The Metropolitan Museum of Art has set a new record for attendance for the fiscal year, tallying a total of 6.7 million visitors over the last 12 months. “Our audiences are local, national and international, reflecting the depth and breadth of the extraordinary works of art in our galleries,” said director Thomas P. Campbell. (more…)
VigeÌe Le Brun, Baron de Thellusson (1814), via Art Observed
There are few prominent female artists that are as highly revered as Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was in 18th Century France. Falling in love with painting through her father, Louis Vigée, Le Brun went on to work for the aristocracy in Paris during the French Revolution. After painting more than thirty portraits of Marie Antoinette and her family, Le Brun was forced to flee the country over her association with the queen, ultimately working in Italy, Austria, and Russia. Once she settled in Italy, she was elected into the artist group Accademia di San Luca, and moved on to painting portraits of Catherine the Great’s family as well as Stanislaw August Poniatowski, Poland’s last king. (more…)
Following several years of aggressive expansion, the Met is facing a $10 million deficit, which some project could increase to $40 million without changes and cuts to the institution’s structure. “We’ve had increasing pressure on the budget and knew that we were going to have to take actions to get it back in balance,” says Director Thomas P. Campbell. (more…)
The New Yorker has published a selection of photos by Bill Jacobsen, documenting the transitional period between the Whitney’s departure and the Met’s arrival in the Breuer building. The photos, showing the space’s stripped bare architecture, welcomes both a familiarity with the Whitney’s former home, and an appreciation for the unique architecture its original designer had embraced. (more…)
The WSJ looks at the efforts of The Met to cater to more contemporary and modern art in its collections and exhibitions, noting the challenges the storied institution faces from the city’s great number of curators, museums and galleries, and its vision for the future. “The Met used to talk about itself as 17 museums under one roof, and I have very actively been seeking to break down that notion,” says Director Thomas Campbell. “We are a single museum with a single collection.” (more…)
The LA Times profiles Thomas P. Campbell, and his tenure as Director of the Met, including his work on the Breuer Building project, and the difficult financial straits he was thrust into when he took the position in 2008. “It was by no means a slam dunk,” he says. “I spent the first six months of being director going through a contraction of the institution. We had to contract by 10%. And while we were doing that, we were trying to plan for the future.” (more…)
John Singer Sargent, The Fountain (1907), All images via Michael Ziga for Art Observed
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition of celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Portraits of Artists and Friends, presents a collection of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, colleagues and friends of the painters, that offered Sargent the freedom to create more radical and dynamic works than those made for paying clients. The sitters are often candidly depicted in the act of painting or lounging where others pose comfortably for Sargent. (more…)
Ken Price, Big Load (1988), via The Met
Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, currently on view at the Met, marks the first major exhibition of work the late Ken Price in New York. Throughout his career, the Los Angeles-based Price, who passed away last year at the age of 77, challenged the traditional limitations of clay as a sculpting medium, rejecting the narrow-mindedness that often pigeonholed the medium as a lesser form. Through his whimsical, elaborate forms, Price returned emphasis to clay, answering its detractors with a resoundingly intriguing body of work.
Ken Price, Balls Congo (2003), via Architectural Digest (more…)
Seeking to strengthen its international ties, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the “Global Museum Leaders Colloquium,” a two-week program next April that will bring over a dozen museum heads from institutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America to the table, discussing the shared challenges and issues museums are facing worldwide.. “It’s all about promoting international collaboration,” said Met Director Thomas P. Campbell. (more…)
A number of U.S. Museums are exploring new approaches to exhibiting works while in storage, the LA Times reports. Museums like LACMA and the Broad Museum have attempted to place larger portions of their collections in “visible storage,” where interested visitors can view them. “There is this public assumption that museums are hoarding objects in dark rooms, and by the way that isn’t totally wrong,” says LACMA Director Michael Govan. “What we’re saying is that those objects are worthy for viewing and studying if not always for exhibitions. So you’re not contemplating a masterpiece, but maybe you’ll find value in comparing and contrasting different examples of vases.”
Gerald Lee Jones, a former supervisor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s admissions department, has filed an affidavit detailing the museum’s policy towards rewarding higher cashier receipts. In his statement, Jones claims that museum employees who brought in lower admissions receipts, regardless of the museum’s “suggested” admission price, were rebuked for their performance, while cashiers who aggressively pushed for higher admission prices were rewarded. “Cashiers are not only trained to avoid disclosing the truth about the museum’s admission prices; their compensation and their continued employment may largely depend on them not revealing it,” He says in court papers. (more…)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open its newly renovated European Galleries this Thursday, and the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl has published a brief review of the new wing, praising its appointments and rehang. “I had an eerie sense, while surveying the results the other day, that here was a brand new major institution which, somehow, had plundered the holdings of the Met.” He writes. (more…)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is about to open its newest commission for its rooftop garden, a spattered-red work by Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi that plays on the images of blood, and leads a series of works currently on view across New York that play with similarly violent imagery. Responding to bombings in Lahore and Boston, the artist intended the works to provide a moment of reflection, playing against the pristine backdrop of Central Park. (more…)
The Sacrifice of Polyxena, a painting by 17th century artist Charles Le Brun recently rediscovered in a suite at The Ritz Hotel, has been purchased by The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the price of $1.9 Million. The museum had searched for a Le Brun for over 50 years, and seized on the chance to own the painting when it went up for auction on April 15th at Christie’s. “No really famous expert of 17th-century painting has ever stayed in the Coco Chanel suite, apparently,” specialist Olivier Lefeuvre said when asked how the painting had hund undiscovered for so long. (more…)
