Reflections 17 - Period Rooms and the American Wing

 A friend told me that when she was growing up, the period rooms were her favorite galleries at the Met. It's pretty obvious from the foregoing that they don't have the same appeal for me.

One reason is that, for the most part, the rooms don't represent the way the homes' owners actually lived, but instead, how the museum's curators imagined that they lived (though the curators' judgments were based, of course, on expertise and research, not just imagination),  Most of the furniture and the decor isn't original to the homes; the pieces come from the same periods as the homes, but that's as far as authenticity goes. Moreover, as I understand it, these objects were selected because they appealed to the curators' sense of good taste.

One can't possibly see the rooms as representative rooms of the period, but rather, as examples of the way that members of the landowning and mercantile elites might have lived.  This makes the educational scope of the rooms is necessarily limited. The signage makes clear that the residences (with only a few exceptions, the Shaker room being one of them) belonged to wealthy people, but there are no corresponding rooms that show how ordinary people might have lived. Of course, this is not necessarily within the scope of an art museum, but, limited as they are in this way, the rooms may lead to a distorted sense of the past.

The darkness of so many rooms makes viewing them a less than pleasant experience and learning about their contents an activity best performed at home examining the Met's website. A fair number of people actually do come to look at the rooms, but I've noticed that almost no one looks carefully at them; 15 seconds might be a long time spent looking at any one room If the Met is going to have these rooms, the rooms really should be made more inviting to viewers.

But perhaps the most fundamental reason for my reaction is that I just don't like most of the furniture in  the rooms, especially the 19th century rooms. It is too dark, too curlicued, too grand for my taste.  With the exception of the Frank Lloyd Wright room and maybe the Shaker room, these are not rooms I would want to live in.