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KATHLEEN CURRAN is professor of fine arts at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
When you wander a little off the beaten track at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you may find yourself in an 18th-century French bed- room, or In the Frank Lloyd Wright room, or the poignant Damascus Room, with its Arabic Inscriptions and splashing fountain. Al the Wadsworth Atheneum ln Hartford, recent reinstallations include a Dutch wonder cabinet on a grand scale. At the Art Institute of Chicago, the perfectly miniaturized Thorne period rooms are ever-popular. One doesn't have these diorama experiences at the Louvre or London's National Gallery, or in the Prado. Is it a particularly American practice to shape a fine arts museum as a procession through periods of history understood through decorative and in architectural installations. The museum-goer who has wondered about this will find much to consider inn Kathleen Curran's book, The Invention of the American Art Museum. --Apollo
