Celebrated Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas is known for his site-specific sculptural installations. For The Theater of Disappearance, the artist mines The Met’s collection, drawing on the five thousand years of world history within its galleries, to create an elaborate ahistorical work. Set atop the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, Villar Rojas’s installation transforms the space into a performative diorama, where banquet tables occupy an oversize black-and-white checkerboard floor punctuated by sculptures that fuse together human figures and artifacts found within the museum. The resulting juxtapositions put forth a radical reinterpretation of museum practices. This illustrated book is the fifth edition in a series that documents and contextualizes The Met’s annual rooftop commissions. The introductory essay by Beatrice Galilee explores the conceptual framework that informs Villar Rojas’s remarkable commission as well as his interventions around the world. While exploring the Museum, Villar Rojas took thousands of photographs of objects and moments of interest. A selection of these images is featured here alongside the artist’s commentary, offering a unique visual diary of Villar Rojas’s thought process as he developed this arresting installation.

This enigmatic short film imagines Edouard Manet's interior monologue as he painted the 1867 execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.

Violoncello, Jean Baptiste Vuillaume (1798–1875), Paris, mid-19th century. Ex. 1

In the aesthetic upheaval that transformed the art world beginning in the late nineteenth century, Ambroise Vollard played a key role. This young newcomer to Paris became a pioneering dealer who introduced to the public many of the modern era's leading artists. A colorful, enigmatic figure with an excellent eye for undiscovered talent and a canny business sense, he variously inspired friendship, contempt, admiration, and envy. Vollard's groundbreaking 1895 exhibition of paintings by Paul Cézanne—then virtually unknown—established the artist's reputation, and their continuing business relationship made Vollard's fortune. Over his long life, Vollard organized exhibitions of scores of artists, including Nabis, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse, and promoted the work of artists ranging from Degas to Rouault to Derain and the Fauves. His clients included the great collectors of the era, among them Denys Cochin and Auguste Pellerin in France, the Americans Albert C. Barnes and Gertrude Stein, the Russians Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, and the Germans Count Harry Kessler and Karl-Ernst Osthaus. Indeed, Vollard's enterprise extended beyond dealing: encouraging artists to make prints and considerably furthering the development of the artist's book, or livre d'artiste, he published colorful print albums and collector's books that are among the most celebrated of the twentieth century. This catalogue accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Vollard's achievement. Its twenty-two essays examine his relationships with a number of individual artists and collectors; his business practices; his publication of bronze casts, prints, and livres; the wealth of previously unpublished material now available from his archives; and the dispersal of his collection after his death in 1939. More than two hundred important works of art that are part of his history are catalogued, described, and illustrated in color.

Despite his efforts, Manet’s modern scenes remained a target of criticism.

The photographer Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), a central figure in the early development of French photography and acknowledged in his day as a pioneer in the still-experimental field, was widely acclaimed both for his aesthetic sensitivity and for his technical prowess. Establishing a new mode of representing architecture and describing the emerging modern landscape with magnificent authority, he enjoyed high patronage in the 1850s and 1860s. Yet, despite the artist's renown during his lifetime, his name is all but unknown today, his work savored only by connoisseurs. This book, the first to chronicle the life and career of this important artist, brings his work once more before the public. The superb quality of the reproductions captures the subtle tones and soft matte surfaces of the original prints, many of which are published here for the first time. Baldus made his reputation with views of the monuments of Paris and the south of France, with dramatic landscapes of the Auvergne, with photographs of the New Louvre, and with a poignant record of the devastating floods of 1856. But it is his two railroad albums—the first commissioned in 1855 by Baron James de Rothschild for presentation to Queen Victoria, the second in 1861 by the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee railroad company—that are his greatest achievement. Here he brought together his earlier architectural and scenic images with bold geometric views of the modern landscape—railroad tracks, stations, bridges, viaducts, and tunnels—to address the influence of technology (of which both the railroad and the camera are prime examples). In so doing, Baldus anticipated the concerns of Impressionist painters a decade later and those of many artists of our own day, meeting his task with a clarity and directness not since surpassed.