American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915

Part of what makes the Met so extraordinary is that it facilitates encounters among masterworks from every century and every corner of the world. This fall, visitors to the Museum can encounter under a single roof two very different exhibitions devoted to scenes of everyday American life. American Stories brings together paintings by fifty-two artists that date from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, while Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, the influential suite of black-and-white photographs that Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924) made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Read more »

American Stories is the product of several years of preparation, during which the curators planned the exhibition’s scope and narrative, negotiated loans and decided which works from the Met’s collection to include, wrote catalogue essays, and envisioned—at least generally—the arrangement of paintings in the galleries. The works are presented in four chronological groups, allowing visitors to observe the development of painting styles and story-telling devices over time, from portraits of the era of the Revolution to Ashcan pictures of the early twentieth century. Within each section, paintings appear in pairs or groups that encourage visitors to discover their shared themes. Read more »