American Art

The exhibit "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life" at the Metropolitan Art Museum is a blockbuster. The exhibit covers American art from 1765 to 1915, and encompasses too much to take in at a single viewing. What struck me was the absence of mean jokes at the audience's expense. Primitivist nor outsider art was not the focus; rather, the exhibit features artists who had mastered representational technique and were seeking to embrace their surroundings with open eyes. I was reminded of humanist 17th-century Dutch aesthetic, forged amid commercial vigor and celebrating the true and everyday.