The Metropolitan Museum Of Art | The New York Observer

Michael Gross Gets Times Review, Gets Happy

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:00:26 -0400

What a difference a week makes!

On Sunday, The New York Times finally reviewed Rogues’ Gallery, Michael Gross’s two-month-old, unauthorized exposé about the famous people behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The review came just days after the book began appearing in the New York Public Library system, erasing Mr. Gross’s concerns that the two Manhattan institutions might ignore the book completely.

“I was thrilled,” Mr. Gross told The Observer.

Before he received news...

Michael Gross Gets Lots of Dirty Looks But Little Buzz for Rogues' Gallery

Tue, 19 May 2009 16:30:25 -0400

“It was an exercise in sucking up hostility, being called names, being hung up on,” author Michael Gross said of Rogues’ Gallery, his unauthorized and rather provocative history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I had never encountered hostility on that level—hostility so organized. It was daunting, it put a dent in me,” the 56-year-old writer told the Daily Transom during an interview at his apartment overlooking Seventh Avenue near Central Park.

Lawyers for socialite and...

Wood War: Who Wins Today's Grabby Tabloid Battle For Your Eyeballs?

Tue, 05 May 2009 08:17:43 -0400

Daily News: It's hard to write a column about a headline that uses symbols. The top of today's Daily News properly reads only: "TREK." But there are five stars above it. So, it's sort of like "[Five Stars] TREK." Get it? Generally in the mornings we look closely at both front pages before coffee, then brood over them while fueling up. Today, it took well into the second cup to realize that the headline...

New, Old and Festive: Music at The Met

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:30:22 -0500

As much as we write about pop culture here, we also appreciate the classics, so it's always refreshing when a press release like the one we received earlier today from The Metropolitan Museum of Art announcing its December concert lineup comes through our inbox. What's in store this season? A little classical. Some gospel and jazz. A few holiday treats. (Can you feel that winter magic in the air?!)

For starters, there's Austrian piano man...

An Acquiring Mind

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:47:46 -0500

Philippe de Montebello stepped up to the podium at the press preview for the exhibition “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions” and looked about ready to keel over. Explaining that he had caught a bug, Mr. de Montebello seemed adrift in a NyQuil haze, his voice croaky and his demeanor sluggish. The eve of a much anticipated tribute to an illustrious career—there are better times to catch a cold....

Met, MoMA Feel Wall Street's Pain

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:28:23 -0400

From the Wall Street Journal: "How dependent is the museum business on Wall Street and financial-services income? Boards are actually fairly well diversified, but Wall Streeters have been disproportionately generous. The Met's first gallery devoted to contemporary photography, Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, opened earlier this year; it was endowed chiefly by Robert Menschel, a senior director of Goldman Sachs. ... The ties to financial institution executives are particularly tight at the Museum of...

Klaus G. Perls, Art Dealer Who Gave Picassos to the Met, Dies at 96

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:59:04 -0400

Klaus G. Perls, the art dealer who gave one of the largest donations ever received by the the Metropolitan Museum of Art's department of 20th-century, died on Monday. His daughter confirmed his death.

African art, as well as works by Picasso, Modigliani, Braque, Léger, Soutine and Pascin have been among their...

Former Met Director to Take on Teaching

Tue, 20 May 2008 10:08:25 -0400

Philippe de Montebello, who stepped down as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art after 31 years in January, will become New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts' first professor to teach the history, evolution and culture of museums. An announcement will be made tonight at a dinner celebrating the institute’s 75th anniversary, according to the New York Times. In addition to teaching at N.Y.U., he will advise the university on its plan for...

Koons’ Expensive Distractions Clutter Met’s Summer Rooftop

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:09:42 -0400

A few months back, I bumped into a colleague at the Met’s Courbet exhibition. After a polite disagreement about the merits of the 19th-century French painter—he’s a fan, I’m not—we extolled the Met’s stellar run of historical exhibitions mounted under the guidance of since-retired director Philippe de Montebello: Ingres, tapestries, Velázquez, the Greek and Roman galleries, the list goes on.

When the discussion turned to the museum’s forays into contemporary art, the requisite...

Morrison Heckscher, On the Park

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:06:04 -0400

Location: Your new book, Creating Central Park, asserts that the park was a testament to democracy, lowercase ‘d.’ But it wasn’t born of it. Can you explain the vote for the park and the general push for the park?

Mr. Heckscher: I would like to start by saying that the whole issue of the park has to do with open space in Manhattan. Central Park is, shall we say, the conclusion...

Advertisements for Himself

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:52:17 -0400

The 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a big personality, a cultural subversive, a braggart and showman worthy of P. T. Barnum. He was also a paint-handler of exquisite grit and outrageous sensuality—traits that combined into an artist whose greatness just barely redeemed his insufferable narcissism. By the time you’re through with the first gallery of the Met’s “Gustave Courbet,” ringed with 20 or so self-portraits of the artist, you’ll have had quite...

City Museum Disposes of Rockefeller Rooms

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:22:32 -0500

The Museum of the City of New York has decided to quietly dispose of its Rockefeller Rooms to make way for a modernisation of its Fifth Avenue building, The Art Newspaper reports. For 70 years, the two period rooms from the Manhattan townhouse of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller have been the museum’s main attractions. The dressing room is likely to go the Metropolitan Museum of Art which is currently reinstalling its suite of...

Met Museum Chairman Houghton Gets $4.9 M. for Majestic Co-Op

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:23:17 -0500

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s colossal 71-year-old director Philippe de Montebello announced his upcoming retirement last month, New York’s patrician class wept and gnashed its teeth. Mr. de Montebello, a descendent of Napoleonic aristocracy, and the owner of that honeyed voice on the Met’s audio tours, is irreplaceable.

Now the chairman of the museum’s board, James R. Houghton, has one less big tie to New York, too: He sold his two-bedroom...

Met Hires Firm to Find New Director

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:14:57 -0500

Now that Philippe de Montebello has announced his departure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has hired a New York-based executive-recruiting firm to look for a new director. Mr. Montebello plans to retire by the end of the year after leading the museum for more than three decades. The firm, Phillips Oppenheim, specializes in executive searches for the not-for-profit sector with expertise in the museum field (they have helped the Whitney and the Museum of...

Met Trades Krater for Vases to Settle Dispute With Italy

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:40:01 -0500

The Euphronios krater, an ancient Greek bowl painted by the Greek artisan Euphronios, has long been the subject of a spat between Italy and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met bought the krater in 1972 for $1 million from Robert Hecht, an antiquities dealer who is now on trial in Rome on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted artifacts (the Observer's Jason Horowitz explains here). The krater will be on view at...

Met's De Montebello Resigns

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:20:37 -0500

Philippe Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the past 30 years, announced to the Met’s board of trustees yesterday afternoon that he will resign from his post at the end of the year or until they could find a replacement.

The New York Times reports:

In a telephone interview, Mr. Montebello said that after a packed fall season and the completion of several big long-term projects like new galleries for...

Fabiola Beracasa Shows Off Semen Necklace, Pink Dress at Met

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:57:16 -0500

Who knew socialite Fabiola Beracasa was such a stellar broadcast journalist? In addition to her tireless circuit of charity events, Ms. Beracasa took time out to host a sneak peek at the Met’s “blog.mode: addressing fashion” exhibit, which runs through April 13.

In this clip, Ms. Beracasa has a conversation with Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute for the past five years. And there are some very...

The Met Opens Doors for New Years Eve Day-Browsing

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:36:53 -0500

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is usually closed on Mondays, has opened its doors until 5:30 p.m. tonight. So start your "more museum-going" resolution early and check out Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, which closes on Jan. 6 and the new galleries for 19th and early-20th century European paintings and sculpture, which feature a French art noveau assembly of "The Wisteria Dining Room," by Lucien Lévy Dhurmer. There's Henry Lerolle's gigantic...

Met Gets Diane Arbus Archives

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:12:20 -0500

Diane Arbus' estate has given the photographer's intimate, complete archives to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971, according to the New York Times.

At the same time, the museum has bought 20 of Arbus’s most important photographs, including “Russian Midget Friends...

Meet Harry Mount: Wanker, Wordsmith

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:28:05 -0500

Harry Mount is the author of a playful and, considering the historically staid subject matter, irreverent book on the principles of Latin, Amo, Amas, Amat…and All That (Short Books). New Yorker scribe Lauren Collins writes a fittingly playful, albeit not altogether irreverent, “Talk of the Town” on the 36-year-old journalist.

Strolling around the New Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum the other day,...

Met's Costume Gala to Get Hollywood Treatment

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:53:18 -0500

It's a bird...It's a plane...It's Anna Wintour! “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” the name of a forthcoming exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, will also be the theme of the museum's annual Costume Institute gala, where guests are likely to encounter quite the spectacle, reports WWD. Nathan Crowley, who is probably best known for his set designs for movies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Batman Begins and The Dark Night, has been hired as...

Met Director Considers Rutelli, "Stolen" Antiquities

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:34:35 -0500

Over two years ago, the Italian culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, embarked on a mission to recover stolen antiquities that had somehow landed in the collections of several American museums. At the heart of the conflict was the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its director, Philippe de Montebello. In early 2006, the Italian government convinced the Met to return 20 works of Greek and Roman art that the Italians said were illegally removed from their...

Ceremonial Offerings

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:42:22 -0500

The first gallery of Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art bears a wall label with a quotation from St. Augustine. He speaks of “the sanctified use [of] instruments and vessels” to memorialize the “righteous and faithful” dead, as a means of maintaining spiritual sustenance.

What follows is a cross-cultural array of artifacts embodying that idea: an African totem from the Fang, a...

At Apollo Circle Benefit, Guests Get Big-Screen Treatment

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:12:41 -0500

As young patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art arrived in black-tie attire for the Apollo Circle benefit dinner, which was held last Thursday, they didn’t even need to wait until the next day to peruse Patrick McMullan’s party pics to see everyone who was there. Images taken by the photographer were projected onto the walls of the museum, showing guests as they arrived. The large, cinema-sized photos provided most guests with their ideal...

Financiers Honored Over Artists at the Met?

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:15:04 -0500

The Guardian's Richard B. Woodward is perturbed about the Met's recent shows, including its current Age of Rembrandt exhibition, in which large, scripted letters and superfluous descriptions seem to credit the benefactors more than the artists.

He writes:

"[T]he jingling sound of money [is] audible throughout and the subliminal appeals for more of it to replenish the museum's coffers. The title of the show is a misnomer and a ruse. The curators aren't examining...

Shark Tales, Gifts for Gods and Threads of Splendor at the Met

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:04:08 -0400

Cue that foreboding Jaws soundtrack! Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, otherwise known as the huge Tiger shark suspended in 4,360 gallons of formaldehyde, has arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be on display starting today.

The MET will also debut “Gifts for the Gods: Images from Egyptian Temples” today and “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor,” opening...

Philippe de Montebello Makes Big Money at the Met

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:57:51 -0400

Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the highest paid director of a nonprofit in the country, according to a survey of nonprofit executives conducted by The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Last year, the popular and eccentric museum-director made $4,557,342, putting him ahead of the directors of major hospitals and universities across the country.

And he isn't the only Manhattan non-profiteer: Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern art, "in addition...

Neo Rauch’s Fractured Fables

Tue, 29 May 2007 14:50:06 -0400

The paintings of Neo Rauch are dense with symbols. They’re bathed in a cloudy 19th-century ambiance, burdened with portent and packed with strange, incongruous happenings. Figures situated in claustrophobic interiors or within landscapes that are no less oppressive engage in mysterious and sometimes ritualistic acts. A single canvas can contain myriad events and things; the smaller paintings, while less various in imagery, feel just as knotty.

In Der Nächste Zug (The...

All That Glitters Isn’t Gold: Weimar Visages Laid Bare

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:00:00 -0500

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s is an exhibition that submerges pleasure beneath the burden of history. It’s a dark and sometimes trying examination of characters from the Weimar era, that brief moment when a fragile German republic, caught between the First World War and the Third Reich, tried to steer itself through a collective crisis of faith. The period was one of great unrest exacerbated by...

Making Faces: At the Met, Middle Age's Stony Features

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 19:00:00 -0500

It sounds like a medical procedure you’d hope to avoid, or like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie: Neutron Activation Analysis. It’s actually a high-tech way to take a sample of something and precisely determine its elemental makeup. A venture called the Limestone Sculpture Provenance Project, which keeps a database of over 2,100 samples of stone obtained from around the world, uses N.A.A. to discern the “fingerprints” in limestone, tracing it to this...

Making Faces: At the Met, Middle Age’s Stony Features

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 19:00:00 -0500

Bond Street Bind

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:52:05 -0400

Rendering of 363-371 Lafayette. Community Board 2 tentatively approved a plan for the development of 363-371 Layfayette Street last night, with several stipulations that the board hopes will preserve light and space for the adjoining building at 20 Bond Street, where legendary artist Chuck Close has a studio.
Tenants at 20 Bond Street and the developer 363-371 Layfayette Street, Olmstead Propeties, have been in negotiations for months concerning the new development. Aided by big guns...

Rembrandt, Birthday Boy, Pulls a Surprise or Two

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:00:00 -0400

The curious and often contentious relationship between artists and critics has a long, if not always noble, history. That’s as it should be. Friction between practice and opinion is inevitable. Sometimes it can shed light; often it prompts comedy, intentional and otherwise. The critic has been the target of some deliciously caustic works of art. Hell hath no fury—or insight—like an artist scorned. Just ask Honoré Daumier. A collection of artworks in which the...

Ancient Mayan Treasures Still Provoke Troubling Questions

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:00:00 -0400

Can a work of art be independent of the time and culture in which it was created? Can it thrive on the characteristics inherent in its shaping—on aesthetic merit alone? In today’s theory-addled art world, no avant-gardist curio comes off the assembly line without a ream (or three) of explicatory text. We live in an era in which the mere notion of visual art—that is to say, objects crafted specifically to engage the eye—is...

A Queen of All Media Misses Grand Synthesis

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 20:00:00 -0400

You’ve got to hand it to an artist who could even conceive of an erotic burrito, and then muster up the talent to create a sculpture fulfilling the idea’s absurdist promise. There it is, at the beginning of The Art of Betty Woodman, a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring more than 50 years’ worth of Ms. Woodman’s ceramics. Erotic Burrito (1971) consists of a saddle-like orifice set upon a flaccid pillow...

A Queen of All Media Misses Grand Synthesis

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 20:00:00 -0400

You’ve got to hand it to an artist who could even conceive of an erotic burrito, and then muster up the talent to create a sculpture fulfilling the idea’s absurdist promise. There it is, at the beginning of The Art of Betty Woodman, a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring more than 50 years’ worth of Ms. Woodman’s ceramics. Erotic Burrito (1971) consists of a saddle-like orifice set upon a flaccid pillow...

Sophisticated Sicilian Was In Step With Masters of Northern Europe

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 19:00:00 -0500

Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings has left the Met, and not a moment too soon. Am I the only New Yorker happy that the tempestuous Dutchman has hit the road? Whenever the Van Gogh name gets onto a museum marquee, you’re guaranteed an environment bereft of oxygen. I’m not talking about the crowds. It’s the biographical fog that both obscures and embellishes what is essentially a respectable, not spectacular, achievement. Poor Vincent isn’t...

Apparitions of One Man’s Mind: Redon Strove to Render Dreams

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:00:00 -0500

Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is devoted to the paintings, drawings and prints of an artist who was a contemporary of the Impressionists and, in so many ways, their antithesis. The ethereal and spooky pictures of Redon, who died in 1916 at the age of 76, were inspired by the inner workings of the mind, not the actualities of light. Culled exclusively...

Fra Angelico Elicits Astonishing Piety At Met Exhibition

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:00:00 -0500

The modern mind doesn’t easily accommodate itself to the idea that the art of painting may sometimes achieve the status of a spiritual vocation. Christian iconography plays a central role in many of the paintings we regard as masterworks of Western art, and yet our response to those paintings tends, for the most part, to remain aesthetic—which is to say, secular. However intense our admiration of the art may be, we don’t feel called...

Fra Angelico Elicits Astonishing Piety At Met Exhibition

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:00:00 -0500

Van Gogh's Drawings: A Precise Draftsman, Emotional Cauldron

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Fame hasn’t always been kind to the reputation of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), whose drawings are now featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s owing to his fame, after all, that van Gogh is still so often described as a deranged genius—the man who cut off his ear in a fit of paranoid rage. Yet the artist’s drawings often tell a different story.

For while it’s true that...

Bohemia's Beautiful Style: The Met's Ticket to Prague

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Let’s get the kudos out of the way: Prague, The Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is yet another serious, authoritative and astonishing exhibition from an institution that seems incapable of mounting anything less. (Granted, the Met bumbles once in a while, but overall, its recent track record warrants the hyperbole.)

This exhibition outlines an ambitious feat of cultural engineering. Born in Prague, Charles IV (1316-1378) was...

Van Gogh’s Drawings: A Precise Draftsman, Emotional Cauldron

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Exquisite Portraits, Fauvist Hues And a Handful of Spiritual Quests

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Unless you’re a devotee of 15th-century Netherlandish painting, chances are you’ve only stopped to give a cursory look at Hans Memling’s diminutive painting on panel, Portrait of a Man (c. 1470), as you’ve made your way to the Frick Collection’s big-name, box-office draws. That’s less likely to be the case next month, when the venerable institution mounts Memling’s Portraits, an exhibition of more than 20 examples of the genre, as well as paintings by...

From Gauguin's Adopted Home, Ornaments of Remote Islanders

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 20:00:00 -0400

The 2005-6 art season has begun—but only barely. The notable museum shows—Fra Angelico at the Met, Memling’s Portraits at the Frick and Oscar Bluemner at the Whitney—won’t go on display until next month. Commercial spaces are out of the gate faster. In the next couple of days, many galleries in Chelsea—and, lest we forget, 57th Street and the Upper East Side—will kick off their fall exhibitions. I don’t pretend to know what’s happening in...

From Gauguin’s Adopted Home, Ornaments of Remote Islanders

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 20:00:00 -0400

The 2005-6 art season has begun—but only barely. The notable museum shows—Fra Angelico at the Met, Memling’s Portraits at the Frick and Oscar Bluemner at the Whitney—won’t go on display until next month. Commercial spaces are out of the gate faster. In the next couple of days, many galleries in Chelsea—and, lest we forget, 57th Street and the Upper East Side—will kick off their fall exhibitions. I don’t pretend to know what’s happening in...

Fenton's Photographs Expose Sublime, Ghostly Landscapes

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

The most striking photograph included in All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860, an exhibition on display in the Robert Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is neither the best thing in the British photographer’s oeuvre nor the most beautiful. Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards (1855) is among a number of photos by Fenton (1819-1869) devoted to the Crimean War, a documentary project commissioned by a Manchester publisher and...

Schmattes of Matisse: Painter Was Obsessed With Textile Design

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 20:00:00 -0400

It’s odd now to recall a time when the word “decorative,” as applied to the paintings of Matisse, was a term of critical reproach. “Decorative” was then taken to signify something shallow or superficial; it also suggested the pleasures of a self-indulgent hedonism—the opposite of everything deep and profound in art. The association with pleasure, moreover, was reinforced by Matisse’s principal subject matter, which at the time amounted to a virtual harem of odalisques.

That...

Schmattes of Matisse: Painter Was Obsessed With Textile Design

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Carnevale's Late Renaissance: A Scholarly Exhibition at the Met

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 19:00:00 -0500

Before I begin kvelling about From Filippo Lippi to Piero Della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, duty compels me to get the bad news out of the way. Contrary to the exhibition's title, Fra Carnevale is no master-he's a dud.

Actually, the key word in the title isn't "master," but "making." What powers the exhibition is the scholarship leading to the recent...