Huntington's American art galleries glisten anew

With exceptions, the paintings are generally weak. In 1979, the Huntington acquired the Virginia Steele Scott Collection: 50 American paintings that formed the basis for the museum's expansion into the field. A mixed bag, its finest works include Frederic Edwin Church's monumental 1864 Ecuadorean landscape, "Chimborazo," a tropical scene of Indian and Spanish colonial harmony unfolding beneath an almost mystical Andean volcano; and Mary Cassatt's 1897 "Breakfast in Bed," a thoroughly secular Madonna and child in which a mother and her young daughter cuddle amid blue-white clouds of bedding. The collection also has good or quirky examples by Martin Johnson Heade, Elihu Vedder, William Harnett and a few others.

The sculpture is generally modest. Among the curiosities is Paul Manship's wild Art Deco figure of a gilded Salome dancing above the severed head of John the Baptist, resting on a platter on the floor.

The Huntington recently scored a coup with the acquisition of Harriet Hosmer's long-lost monumental 1859 marble, "Zenobia in Chains." Mid-19th century America saw an odd eruption of sculpture on the theme of women in bondage. Hosmer's shows the Syrian queen, captured by Rome's emperor, as a veritable pillar of strength. Zenobia wears her chains like elegant jewelry, a testament to the historical figure's refusal to knuckle under -- and, tellingly, the refusal of a female sculptor, a 19th century rarity, to represent victimhood.

"Zenobia" is handsomely installed near Hosmer's slightly earlier parlor sculpture of an impish "Puck." The winged Shakespearean elf sits on a magical toadstool. High above is a corner window in the gallery ceiling, designed by the Erburu building's architect, Fred Fisher, to recall the Minimalist 1960s Light and Space sculpture of Larry Bell and James Turrell. The collection would benefit from more playful interludes such as this.

American art is generally conceived here according to traditional textbook history: Art starts in New England and Philadelphia, comes to New York and slowly marches across the plains of the Midwest, arriving in California in the 1960s. But that lineage doesn't really apply to the way we think about art anymore.

Major works like "Zenobia" are exceedingly hard to come by too, so prospects aren't good for the development of a first-rate standard representation of American art history. Why not let loose?

Rather than another cartoon-like Thomas Hart Benton from the 1920s, which the Huntington recently acquired, it would be great to see a Henrietta Shore floral, a Modernist pastoral landscape by Charles Reiffel and transcendental abstractions by Raymond Jonson and Agnes Pelton from the same period. These are painters not always encountered in the mainstream story line. But their best works are better than the routine Ashcan School and Social Realist works found here. The Huntington needs to shake things up.

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christopher.knight@latimes.com

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Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art

Where: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino

When: 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesdays to Mondays

Price: $15 to $20

Contact: (626) 405-2100 or www.huntington.org