The three-year, $70 million remodeling of the New-York Historical Society is not just a cosmetic affair. That is clear the moment you approach the main entrance’s widened steps on Central Park West and see a bronze, life-size statue of Abraham Lincoln standing in casual welcome.
Lincoln is on the steps, among us, prepared for photo ops that will most likely disrupt pedestrian traffic during Friday’s reopening of the renovated institution. And around the corner, on 77th Street, Frederick Douglass poses in bronze near the society’s other major entrance.
But why Lincoln and Douglass? Neither had anything to do with the society’s founding in 1804. Neither was born in New York. And while Lincoln visited and Douglass lived here for a time, they appear now for a particular purpose. They are making a statement about the society’s vision. They are key figures in the abolition of slavery in the United States, representing both the democratic ideal and the struggles required to realize it.
And these are also central themes in a conceptual reconfiguration of the society that began in 2004, when Louise Mirrer became its president. In recent exhibitions, current displays and a high-tech introductory film being shown in the new state-of-the-art auditorium, slavery has been placed close to the narrative center of American history.
So have the tensions between the ideals and failings of American democracy. The failings are chronicled and the ideals championed with great energy. Both condemnations and celebrations are partly populist, partly the result of an increased attention to New York’s ethnically diverse past, partly a desire to expand the audience, and partly an intellectual enterprise. Some of the building’s extensive renovations — which include a reconfiguring of display space, a new children’s museum, an expansive entrance gallery and a new restaurant — are meant to resonate with those themes.
The society actually seems to have a new center of gravity. And you can feel the shifts underfoot as you enter. On occasion the result is an institutional pratfall (as in some aspects of the opening gallery); other times (as in many sections of a major new exhibition on the American, French and Haitian Revolutions) they lead to powerful perspectives.
The change is also reflected in the self-consciously imposing building, constructed between 1903 and 1908, designed by York & Sawyer. The modifications by Platt Byard Dovell White Architects emphasize not monumental elevation but democratic accessibility, including a wider staircase and expanded entrance that lead into a new opening gallery, visible through transparent walls from Central Park West.
The atmosphere has also changed. The institution, which bills itself as New York’s first museum, was established in order to chronicle the evolution of a new state in a new nation. Its staggeringly rich collection includes 1.6 million artworks, 2 million manuscripts, a million newspaper issues, along with furniture and artifacts like board games. In recent decades it has weathered several crises and expanded its holdings.
Now, you enter the lobby, which has become the Robert H. and Clarice Smith New York Gallery of American History, and see the artifacts of old-line pride transformed by populism.
Part of the gallery has a ceiling from Keith Haring’s “Pop Shop,” which sold his works. Embedded in the floor are 12 circular displays showing artifacts found by amateur archaeologists in New York, ranging from arrowheads to a drowned child’s shoes. And in a neighboring space the society’s painting collection is plumbed to explore the evolution of “narrative art for a new democracy.” The society’s interest in ethnic history is reflected in a display of a Torah scroll deliberately damaged by British troops during the American Revolution.
The overall effect is at once dizzying, alluring and disorienting. In the opening gallery, for example, an array of objects called “New York Rising” is mounted on the wall mixing genre and type: paintings, busts, artifacts of daily life. But instead of being presented as icons of the American heritage, they seem to jostle against one another, sculptured heads hovering above weapons, paintings hung over broadsheets. We discover connections only when using enormous touch screens that show links to labels and commentary documenting the early years of the city. The presentation filters out intimations of hierarchy or solemnity in the objects.
I miss something in this approach, but it does inspire reflection. Unfortunately the playfulness is almost undone by a central object in the gallery, which is also the first thing you see as you enter. Originally shown in a society exhibition in 2006, “Liberty/Liberté” by Fred Wilson is constructed from objects in the collection. Busts of George Washington and Napoleon are perched behind the balustrade from the old Federal Hall, where Washington was inaugurated. And in front of this gated terrain of white plaster and marble stands a black wooden cigar-store figure in a liberty cap — a liberated slave? — seeming to look up at these figures. Behind the busts hang manacles along with other artifacts of the enslaved — referring, perhaps, to the fact that Washington held slaves. We are told that these objects “bring into focus the unfulfilled ideals of the 18th and 19th centuries.”
But we might see something similar from almost any century in recorded history; does this really bring into focus anything distinctive about those ideals? And don’t we care about Washington because of those ideals, not their unfulfillment? In recent exhibitions the society has explored some troubling aspects of New York’s past, but the presentations were nuanced and enlarging. Here, though, we see only a placard. We want to think highly of our once-worshiped gods? Hypocrites, slave holders, oppressors!
Luckily, this opening display turns out to be false advertising. But it serves as a reminder: If we are to make sense of our nation’s history, then, yes, we need a thorough accounting of slavery’s place in it. But we also need to understand how democratic ideals led to a more remarkable phenomenon in world history: abolition. We need to understand the democratic impulse — the impulse toward equality, the desire to level difference. We need to understand too an aspect of the democratic impulse that sometimes seems endangered by that desire but which led to the creation of this society and to other American movements: a sense of aspiration that leads to accomplishment. How can all these strands be pulled together?
These are also some of the issues latent in the new exhibition “Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn,” which demonstrates the virtues of the society’s reconfiguration of history. Created by Richard Rabinowitz and his firm, American History Workshop — the same team behind the society’s landmark shows about slavery in New York — it examines how notions of equality and human rights led to three revolutions: the American, the French and the Haitian. How did those aspirations for liberty evolve? How did they play out? What are their connections?
This narrative is illuminated by rarely shown documents and artifacts: George III’s Stamp Act from 1765, which offended the American colonies (and has never before been out of Britain); an “African Box” filled with 18th-century African craftworks that the early British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson displayed at lectures opposing slavery; Napoleon’s signed authorization to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803 (a result of the French loss of Saint-Domingue, which became independent Haiti); and the only known copy of the first printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence from 1804, recently discovered in the National Archives in London.
We see how the British victory over the French and Spanish in 1763 led to an expansive sense of empire that spurred the resentments of the American Revolution, and how France’s backing of that revolution relied on its colonies’ riches (Saint-Domingue was the wealthiest) but helped drain its treasury, which in turn led to the French Revolution. And we learn how both upheavals inspired Saint-Domingue’s slave rebellion and the later revolution that overthrew French rule.
The suggestion is also made that the shock of the British defeat in the American Revolution was one factor that led to the growth of England’s abolition movement. (“How is it,” Samuel Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”) Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1807 was partly a reproof, a counterdemonstration, England’s own bloodless revolution.
By the end we see, in other declarations up to the present, how the ideals of these revolutions have now become common parlance.
The exhibition deserves close examination, and its catalog is an essential companion. But there are flaws and gaps: the French Revolution is overshadowed by the attention given British abolition, and it never becomes clear how the Haitian slave rebellion evolved into a real revolution.
We also do not come much closer to understanding the intellectual differences between these revolutions or the reasons for their vastly different consequences. Democratic ideas and aspirations can lead in many different directions. And their possibilities and promises pose challenges.
The same is true here, as these ideas take center stage, and the society begins to navigate the altered landscape it is creating.
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