The Met's New Gallery with "Washington Crossing the Delaware"

A controversial, (some hate it while others love it) though iconic painting is the star of the new gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. I paid my respects to this mammoth painting in the 70s  while it was the crown jewel of the Washington Crossing Museum in Pennsylvania. I was struck by the size of the thing, paid no attention to any flaws that only the art-elite had noticed, and didn't care. I thought it pompous and just right for its time. Anyway, an interesting story and I thought I'd share.

It was quietly dismantled at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art by staff who didn't like it, shuttled around the country for years, and held hostage in Pennsylvania by a woman who really liked it. Starting this week, Emanuel Leutze's iconic "Washington Crossing the Delaware," once the Met's redheaded stepchild, is back as a star.
Leutze's ode to the U.S. revolution now anchors the third and last addition to the museum's $100 million, 10-years-in-the-making American arts wing. It's a far cry from being kept in a small side gallery or eagerly sent on loan across the country, as it had been by the Met for more than 100 years. Since Monday, visitors can enter the New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts -- 26 new Beaux Arts-style rooms lit by the sun -- at what wing director Morrison Heckscher calls "the 50-yard line." Leutze's painting ("the goal post") sits 150 feet west at the end of a clear sight line past high-coved rooms, made to look the way Americans would have seen it in 1864.
It wasn't always this way between the Met and its famous charge. Indeed, the museum's 48-page Leutze-centric issue of its quarterly bulletin (which visitors can and should get their hands on) reads more like a case file for a brilliant but difficult foster child than the story of a prized work of art.
From the moment Leutze's operatic panorama entered the Met's holdings in 1897 as a gift from philanthropist John Stewart Kennedy, the museum struggled with whether to display it at all. Though the painting was popular with crowds, it wasn't considered great art. It is rife with historical and physical inaccuracies (so much so, an artist was commissioned to correct it last fall). Plus the work is too large to ignore or easily get rid of. At 12 by 21 feet, the 1851 canvas could easily shade a pair of midsize Hummers parked side by side. Its surface area exceeds that of all other works in the museum's American collection, and (not unlike a Hummer's size) is both why people love it and hate it.

The rest of the fascinating story is HERE, which also contains a slide show.

And so it goes.
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