MetPublications

Many small Renaissance portraits were richly adorned with covers or backs bearing allegorical figures, mythological scenes, or emblems that celebrated the sitter and invited the viewer to decipher their meaning. Hidden Faces includes seventy objects, ranging in format from covered paintings to miniature boxes, that illuminate the symbiotic relationship between the portrait and its pair. Texts by thirteen distinguished scholars vividly illustrate that the other “faces” of these portraits represent some of the most innovative images of the Renaissance, created by masters such as Hans Memling and Titian. Uniting works that have in some cases been separated for centuries, this fascinating volume shows how the multifaceted format unveiled the sitter’s identity, both by physically revealing the portrait and reading the significance behind its cover.

During the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse and André Derain went on holiday in Collioure, a modest French fishing village fifteen miles from the Spanish border. This groundbreaking book examines how two artists, entranced by the shifting light and stunning imagery of the eastern Mediterranean, laid the groundwork for the movement known as Fauvism (from the French fauve, or “wild beast”). Featuring more than 70 paintings, watercolors, and drawings produced by Matisse and Derain during their stay, the book also brings to life their personal and artistic revelations with 21 of their letters, published here for the first time in English. Vivid and engaging texts detail their daring experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective; the scandal their paintings caused when they were exhibited several months later; and how, despite the jeering remarks from critics, these works changed the course of French painting. Emphasizing as never before the legacy of that summer, this publication shows how the two artists’ radical investigations galvanized their contemporaries, and how this strain of modernism, created almost by accident, resonates even into the present day.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renowned collection spans the globe and represents over five thousand years of human creativity. This innovative book celebrates the Museum’s 150th anniversary and highlights its the most popular works while offering fresh ways of exploring visual culture from prehistory to the present. Art = also celebrates the 20th anniversary of The Met’s award-winning online feature, the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The book draws on the diversity of interests expressed by the Museum’s online visitors by featuring wide-ranging texts and images from the most viewed webpages of this popular digital project. Unlike traditional surveys of art history, this volume groups works of art by thematic keywords, providing a new perspective on these well-known paintings, sculptures, photographs, decorative arts, and much more. The nearly 900 works of art in Art = appear across three color-coded chapters: Material/Technique, Period/Place/Style, and Object/Subject. In the first section, works of art are grouped by medium or method such as Drawing, Marble, Watercolor, and Wood. The second section organizes work by time period, movement, or geography, allowing readers to focus on topics such as Ancient Egyptian Art, Impressionism, and Japanese Art. The third section arranges work by motifs, such as Flowers, Food, and Motherhood and by object type, like Furniture, Jewelry, and Self-Portrait. Art = also features more than 160 informative essays written by the Museum’s experts that offer additional cultural and historical context. Color-coded symbols link each essay and work of art to other essays and keywords. The publication’s dynamic structure provides an experience that is different on each reading, inspiring new connections and raising the question: What does art equal today?

Published to celebrate The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 150th anniversary, Making The Met, 1870–2020 examines the institution’s evolution from an idea—that art can inspire anyone who has access to it—to one of the most beloved global collections in the world. Focusing on key transformational moments, this richly illustrated book provides insight into the visionary figures and events that led The Met in new directions. Among the many topics explored are the impact of momentous acquisitions, the central importance of education and accessibility, the collaboration that resulted from international excavations, the Museum’s role in preserving cultural heritage, and its interaction with contemporary art and artists. Complementing this fascinating history are more than two hundred works that changed the very way we look at art, as well as rarely seen archival and behind-the-scenes images. In the final chapter, Met Director Max Hollein offers a meditation on evolving approaches to collecting art from around the world, strategies for reaching new and diverse audiences, and the role of museums today.

Featuring beautiful color reproductions and enlightening descriptions, this is the definitive guide to one of the largest, and most beloved, collections of art in the world. More than a simple souvenir book, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide provides a comprehensive view of art history spanning five millennia and the entire globe, beginning with the ancient world and ending in contemporary times. It includes media as varied as painting, photography, costume, sculpture, decorative arts, musical instruments, arms and armor, works on paper, and many more. Presenting works ranging from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur to Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa to Sargent's Madame X, this revised edition is an indispensable volume for lovers of art and art history, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of lingering over the most iconic works in the Metropolitan's unparalleled collection.

This highly anticipated volume completes the comprehensive series, a model of its kind, cataloguing the extraordinary diverse holdings in the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. Presented here are more than four hundred works in the decorative arts dating from antiquity to the twentieth century and ranging from intricately enameled watches (one was once owned by King Louis XIV) and exquisitely painted and jeweled snuffboxes to monumentally carved wood wedding chests, originating throughout Europe and Asia. Highlights include a superb seventeenth-century oval-shaped watch decorated with enamels by the master Susanne de Court of Limoges; a dazzling domed cup supported by a carved aragonite figure of a bearded Turk, replete with jewels and precious stones, crafted in early eighteenth-century Germany; and a French secrétaire from the 1780s set with painted enamels from the famed Sèvres Manufactory. Foremost scholars provide expert analyses of the works of art, including notable reassessments of Renaissance jewelry and furniture. In-depth discussions, many elucidated by new photography, constitute a fitting finale to this venerable series documenting one of the most distinguished privately assembled art collections in the United States. Provenance information, exhibition histories, and references are provided, and selected comparative illustrations are incorporated. The volume also includes a bibliography and an index.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Philip and Robert Lehman amassed 230 remarkably varied pieces of European sculpture and metalwork, now part of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Presented here are exemplary aquamanilia, bronze sculptures, medals, and plaquettes dating from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. Acquired from the most prominent dealers in Europe and the United States, many of the objects were accompanied by illustrious provenances, including Buckingham Palace, European nobles, and the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan. An early highlight from the Southern Netherlands is a medieval aquamanile, the finest of its type, depicting the theme of foolish love in the fable of Phyllis and Aristotle. Later standouts include four superb brass fifteenth-century Belgian sculptures of Saints Adrian, Stephen, John the Evangelist, and Peter that probably once adorned a lectern or baptismal font. A delightful household sculpture from sixteenth-century Padua takes the form of a perfume burner surmounted by a faun. Another decorative bronze, dating to about 1600, depicts a commanding figure of Mars in the guise of a musketeer loading his weapon. The middle section of the book is devoted to the entire group of Lehman medals and plaquettes—its 117 pieces constitute more than half of the holdings described in this catalogue. Italian, German, French, and Netherlandish works are represented, lending an impressive geographical and chronological breadth. Rarely on public view, this fascinating collection is fully revealed for the first time. These, as well as all the works included here, are illustrated, the majority with new color photography made expressly for this book. Enhancing the in-depth scholarly discussions are professionally researched provenances, exhibition histories, and references, as well as selected comparative illustrations. The volume also includes a bibliography and an index.

The vibrant late paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) are considered by many to be among his finest achievements. Working in a small covered bedroom of his villa in the south of France, Bonnard suffused his last canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand-usually everyday scenes taken from his immediate surroundings, such as the dining room table being set for breakfast, or a jug of flowers perched on the mantelpiece—Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he preferred to make pencil sketches in small diaries and then rely on these, along with his memory, once in the studio. Bonnard's late interiors thus often conflate details from his daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear and disappear at the margins of these canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit, dishes, or other still-life props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language. This volume, which accompanies the first exhibition to focus on the interior and related still-life imagery from the last decades of Bonnard's long career, presents more than seventy-five paintings, drawings, and works on paper, many of them rarely seen in public and in some cases, little known. Although Bonnard's legacy may be removed from the succession of trends that today we consider the foundation of modernism, his contribution to French art in the early decades of the twentieth century is far more profound than history has generally acknowledged. In their insightful essays and catalogue entries the authors bring fresh critical perspectives to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard's reputation and to his place within the narrative of twentieth-century art.

Robert Lehman (1891–1969), one of the foremost art collectors of his generation, embraced the work of both traditional and modern masters. This volume catalogues 130 nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings that are now part of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The majority of the works are by artists based in France, but there are also examples from the United States, Latin America, and India, reflecting Lehman's global interests. The catalogue opens with outstanding paintings by Ingres, Théodore Rousseau, and Corot, among other early nineteenth-century artists. They are joined by an exemplary selection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. Twentieth-century masters represented here include Bonnard, Matisse, Rouaualt, Dalí, and Balthus. There are also newly researched modern works by Vicente o Rego Monteiro, Kees van Dongen, Dietz Edzard, and D. G. Kulkarni (DIZI). Robert Lehman's cultivated taste for nineteenth-century French academic practitioners and his intuitive eye for emerging young artists of his own time are documented and discussed. Three hundred comparative illustrations supplement the catalogue entries, as do extensively researched provenance information, exhibition histories, and references. The volume also includes a bibliography and indexes.

The Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the finest collections of frames in the world. Robert Lehman's interest in picture frames set him apart from other collectors of his era. The collection he bequeathed to the Museum includes nearly four hundred frames, most of them Italian and French and dating from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Although he bought most of these frames to display his paintings and drawings, a number of them could only have been acquired as works of art in their own right. Like nearly all other European frames, the ones Robert Lehman collected have now been taken entirely out of context, the exception being the engaged moldings on early Italian panels. Most of the Italian frames, both the engaged moldings and the small cassette and astragal frames they inspired, probably hung in palazzi; the finest of the French frames were originally displayed amongst the gilt furniture and heavy fabrics that decorated luxurious northern European rooms. Using the documentary evidence that survives and his wide knowledge of comparable examples, Timothy Newbery has attempted to place these frames on the pictures and in the interiors for which they were intended. For each frame he has provided a profile drawing that is a key to its design, origin, date, and application. Newbery, a frame historian and frame maker who lives in London, is one of the world's few experts on the subject of frames. His scholarship represents the state of the art in this still relatively narrow field. The volume includes a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.