MARC 主機 00000nam  2200349   4500 
001    AAI3203767 
005    20070413143114.5 
008    070413s2006                        eng d 
020    9780542524400 
035    (UnM)AAI3203767 
040    UnM|cUnM 
100 1  Trask, Jeffrey Lee 
245 10 "American things": The cultural value of decorative arts 
       in the modern museum, 1905--1931 
300    326 p 
500    Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-
       02, Section: A, page: 0693 
500    Adviser: Elizabeth Blackmar 
502    Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2006 
520    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 
590    School code: 0054 
590    DDC 
650  4 History, United States 
650  4 Art History 
650  4 Design and Decorative Arts 
690    0337 
690    0377 
690    0389 
710 20 Columbia University 
773 0  |tDissertation Abstracts International|g67-02A 
856 40 |uhttp://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/
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