915,” is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 24. For more information, check out the exhibition’s page on the Met website here. The show continues onward to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exhibiting February 28–May 23, 2010,

OMNP would like to recognize Carrie Rebora Barratt- Associate Director for Collections and Administration, Bruce Robertson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Margaret C. Conrads-Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City for their work on this exhibition.