As the largest museum building project on the eastern seaboard of the United States in recent times, the new Art of the Americas wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts provides an imposing home and rich context for the stars of its American holdings. Ten years in the planning and designed by Foster + Partners, it is inserted into the space between the wings of the original building which respectively house European and Ancient collections. Its external impact is relatively minimal – in fact rather low-key and corporate; however, when approached from the heart of the Museum, a sense of occasion, even drama is created. Visitors enter through a vast glass atrium (The Shapiro Family Courtyard), the feature that most obviously marks it as a Fosterian commission. Formed on one side by the 1909 exterior wall of the Museum building and flooded with light and piped Baroque music, it contains a café and two modern sculptures, and will prove valuable for development events as a space in which Boston bankers will undoubtedly feel at home. The fifty-three new galleries ahead, which house in excess of five thousand objects, rise over four levels. They do not simply represent a survey of a national school of art, but span two continents and some three thousand years – the Americas are interpreted here in the broadest sense in a bold move which is the defining characteristic of the whole project.

Although not immediately obvious, a tour should start below ground level, with the Ancient Mesoamerican collections, where works such as an Olmec jadeite mask of 1150–550 BC are given pride of place. One then ascends through the heart of the building, travelling in time, until the mid-twentieth century is finally reached at the top, and Alexander Calder’s delightful wire Cow (c.1929) or César Paternosto’s vivid painting Staccato (1965) can be enjoyed. The displays have been planned so that the first objects seen on each level are especially impressive or celebrated: this means that one can ‘tick off’ obvious ‘must-sees’ – Copley’s Paul Revere or Sargent’s The daughters of Edward Darley Boit, for example – with relative ease. The central galleries beyond them on each floor illustrate key themes, ranging from ‘Pre-Columbian gold’ and ‘American Artists Abroad, c.1800’ to ‘The Aesthetic Movement’. Then, meandering further in, one discovers satellite galleries, some located in pavilions linked to the main building by suspended walkways, which examine related themes – considerations of genres, media and technique, as well as period rooms. If a vis­itor has the considerable energy required these should be fully explored as they contain numerous works of great interest, which include, to take two random but good examples, Mary Cassatt’s desk, shown beside her exquisite etching The letter, in which it features, and a spectacular display of weather vanes in the Folk Art gallery. The modes of presentation are varied, shifting from the clotted to the austere, depending on the material, and so drawing one’s eye on and up. The installations in the principal galleries are largely successful, particularly so with key spaces such as ‘Arts of the New Nation: 1800–1830’, an elegant Neo-classical shrine to the political birth of the United States, which includes Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portraits of George and Mary Washington and is dominated by Thomas Sully’s mon­umental Passage of the Delaware. The gallery on the next floor up, in which a dense, multi-layered hang evokes a high-Victorian salon or academy display, also works with aplomb. There are, however, occasional aberrations; it remains unclear quite why some of the Copleys had to be shown against a purple and dull gold floral flock wallpaper which makes it hard for them to breathe, or indeed to be seen.

Supporting the appreciation of the collections is the full range of facilities one would expect in a development of this magnitude: a reception area, a temporary exhibition space and an auditorium, along with all the paraphernalia of current museum interpretation in the galleries themselves. Interactive touch-screen displays and digital presentations highlighting conservation and curatorial work are here, happily discreetly so. Near these, in a number of instances, attractive, symmetrical arrangements of pictures, furniture and the decorative arts are penned in behind low barriers. There are only so many ways in which exhibits of this sort can be arranged, but it is notable that they strike an archaic note in such a contemporary context. Comfortable public seating straight out of the 1950s adds to this retro effect.

Telling cultural histories using objects in different media across a great expanse of time is a testing business and no doubt doctoral theses of the future will analyse the approach adopted here, and compare it with that at, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (where you would have to walk some miles to link up collections of Mesoamerican, Colonial and Abstract Expressionist art). Curiously the book published to accompany the Art of the Americas wing will not really assist with such endeavours, as it does not provide a commentary on the Boston approach, but employs a rather different strategy, seeking instead to look at American art chiefly through the prism of a range of external national and cultural influences.1 This makes for stimulating reading but perhaps glosses over the weaknesses of the collection. The installations in the galleries themselves inevitably play to the Museum’s strengths – so, for example, we are shown Copley and Sargent and American Impressionism in depth; it has to be admitted, however, that its lacunae are also clear, notably in the native American and the modern collections. The latter might in part be explained if works are being held back for the opening in September of seven new contemporary galleries at the other end of the original building. This prospect is a strong indication that the sense of renewal and soaring ambition created by the Americas wing is to continue. It already offers a stimulating, sweeping narrative for appreciation and is especially laudable at a time when so many museums in the States are facing uncertainty and retrenchment.

1    A New World Imagined, Art of the Americas. By E.B. Davis, D. Carr, N. Gadsden, C. Hartley, E.E. Hirshler, H. Hole, K.H. L’Ecuyer, K.E. Quinn, D. Reents-Budet and G.W.R. Ward. 359 pp. incl. 285 col. + 4 b. & w. ills. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2010), $60. ISBN 978–0–878–467600.