Although visitors to New York City often visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the nearby Frick as well, few of them know about the wonderful institution just across the East River, the Brooklyn Museum. Because the Brooklyn Museum was designed by the legendary architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White in 1893, it was the perfect location for the seminal exhibition titled "The American Renaissance: 1876-1917." The monumental Brooklyn building, with its classical domes and columns, sculptural groups and murals, represents the goals and ideals of the American Renaissance, where, inspired by the classical past, artists, sculptors, designers and architects colaborated on civic, private and commercial projects.

     The exhibition opened in the fall of 1979 in Brooklyn and then traveled to the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the National Museum of American Art) in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1980, going on to the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in the summer and the Denver Art Museum in the fall.

     The catalog for the exhibition is well-assembled and dense with information. The first part of the catalog describes the triumphalist spirit of America and the new cultural awareness that initiated the American Renaissance. Architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson writes on the new American identity that sought a form of expression, the cultural conditioning that helped create it, the classical inspiration shared by the figures in the movement, the eclectic styles that coalesced into the american Renaissance and the organizations that abetted its development.

     Hirschl And Adler Galleries in New York is known for their well-organized survey exhibitions. In 1985, they mounted an impressive exhibition dedicated to the art, sculpture and design of the American Renaissance. Titled simply "The Arts of the American Renaissance," the exhibtion catalog features a foreward by Stuart Feld and an essay by Douglas Dreishpoon and Susan E. Menconi. The concise essay does an excellent job of explaining the American Renaissance: "in a period when America was searching for natural identity after the divisive Civil War,amidst unprecedented undustrialism and eclecticism, the artist shaped and visulaized te hopes of an entire nation."

     The essay discusses leading figures Will Low (1853-1932), Edwin Blashfield (1848-1936), Kenyon Cox (1856-1919), Daniel chester French (1850-1931), Albert Herter (1871-1950), Augustus St. Gaudens (1848-1907), who worked together on large civic projects as well as private commisiions for the Carnegies, Goulds, Morgans, Mellons and Vanderbilts.

     The selection of works in the exhibition - reproduced primarily in color - shows the eclecticism of the American Renaissance. The mural studies reveal the conceptual process of the artist at work and the architectural renderings exhibit the classical origins of the movement. The maquettes, bronders and marbles show the transition from Italian and then French Beaux-Arts influences to fluid, more interpretive styles.

     While the American Renaissance period faded in the 1920s, it left us with monumental civic structures, plazas and sculptures that remain popular with residents of the great cities today. In fact, it was the destruction of McKim, Mead and White's landmark Penn Station that is credited with starting today's historic preservation movement.