High Style

White-marble slave girls languish alongside posturing tragedy heroines and cherubic children. Emanuel Leutze's classic, Washington Crossing the Delaware, looms in its full-size 264-sq.-ft. version. Tiffany lamps and cut-glass bowls of dazzling intricacy vie with gingerbread mantelpieces. At first glance the Metropolitan Museum's gargantuan exhibition of 19th century American art, architecture and decoration seems about as serious an undertaking as a rainy afternoon spent in grandmother's attic. On second look, it proves to be a well-planned, scholarly survey of an oft-disparaged, still underestimated century.

Especially fascinating are ten reconstructions of the parlors, dining rooms, gardens and even furniture stores of the era's big-city upper crust. These handsome period settings ignore folk art and country furniture, and they exude a shameless relish for the lives of the very rich. But they also make a major contribution toward a re-evaluation of the high-style decorative arts of the 19th century, one of the last great neglected areas of art scholarship and appreciation.

Tete-`a-tete. Curator Berry Tracy spent three years tracking down and assembling some 300 pieces, many destined for permanent exhibition when the museum expands its American Wing. One of the earliest rooms contains a severe but elegant Duncan Phyfe parlor set done around 1837 in the master's late Empire style. Twenty years later, the fashion for historical revivals was in full swing; the yellow satin sofa and chairs of the John Taylor Johnston parlor are a free adaptation of Louis XVI neoclassicism by the French-trained New York designer Leon Marcotte. Over them hangs a chandelier that cunningly conceals newfangled gas piping beneath its fake candles and pseudo-18th century glass.

In furniture as in architecture, the 19th century's fanciful adaptations of traditional styles often masked new concepts in design and construction. The sinuous curves and scrolls and extravagant ornamental carving of J.H. Belter's rosewood chairs and tables were based --however remotely--on 18th century French rococo precedents. But the S-shaped Tete-`a-tete chair that seats two people facing one another was a strictly Victorian innovation.

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