'American things': The cultural value of decorative arts in the modern museum, 1905--1931 (New York City)

This dissertation examines education reform programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the Progressive era that used museum collections to promote improved civic taste. Seeking to modernize the Metropolitan after 1905, Robert de Forest, New York's "first citizen" and secretary of the museum's board of trustees, and his assistant Henry Watson Kent implemented professional management into the museum's previous paternalistic organizational structure and they integrated decorative arts into its fine arts collections. The museum used its decorative arts collections of "household arts" to improve American taste because de Forest and Kent believed that ordered home environments contributed to good citizenship. The museum's taste education program was part of larger social-engineering reforms that focused on improving the built environment of cities to enhance individual's capacity to participate in civil society. The museum's civic-education program was two-pronged: the American Wing displayed colonial-era period rooms that interpreted a civic ideal of Protestant patriarchal authority and grounded the museum's "progressive" response to the industrial present in a simplified history that removed social difference and conflict; at the same time, the museum coordinated with industrial manufacturers to provide guided access to museum collections to improve the quality of modern finished products available to household consumers. To facilitate industrial cooperation, the museum held annual design competitions and exhibitions of the best industrial design produced from museum study. During the 1920s, the Metropolitan Museum became a show-place for modern-style industrial design, at the same time it presented traditional homelife in its American Wing galleries. While reform leaders at the Metropolitan Museum embraced institutional and bureaucratic modernism, they remained leery of aesthetic modernism and its radical implications. Historians interpret art museums in this period as elite models of social control and exclusion while material culture scholars examine objects either for their intrinsic meanings or as reflection of consumerist agency. I expand upon and challenge those interpretations by historically analyzing art museum education programs, and their selection and use of American things and American history. Rather than protecting access to fine art, the museum used decorative art as educational tools for (specific) aesthetic and social reform.