Copious accolades and impressive numerical figures fed into the hype surrounding the opening, in November 2010, of the Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. One can read in the mainstream media sensational descriptions of the elegant four-floor, 121,307-square-foot glass rectangle (designed by the London firm Foster + Partners) that houses the wing and many plaudits of its fifty-three galleries (which showcase over five thousand objects, more than double the number previously on view), nine period rooms, and four “Behind the Scenes” exhibits that explain the wing’s collecting and conservation practices. And one can read how Malcolm Rogers, the MFA’s ambitious director, displayed unprecedented acumen in soliciting $504 million and gifts of art amounting to $165 million. “It’s a wow,” Holland Cotter said of the wing in the New York Times. “Almost a double-wow” (“Seating All the Americas at the Same Table,” New York Times [November 19, 2010]: C23).

Much has been said as well about the decision to exhibit pre-Columbian art in the same wing as colonial art and the art of the United States, but remarkably little has been said about how the geographic concept transforms our understanding of the latter (in this case, North American art from the eighteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century)—though one museum press release boasts, enticingly, that the new wing “sets the stage for the rebirth of numerous MFA masterpieces of artistic and historical significance,” and then mentions by way of example paintings by Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and Thomas Sully. The MFA’s public relations materials imply, then, what the several new textbooks on American art published during the past eleven years claim explicitly, which is that new contexts are available for understanding the North American canon. So it is reasonable to ask whether, in fact, the wing succeeds at constructing an instrumental history of this canon. What, for instance, does it reveal about the familiar categories, namely colonial portraiture, early national painting, nineteenth-century landscape painting, antebellum genre painting, Gilded Age art, and the vociferous political debates of twentieth-century modernism? (For Kristina Wilson’s review of the MFA’s new Art of the Americas Wing, click here.)

In its present configuration, the wing disappoints in one especially critical area. With a few exceptions, it forsakes politics, as if American history as experienced, and the conditions of artistic production around those experiences, are unfit for the stylish galleries. That this is an old-fashioned sort of elision—American art was long ago confirmed as political art—makes the oversight all the more frustrating. The wing certainly employs several enlightening strategies and contains many pleasures. The Lower Ground level, for instance, which houses collections of pre-Columbian, South American, and Mesoamerican art, as well as ancient to contemporary Native North American art, includes an instructive gallery devoted to ocean adventure and maritime arts. The gallery educates visitors about the age of exploration—for instance, Fitz Henry Lane’s painting New York Harbor (ca. 1855), which features sailing ships anchored near steam-powered vessels, documents the transformation from windborne exploration to engine-powered commerce—and cleverly encourages them to experience the thrill of encounter for themselves. Installed here is a bank of drawers that visitors can pull open to find nautical prints and navigational equipment, which evokes the process of discovery that runs as a counter-narrative to the “primitive” customs on display in the nearby galleries of indigenous art. The schadenfreude is didactic but not overly so: opening the drawers, one is struck by how caught up artists and craftspeople of this era were in their own ingenuity, which they contrasted to what they believed to be the relatively unsophisticated objects made by the people they were effectively conquering.

But there are some missed opportunities here, too. For one, the collection of Native North American art is conspicuously small. Also, a gallery devoted to colonial embroideries falls flat, as it is not made clear how these objects fit into the narrative being told elsewhere. This gallery, though, is dedicated to rotating exhibitions, so one hopes that in the future curators will install, say, paintings representing contact with indigenous cultures, or nineteenth-century photographs documenting the mechanisms of imperialism in the Americas.

Level 1, containing galleries of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art, begins auspiciously. Hanging just outside the doorway to these galleries is Copley’s George IV When Prince of Wales (1809), a massive equestrian portrait painted without a commission that demonstrates just how ambitious the painter was to secure royal patronage. This portrait of the future king of England sets up a startling aesthetic and ideological contrast with Copley’s iconic portrait of Paul Revere (1768), a pure representation of sober aspiration that hangs just inside the first gallery. There is something subtler at work in this coupling as well, for both portraits conjure the same prospecting attitude that characterizes the MFA’s broader enterprise with the wing.

Unfortunately, two Copley portraits of his stepbrother, Henry Pelham, are awkwardly hung and so fail to register as powerfully as they should. A small painting depicting a young Pelham reading by candlelight (ca. 1760) is crammed into a corner blocked by colonial furniture, and the famous Boy with a Squirrel (1765) hangs next to a passageway to another gallery (not a convenient place to linger, even though the painting demands the viewer’s attention). The absorptive qualities of both paintings would be more keenly felt had they been situated in the smaller side gallery of Copley portraits. The rear gallery on Level 1 is more successful and is one place where politics comes to life. The endearing Gilbert Stuart portraits here personalize post-revolutionary political philosophy, and Sully’s large The Passage of the Delaware (1819), which hangs on the end wall, manifests the romanticism of early national ambition. The curators get the design just right here: by turning two benches in front of the Sully sideways to face the Stuart portraits, they orient visitors to the individual people, rather than the grandiose myths, that make democracy happen.

The galleries of Gilded Age art on Level 2 are gorgeous. The MFA’s collection of American Renaissance and Aesthetic Movement art is flat-out superb, and the installations here, befitting the aesthetic trends of the Gilded Age, are luxurious. The place of honor goes to John Singer Sargent’s crowd-pleasing The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) (click here for review), though one need not fuss about the crowds in front of the painting because the whole first gallery features his opulent paintings, virtually all of which are breathtakingly good. Standing in front of his portrait of Helen Sears (1895), for instance, is thrillingly stimulating: the canvas’s sensual surface invites an intense inspection that contrasts with Sargent’s oft-noted attitude of nonchalance.

But Level 2 also has some weak galleries. For one, the history of landscape painting that emerges here is clumsy. Other than the logical pairing in one gallery of paintings by Lane and Martin Johnson Heade, viewers do not get much instruction about how to read landscape paintings as emblematic of nationalist ideologies. How, for example, to differentiate between Thomas Cole’s early View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (1827), which is exhibited in a gallery given to the Gothic sensibility, with his later allegories, such as River in the Catskills (1843), which, awkwardly, hangs in the same gallery but has nothing Gothic about it? And in the “salon” gallery—which exhibits dozens of paintings stacked in a vertical orientation, as they typically were in the nineteenth century—how is a visitor to distinguish George Inness’s evocative landscapes from the gauzy sentimentality of paintings by William Morris Hunt?

The handling of genre painting is the biggest misstep in the wing. The first problem is that there are so few examples. Hidden away in an easy-to-miss suite of galleries on Level 2 are just four genre paintings from the antebellum period: Jerome B. Thompson’s A Pic Nick in the Woods in New England (ca. 1855), Alvan Fisher’s Corn Husking Frolic (ca. 1828), and William Sidney Mount’s Rustic Dance After a Sleigh Ride (1830) and The Bone Player (1856). The second issue is that the wall labels describe the paintings using old-fashioned terminology. Certainly scholarship from the past quarter of a century has amply demonstrated that genre paintings are much more than mere “entertainments” or scenes from “daily life.” As it is, though, genre painting comes across as incidental. The implication that it was a fringe tradition is all the more disappointing because the MFA owns other examples, and had they been included here, a much more nuanced story about narrative pictures from the nineteenth century could emerge. Sadly, two MFA paintings by George Caleb Bingham are not on display. Furthermore, scattered throughout Level 1, and thus distanced from each other as well as from the genre paintings on Level 2, are Thomas Sully’s The Torn Hat (1820), Samuel F. B. Morse’s Little Miss Hone (1824), Henry Sargent’s The Dinner Party (ca. 1821) and The Tea Party (ca. 1824), and Michele Felice Cornè’s Saturday Evening and Sunday Morning (ca. 1801). Were these paintings, as well as Williams Hogarth’s 1741 print The Enraged Musician (which is hidden away in a period room), hung in the same gallery as the genre paintings, or in some other manner linked to them thematically, visitors might find it exhilarating, not to mention relevant to their experiences of the outside world, to observe how genre images hang together—that is, how they represent social and political beliefs.

The wing’s aversion to politics is exasperatingly evident on Level 3, which is given to art of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s. It is hard to imagine that a hanging of American paintings from the 1920s and 1930s could be apolitical, but that is the case here. A gallery titled “American Modern” includes one Edward Hopper, two precisionist paintings, a late Joseph Stella, and one example from the Harlem Renaissance (by Archibald Motley). The conceit here seems to be that, like the decorative objects on display in the gallery, the paintings are cool. We get virtually nothing about identity politics, and an adjacent gallery devoted to American “places” exhibits none of the partisanship attending modern conceptions of the rural and the urban, none of the “intellectual business and political ballyhoo,” to borrow from the title of Thomas Hart Benton’s lunette for the Whitney Museum murals, that characterize the war of words between Regionalists and Social Realists. Moreover, the truism that the MFA has a thin collection of modern art is amplified by the display of just one Jackson Pollock and one Mark Rothko. And I would have loved to have seen the Pollock exhibited next to, say, a Pueblo bowl, to bring the lower level into some kind of dialogue with this upper level. As it is, abstraction emerges in an old guise—as immaculately conceived—and the indigenous art on the Lower Ground level is largely forgotten.

Evidently the wing’s designers reserved the politics for the “Behind the Scenes” galleries, which address the machinations of museum display. But that is internal politics. A major national museum ought to be looking outside its walls. What better place than Boston, I wonder, and what better moment than the current “Tea Party” moment, to let art repossess politics from the clutches of demagogues, ideologues, and misinformers?