Overview

"In The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lois Fink traces the nation's oldest art collection from its origins in private and government holdings to its present-day status. By situating the museum in the context of the nation's history, Fink contributes to a better understanding of our past, while illuminating the challenges all museums face today. The Smithsonian American Art Museum followed a circuitous path through time, wandering literally - from one building to another - and figuratively - with four different names changes. Despite the fact that the museum was made custodian of the nation's art, for decades it received little support for that purpose from the federal government or from its own parent institution. Yet the story has a happy ending, with the collections finally settling in the building in which they originated. Fink's extensive research based on archival files and other primary sources ably captures those vacillations of fortune. The book centers around the museum's collection, but pays particular attention to those details that relate to shifts in museum practices elsewhere and how those issues relate to our own time. Fink begins with the significance of collections in the Western world and exhibition practices of the nineteenth century. Also covered is the impact of biological theory in the late nineteenth century and how it provided new structures and vocabulary for the organization of collections and exhibitions. She moves on to the progressive growth of the collection between 1906 and 1937 and how the loss of the title ""National Gallery of Art"" in 1937 affected the expectations held by two generations for the place of nationalism in art. The theme of attitudes toward American art arises throughout the text but especially in the chapter covering the years of 1930 to 1960, a time when the indifference shown toward the National Collection of Fine Arts (its title at the time) reflected the low esteem generally given to the nation's own art. Fink covers the many reversals of fortune and disappointments felt by the American Art Museum in the ensuing years and its momentous strides made under two dynamic directors. She details the new approaches to museum policies, practices, and creative funding that these men articulated. In concluding her study, Fink draws connections from the past to the ongoing activities of the museum. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, much like the museum itself, is written to be accessible to both the general reader and scholars of art history."

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9780826214294

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Lois Marie Fink is a Research Curator Emeritus of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is the author of American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons.

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