Art19th Century America at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 16 - September 7

LIFTED from the walls, packed and shipped, paintings from the exhibition of contemporary New York art have abandoned the Metropolitan Museum and scattered. The new show of Nineteenth Century American Art which arrived to replace the modern exhibition has transformed the domain beyond recognition. Representational paintings of mountain landscapes, stern portraits of government leaders, scenes of domestic life now sit where the abstract geometrical colors of the avant-garde did in the fall. The leap from nineteenth to twentieth century shows the revolution in sensibility that slashed through the old tradition, when artists gave up sketching images of the world and began to struggle with abstract pictures.

The third of the Metropolitan Museum's monumental exhibitions in honor of its hundredth anniversary, 19th-Century America. comes prepared to outdo the previous exhibitions in claborate display, quantity and splendour. With the bravura of technicolor and wide screen, the museum puts hundreds of paintings and sculptures among a setting of period furniture and decorative art with craftsmanship and detail stripped from design today,

Chairs, clocks, tables and china, arranged in Victorian abundance illustrate shifts in popular taste that marched through revivals of the Gothic, French Empire and Romantic styles. The nineteenth century public highly valued the furniture that warmed their houses. The mixture of decorative art with painting and sculpture in the Metropolitan exhibition illustrates the ties between the two during the last century. Whole rooms have been recreated by the museum with yellow silk chairs and gilt chandeliers to look the way they once did in American mansions. The style of the rooms is more ornate than the plain style in the paintings that describe a cross section of American life.

Unlike today, artists in the nineteenth century had no problem selecting a subject for their work. All aspects of the country invited them to paint-to paint things that no one had painted before. They recorded events, people, plains and waterfalls in a sparse. direct style. Though these artists used traditional methods of perspective, often minimal training and a choice of unusual subjects makes the work look specifically American. Figures are stiff, sometimes doll-like in position even though details of appearance are neatly printed out. Artists seized concrete elements around him to fit into the crisp lines on the canvas.

Fascination with the subject often shadowed other elements in the painting. Samuel Morse, famous for his telegraph code, painted a seene of a room at the Louvre with an array of well dressed young artists beside their casels in front of a wall striped with the old masters. The painting offered instruction to the American public about art treasure on the other side of the Atlantic. Today the minute imitation of more than thirty paintings crowded on the museum wall make a pattern of curiosities for the eve to probe. Morse used mellow tones in his graceful storv of European culture.

The slightly strange look of the world inside American works sometimes runs close to the visionary. In one particularly beautiful picture by George Caleb Bingham, a canoe moves across the canvas on a glassy river. A yellow glow from the side lights the figures of a man who has stopped paddling for a moment and of his passengers, an Indian boy and a fox. All three sit motionless, staring at the viewer as though he were sitting on the bank. The uniform pale yellow-grey sky seems to stretch in all directions beyond the frame that cuts it off.

Many nineteenth century artists began their careers as sign painters or carpenters and never had much formal training in art. Often this lack of instruction freed them from a rigid approach. Some explored the country searching for ever more dramatic landscapes. Frederick Edwin Church traveled to South America and painted enormous canvasses of the dense jungle beside the Andes, Painting seemed an adventure of luck in finding the right seene. Artists must have carried their easels for miles before stopping before a view and setting up equipment among the leaves. On another large canvas Church painted the sunrise spreading redness over a lake like lava. Similarly painted out of the studio, the landscapes of the Hudson River School have a more peaceful tone. Nineteenth century artists saw their environment with wonder. They felt no alienation from their public whom they delight with colorful reflections. Fierce whims of nature are the most hostile forces depicted by the painter.

The many genre scenes of daily life-making cider or bartering a horse-have primarily an historical and anecdotal interest. The best come from an unsentimental brush, free from the snare of an over-appealing subject. A winter scene in Brooklyn, half way between landscape and genre, shows a section of New York City as a country town with a wood pile in the foreground and animals walking in the snow.

The portraits have the dignity of family character studies that crowd institutional walls. Group portraits of large families in their living rooms seem an ancestral view of the American family photograph. The artist shifts each person into a still life arrangement, sitting around the piano or playing with the dog.

The simple realism of nineteenth century American art made paintings understandable to the contemporary public. Ironically, Americans trained on the values of the European tradition and born in the midst of Abstract Expressionism feel removed from this severe realism today. We look at the simple style of the last century critically, admiring the honesty, yet realizing that it wanders far from the quality of Europe. Viewers need to look at labels for the artist's name.

The art in this exhibition seems to come from a distant car. The illustration of things that are remote. Indians, sails in New York harbor and the untouched expanses of prairie, give a sense that this is art of the past. The carefully described clothing and setting of the paintings also locks this art into a specific time and place.

The exhibition itself reinforces this feeling of distance from the twentieth century by having so many pieces of actual furniture and whole rooms where you can stick your head over the rail into nineteenth century atmosphere. The material presence of the decoration-the glass, the silk, the gold knick-knacks-settles the paintings in history.

The best paintings hang at the end of the exhibition in the last work of the nineteenth century when artists like Eakins, Whistler. Homer and Sargent work with full new techniques of realism. In one haunting canvas by Eakins, surgeons in business suits cut into a man's leg. Scarcely visible in the dark background, a hall of students observe the operation. The quiet bloody hands makes it difficult to stare at this intense description. Sargent has an equally striking work of four girls arranged on a wide space of a dark room. The smallest sits, paused in playing with her doll an a grey rug. Painted with shimmering intensity of dark and light, they stand in black stockings and white dresses. Sargent dissolves the trivia from the subject by making it look like a monumental stage.

Quite soon after these painters, some American artists reckoned with European art and brought a revolution. Nineteenth century America was too young to worry about more than the facts that could be put on the canvas. Transformation of all parts of American life had to occur before art could break from copying. Once American tradition established itself, visions of an art that would achieve the mastery of Europe twirled in the eyes of Americans. The best recent art in this country goes beyond the cubism of Europe and its abstract inventions.

The Metropolitan Museum has selected the best of thousands of paintings done in the realist partner for its exhibition. Many people still prefer to hang a well-painted country scene on their wall than a stark unacceptable abstract work. Satisfying, but unimaginative representations of American life are bought every day from dimly lit galleries all over the country. And painters like Andrew Wveth continue to see the world with knife-like clarity in a modernizing of the nineteenth century American method. Though many realist painters exist and taste for nineteenth century art prevails over much of the country, today's realism of the traditional sort seems to have run itself out by not recognizing the inevitability of abstract art.