Tag: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Categories
Bowery Boys Bookshelf Museums

All The Beauty In The World: Guarding the Met with Patrick Bringley

A special bonus episode! Two years ago we featured Patrick Bringley on the show, the author of All The Beauty In The World, regarding his experiences as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the life lessons he learned strolling silently past priceless works of art.

The book has become a massive best-seller worldwide and has even become a cultural phenomenon in South Korea, selling more than a quarter million copies in that country alone. So we thought we’d bring Patrick back to the show, on the occasion of his new off-Broadway show based on the book.

How do you transform an off-Broadway stage into the Metropolitan Museum of Art? What life lessons can you absorb from walking around museums?

As it turns out, the routines and responsibilites of a museum security guard can stand in for many types of professions, offering peaceful ritual and possibilies for deeper reflection of the beautiful things surrounding us.

LISTEN NOW: ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD

Get information and tickets to Patrick Bringley’s new show here and further ticket information here

Categories
Museums Podcasts Politics and Protest

The Guarded Smile: Mona Lisa at the Metropolitan Museum

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s stoic portrait and one of the most valuable paintings on earth, came to America during the winter of 1963, a single-picture loan that was both a special favor to Jackie Kennedy and a symbolic tool during tense conversations between the United States and France about nuclear arms.

The first stop was the National Gallery in Washington DC, where over a half million people spent hours in line to gaze at the famous smile.

Mona mania: New Yorkers line up outside the Met for the hottest ticket in town in 1963. — Image by ©Bettmann/Corbis

Then, on February 7, 1963, she made her debut to the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the medieval sculpture hall, for a month-long exhibition that would become one of the museums most attended shows in history.  

New York tourist Mona Lisa

In the second half of this week’s show, we’re joined by Patrick Bringley, a former security guard at the Metropolitan Museum and a current tour guide. His book All The Beauty In The World: The Metropolitan Museum and Me, published by Simon & Schuster, recounts a decade of purpose, sorrow and epiphany while working in America’s largest museum. 

He’s making the rounds! Read this excellent New Yorker profile A Museum Soup-Thrower’s Worst Nightmare and listen to him on NPR.

For more information on the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, check out our podcast from last fall celebrating the museum’s 150th anniversary:

And for some dazzling backstory on the Mona Lisa and just exactly why she’s so famous, check out the Gilded Gentleman’s podcast The Theft of the Mona Lisa, Paris 1911.

Here’s an excerpt of the article in which this week’s podcast is based:

On that first day, thousands lined up outside in the freezing cold to catch a glimpse of the iconic painting; the first in line, a taxi driver named Joseph Lasky, got there at 4:30 in the morning.

By week’s end, already a quarter of a million people had visited the museum to see the Italian masterpiece.

Accommodating such a famous painting required some unprecedented changes in protocol. As a favor to the two governments, no admission fee was charged to view the painting, and weekday hours were extended until 9 pm each night.

Thousands of schoolchildren crammed the museum every morning, funneling by the modest-sized painting in a daze.

Museum director James Rorimer told the New Yorker, “The dirt we expect, from them and everybody else! The accumulation of dust from scuffling shoes! We’ll have literally balls of dust.”

From reports, it sounds like they got the dust and air quality under control. The painting was secured by bulletproof glass and a couple Secret Service agents.  

A line down the block to see Mona. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum

But the museum sprinkler system almost created an international incident by nearly destroying the painting in an unplanned shower.

According to a memoir by former museum director Thomas Hoving, he arrived at the museum storeroom one morning to find people frantically scurrying around with towels.

“No one ever discovered why, but some time during the night one of the fire sprinklers in the ceiling broke its glass ampoule….The Mona Lisa, according to the Louvre official, was ok.  He told me that the thick glass covering it had acted like an effective ¦raincoat.”

That incident was never leaked to the press.

Actually, this would have been a good time to conceal something from the media as there was a newspaper strike at this time, shuttering many publications.

By the time the painting was packed up aboard the US United States for her journey back to the Louvre, the Mona Lisa had been seen by well over one million people.

According to the New York Times, the museum was able to identify the one-millionth visitor — one Arthur Pomerantz of New Rochelle — who was given a reproduction of the painting and gifts for his children.

The final tally, according to the Times:

This article was originally published on this site in July 2013.

Categories
Bowery Boys Movie Club Film History

‘When Harry Met Sally’ and the return of postcard New York (Bowery Boys Movie Club)

The new episode of the Bowery Boys Movie Club explores the film When Harry Met Sally and the rich historical context of late 80s New York City. An exclusive podcast for those who support us on Patreon.

I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING. When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner and written by Nora Ephron, is more than just a simple romantic comedy about opposites Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan in a breakthrough performance).

The film reinvents New York City for the screen. Its postcard-perfect scenes of autumn leaves in Central Parkand breathtaking walks through the Upper West Side would have been unheard of at the movies ten years before. When Harry Met Sally helped redefine the metropolis after almost two decades of dark, gritty depictions on screen.

Listen in as Greg and Tom recap the story and explore some of the historical context for the film. Featuring a glorious lineup of locations including the Central Park boathouse,the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Puck Building.

How do I listen the Bowery Boys Movie Club?  Once you’re signed in on Patreon, you’ll see a private RSS link that can be put directly into your favorite podcast player. Even easier, it can also be played directly from the Patreon app if you’re signed in.

Your support on Patreon assists us in producing our podcast and website and it helps as we endeavor to share our love of New York City history with the world.

Should you watch the movie before you listen to this episode? This podcast can be enjoyed both by those who have seen the film and those who’ve never even heard of it.

We think our take on When Harry Met Sally might inspire you to look for the film’s many fascinating (but easy to overlook) historical details, so if you don’t mind being spoiled on the plot, give it a listen first, then watch the movie! Otherwise, come back to the show after you’ve watched it.

Where can you watch When Harry Met Sally? It’s available to rent on all movie streaming services and is free to watch on HBO Max.

Categories
Museums

New York’s First Art Museum: The City Hall Rotunda


The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains a very unusual piece of art tied to the early history of City Hall. In fact, this piece is responsible for what is sometimes considered New York’s very first art museum — decades older than the Met itself.

The strange oil painting is called Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles by John Vanderlyn (pictured below). Strange, because it’s a circular work of art, requiring its own room in the American wing of the Met, where it is broken into two pieces that immerse the viewer who walks between them.

Vanderlyn was a painter of great renown at the start of the 19th century, despite being a protege and close friend of disgraced vice president Aaron Burr. He went on to create portraits of many great men of the age, including several presidents.

The artist painted the Versailles panorama in 1818 in his childhood home of Kingston, New York, about a 100 miles north of the city. With the support of some wealthy New York patrons (including John Jacob Astor), Vanderlyn received permission from the city to build a small rotunda in which to properly display this odd, grandiose canvas. And prime real estate it was, located just a few steps north of the newly built City Hall at Chambers Street and Cross Street (or, today’s Centre Street).

It was also next door to an abandoned almshouse; the residents of this facility had been shipped off to the newly created Bellevue Hospital by this time and the building’s hallways were filled with loftier organizations, like the New-York Historical Society and Scudder’s American Museum. Classy, and perfect for a neighboring vanity museum.

Vanderlyn’s self-designed gallery* was tiny but intense, a miniature Pantheon with domed roof 40 feet overhead. Uniquely, it was an art museum designed to focus on one artist — Vanderlyn. However, the piece was not completed in time for the Rotunda opening, and another panorama was displayed — a presentation of the city of Paris by Robert Barker, an Irish artist who allegedly invented the panoramic painting.

Eventually Vanderlyn brought Versailles to the Rotunda on May 26, 1820, as well other panoramas of Athens and Geneva, enhanced of course by the presence of more traditional paintings. The stipulation was that the artist could use the space as his own personal showroom for nine years, when it would pass over to the city for their own purposes.

Below: a segment of Vanderlyn’s panorama, courtesy the Met

However, it appears he grossly overestimated his own appeal. Vanderlyn was constantly owing money for the building’s upkeep and audiences never flocked to the gallery in numbers that would make it profitable. The artist would have to take some pieces on the road to boost interest in them.

Well before his nine years were up, Vanderlyn was interested in renewing his lease, but New York City had other plans. Despite the pleas of some of Vanderlyn’s wealthy friends, the building was refitted as a small courthouse — for a Court of Sessions (county-run criminal court) in 1829 — and morphed, for a time, into New York’s naturalization office and a neighborhood post office.

Drawing by Alexander Jackson Davis

Art returned briefly to the Rotunda in 1845 when it was used in the inaugural display from the New York Gallery of the Fine Arts, a consortium of art collectors who pooled together a stagger rent of “$1 a year” to shhow off their collections of European paintings. The Gallery only stayed at the Rotunda for a short time, moving to a more elegant gallery at 663 Broadway in 1848 and dissolving entirely when they donated their entire collection to the Historical Society ten years later.

By then, the classic glory of the Rotunda had been muddied by additions mandated by the city to turn the domed structure into government offices. Where once the glories of Greece and France once hung, New York plopped down its water board and home of the Almshouse Commissioner. Despite an attempt at appropriate alternations — including a “propylaeum, having a portico and four Doric columns” — the Rotunda never again returned to any sort of aesthetic glory. It was ripped down entirely in 1870, in time for the city to start construction of the Tweed Courthouse.

As for Vanderlyn, true success continued to evade him. In 1842, he would paint one of his most well-known pieces, The Landing of Columbus, a commission from the U.S. government that was used on the five-dollar bill. Yet, just ten years later, Vanderlyn would alledged die in poverty back in his home in Kingston, where he had created the Rotunda panoramas.

Below: Vanderlyn’s painting and the money it appeared on

Architect of the Capital

His Versailles painting would receive a grand reception when it was donated to the Met in 1956. The museum built a special circular room just contain it.

Click here for a nice review of Vanderlyn’s Versailles panorama and an overview of the entire panoramic phase of painting.

* Many sources seem to grant Vanderlyn the honor of designing the Rotunda himself, although one source lists a more-likely candidate — Martin Euclid Thompson, who was actually an architect.

(This piece originally ran on this blog in 2009)

Categories
Museums Podcasts

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 150 Years of History on Display

EPISODE 341 Celebrating the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 150th anniversary year of its founding — certainly one of the strangest years in its extraordinary existence. 

The Met is really the king of New York attractions, with visitors heading up to Central Park and streaming through the doors by the millions to gasp at the latest blockbuster exhibitions and priceless works of art and history. 

And who doesn’t love getting lost at the Met for an afternoon — wandering from the Greek and Roman galleries to the imposing artifacts within the Arms and Armor collection and the treasures of the Asian Art rooms?

The Theodore Weston addition to the Met 1893, J.S. Johnston, Library of Congress

But this museum has a few surprising secrets in its history — and more than a few skeletons (or are those mummies?) in its closet.

WITH Ancient temples, fabulous fashions, classical relics, Dutch masters, controversial exhibitions and the decorative trappings of the Gilded Age.

November 1928, photo courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

AND Find out how the museum building has evolved over the years, employing some of the greatest architects in American history. 

PLUS An interview with the Met’s Andrea Bayer, Deputy Director for Collections and Administration, on the museum’s celebratory exhibition Making the Met 1870-2020. 

How do you launch an anniversary celebration during a pandemic and lockdown?

Listen today on your favorite podcast player:

Opening reception in the picture gallery at 681 Fifth Avenue, February 20, 1872; wood-engraving published in Frank Leslie’s Weekly, March 9, 1872
‘The Barn’, the original Met from Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art
1900, Detroit Pub Co, Library of Congress
The Richard Morris Hunt addition to the Met, 1903, Detroit Pub Co, Library of Congress
The Great Hall, 1907, Library of Congress
The Met in 1920, with the southern wing in place. Museum of the City of New York
The Met in 1983, Getty Images

Some excellent footage from the 1920s of the Met’s Egyptian excavations

The Temple of Dendur. photo by Greg Young
The American Wing sculpture garden at night, photo by Greg Young
Branch Bank entrance, 2012, photo by Greg Young
Washington Crossing the Delaware, taken 2017, photo by Greg Young
Dendur at night, 2018, photo by Greg Young
The Met at Christmas, 2018, photo by Greg Young
The European sculpture garden at night, with views of the original 19th century facade in red brick. 2018, photo by Greg Young

Views from Making the Met (photos by Greg Young):

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every week. We’re also looking to improve and expand the show in other ways — publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a creator on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.

Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans.

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We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

FURTHER LISTENING

The Met was a bit behind the times when it came to celebrating Impressionism but New Yorkers could take a gander at the ‘shocking’ output from Europe — as well as examples from the New York’ Ashcan School — at the Armory Show of 1913.

The Met is a twin institution to the American Museum of Natural History which shares a similar origin story.

In the second half of our Fifth Avenue Mansions series, we look at how the wealthy mansions of Fifth Avenue left midtown and headed to the Upper East Side.


Categories
Mysterious Stories Podcasts

The Mystery of the Central Park Obelisk

PODCAST Cleopatra’s Needle is the name given to the ancient Egyptian obelisk that sits in Central Park, right behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

This is the bizarre tale of how it arrived in New York and the unusual forces that went behind its transportation from Alexandra to a hill in the city’s most famous park.

The weathered but elegant monolith known as Cleopatra’s Needle was created thousands of years ago by the pharaoh Thutmose III.  

Thanks to the great interest in Egyptian objects in the 19th century — sometimes called Egyptomania — major cities soon wanted obelisks for their own, acquired as though they were trophies of world conquest.

 France and England scooped up a couple but — at least in the case of the ill-fated vessel headed to London — not without great cost.

One group was especially fascinated in the Alexandrian obelisks.  The Freemasons (their symbols at right) have been a mysterious and controversial fraternity who have been involved in several critical moments in American history (including the inauguration of fellow Mason George Washington.)

A Mason engineer and adventurer named Henry Honeychurch Gorringe discovered an incredible secret on the remaining Alexandria obelisk, a secret that might link the secretive organization to the beginning of human civilization.

Museum of the City of New York

But how do you get a 240 ton object, the length of a 7-story building, across the Atlantic Ocean and propped up in New York’s new premier park?  

We let you in on Gorringe’s technique and the curious Freemasons ceremony that accompanied the debut of the obelisk’s cornerstone.

PLUS: A newly recorded tale about another ancient landmark that has made its way to New York City — a column from the ancient city of Jerash, brought here because of … Robert Moses?

This is a re-presentation of a show originally released on June 26, 2014 with new 2020 bonus material recorded for this episode. 

Listen today on your favorite podcast player:

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every week. We’re also looking to improve and expand the show in other ways — publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a creator on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.

Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans.

If you’d like to help out, there are six different pledge levels.Check them out and consider being a sponsor.

We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

Cleopatra’s Needle as seen from the inside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Greg Young

Thutmose III, who commanded thousands to construct his obelisks, pictured in a relief in Karmac:

The Masonic Chart by Currier & Ives, 1876, created a few years before the arrival of the obelisk. And another below it, from 1872

From a jewelry advertisement, meant to clarify some of the levels and organizations within the Freemasons, although I’m sure this equally confused or frightened some people! [source]

The New York Masonic Hall on 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue — the original hall (which stood at this corner during the retrieval of Cleopatra’s Needle) and the later 1911 structure which still stands there today. (Pictures courtesy NYPL)

A cigarette card recounting the terrible tale of the London obelisk. (NYPL)


The hero of this episode — Henry Honychurch Gorringe

Gorringe prepares the obelisk for transportation. Even though it holds aloft an American flag, the treasure was actually a gift to the City of New York. (LOC)

Sliding the obelisk into the hatch of a refitted Egyptian postal ship.

Getting the obelisk past the trains of the Hudson River Railroad! Thankfully, a Vanderbilt was in charge of both the tracks and the obelisk project.

The ‘bridge’ which slowly took the obelisk across Manhattan, dismantled and rebuilt as the object moved eastward. (The following images are courtesy Torben Retboll)

Both the obelisk and the Met were new features to Central Park in 1880.


The ‘Whispering’ Column of Jerash, located in Queens

Categories
Landmarks

Green-Wood Cemetery, Katz’s Deli and The Cloisters: Three great New York institutions, three big anniversaries

Green-Wood Cemetery celebrates its 175th year as Brooklyn’s oldest greenspace, populated with deceased politicians, writers and actors.  It’s the final resting place for some of New York’s most famous and notorious characters — Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, DeWitt Clinton and Boss Tweed among them.

The Museum of the City of New York debuts its new exhibit “A Beautiful Way To Go: New York’s Green-wood Cemetery” this week, while the cemetery itself is planning a host of events, including trolley tours, concerts and their popular twilight tours. (The nighttime tour this weekend is sold out, but you can visit their website for future events.)

It’s a good time to chow down at Katz’s Delicatessen again on the occasion of its 125th birthday.  It was in the year 1888 that a deli officially opened at the southeast corner of Ludlow and Houston, serving the neighborhood’s immigrant community.  It was sold to the Katzs in 1910s, renamed and moved to its present location.

They’re throwing a big birthday bash on May 31 with all proceeds going to another great Lower East Side institution, the Henry Street Settlement.  But if you can’t make that, you can always go online and buy anniversary souvenirs.

And finally, the Cloisters Museum, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Fort Tryon Park, is celebrating its 75th birthday this month.  This unusual collection of European buildings were shipped over and reassembled upon a famous Revolutionary War site by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and they house one of America’s most beautiful collections of medieval artworks, including, of course, the Unicorn Tapestries (another gift from Rockefeller).

Opening this week is ‘Search for the Unicorn: An Exhibition in Honor of The Cloisters’ 75th Anniversary‘, a perfect time to revisit these strange, fantastical pieces of art.

If the weather’s nice, why not visit all three? There just happen to be Bowery Boys podcasts on all three places! You can find them all for free on iTunes and other podcast aggregates. Or download them from these links:

— Green-Wood Cemetery
— Katz Delicatessen
— The Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park

Green-Wood pic courtesy NYPL; Cloisters courtesy Met Museum

Another art anniversary: Mona Lisa comes to New York! And she’s almost drowned in a sprinkler malfunction

Mona mania: New Yorkers line up outside the Met for the hottest ticket in town in 1963

While many artistic institutions will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show next month, New York lovers of more classical paintings will be celebrating another milestone — the 50th anniversary of the Mona Lisa‘s visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Leonardo da Vinci‘s stoic portrait came to America fifty years ago this month, a single-picture loan to the United States (as a special favor to Jackie Kennedy) and accompanied by André Malraux, the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. The first stop was the National Gallery in Washington DC, where over a half million people spent hours in line to gaze at the famous smile.

On February 7, 1963, she made her debut to the public at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the medieval sculpture hall, for a month-long exhibition that would become one of the museums most attended shows in history.  On that first day, thousands lined up outside in the freezing cold to catch a glimpse of the iconic painting; the first in line, a taxi driver named Joseph Lasky, got there at 4:30 in the morning.  By week’s end, already a quarter of a million people had visited the museum to see the Italian masterpiece.

Accommodating such a famous painting required some unprecedented changes in protocol. As a favor to the two governments, no admission fee was charged to view the painting, and weekday hours were extended until 9 pm each night.

Thousands of schoolchildren crammed the museum every morning, funneling by the modest-sized painting in a daze. Museum director James Rorimer told the New Yorker, “The dirt we expect, from them and everybody else! The accumulation of dust from scuffling shoes! We’ll have literally balls of dust.”

From reports, it sounds like they got the dust and air quality under control. The painting was secured by bulletproof glass and a couple Secret Service agents.  But the museum sprinkler system almost created an international incident by nearly destroying the painting in an unplanned shower.

According to a memoir by former museum director Thomas Hoving, he arrived at the museum storeroom one morning to find people frantically scurrying around with towels.

“No one ever discovered why, but some time during the night one of the fire sprinklers in the ceiling broke its glass ampoule….The Mona Lisa, according to the Louvre official, was ok.  He told me that the thick glass covering it had acted like an effective…raincoat.”

That incident was never leaked to the press. Actually, this would have been a good time to conceal something from the media as there was a newspaper strike at this time, shuttering many publications.

By the time the painting was packed up aboard the US United States for her journey back to the Louvre, the Mona Lisa had been seen by  well over one million people. According to the New York Times, the museum was able to identify the one-millionth visitor — one Arthur Pomerantz of New Rochelle — who was given a reproduction of the painting and gifts for his children.

Categories
Museums

Art Insanity: The elegant audacity of the Armory Show of 1913, the daring exhibit that awed and outraged America


The monster within the Armory’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2


PODCAST The Armory Show of 1913 was the mainstream debut of modernist art — both European and American — to New York City audiences. Galleries had previously devoted themselves to the great European masters, antiquity and American landscapes as a way to influence the taste of a growing city. But even though vanguards like Alfred Stieglitz debuted artists like Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne into his Fifth Avenue gallery, those names were still barely known to the average New Yorker.

 The Armory Show, located at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, changed all that, but not without controversy. When the exhibition debuted on February 17, 1913, writers and art critics exploded in shock and outrage. Even a few of the artists were incensed, as people raced by some important American works to get to the scandalous European works in the back.

This is the story of an important moment in American art history, but also a moment in New York City pop culture, an event that shook society and challenged its beliefs about taste and beauty — not a small thing in the waning years of the Gilded Age.

At right: Francis Picabia’s Dances at the Spring

But you don’t need to be fluent in art history to enjoy the wackiness of the Armory Show! This is a tale of one of the biggest and most written-about exhibitions in New York history, a story P.T. Barnum would have found satisfaction in.

STARRING: Pretty much a who’s who of your local modern art gallery, with special focus on Marcel Duchamp, Edward Hopper, Robert Henri and Henri Matisse.

To get this week’s episode, simply download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, subscribe to our RSS feed or get it straight from our satellite site.

You can also listen to the show on Stitcher streaming radio and Player FM from your mobile devices.

Or listen to straight from here:
The Bowery Boys: The Armory Show of 1913

NOTE: I manage to get all the difficult pronunciations as close to correct as my voice is going to get, but then keep saying HENRY Matisse. (It’s really pronounced EN-RI.) You’d think with all those Starry Night posters in my youth, I would have caught this….
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The interior of the 69th Regiment Armory, showing the vastness of its drill hall. The room would play host to marathons, basketball games, concerts and fashion shows, but none were as famous as perhaps the event that makes the strangest fit into a military building — a modern art show. (Courtesy NY State Military Museum)



The limousines lined up in front of the Armory Show, certainly carrying away more than a few bewildered (and bemused) visitors. (Pic courtesy Museyon Guides)



 The White Slave, by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, flummoxing crowds in the very first room. (LOC, from photos taken at the show)

The Kiss by Constantin Brancusi, a primitive insult to many. (LOC, from photos taken at the show)

Inside the glorious ‘Gallery I’ with its collection of Cubist works. Duchamp’s eyeopener can be seen in this image. (Courtesy Smithsonian Archive of American Art blog)

This photo of the Duchamp Brothers was run alongside their works in the so-called ‘chamber of horrors’ Gallery I.  For whatever reason — intrigue, outrage, attraction — people became fascinated by the siblings.   From left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Jacque Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon.


Edward Hopper’s painting of a sailboat was one of a few American paintings sold during the exhibit. It was mostly the European entries that got the attention of art collectors.

MORE INFORMATION
For more in-depth information on the Armory Show, your first stop must be the University of Virginia’s invaluable website on the event, featuring a walkthrough of ever gallery, and some exhaustive but interesting analysis.

There will be a great many shows in museums and gallery throughout the United States and internationally this year, being the 100th anniversary. I will list a few here as I find them. However if you know of any that I haven’t listed, please put them in the notes below:

— The New York Historical Society will host an exhibit on the Armory Show starting in October.
“The 2013 exhibition revisits the Armory Show from an art-historical point of view, shedding new light on the artists represented and how New Yorkers responded. It will also place this now-legendary event within the context of its historical moment in the United States and the milieu of New York City in ca. 1911–1913. To that end, music, literature and early film will be considered, as well as the political and economic climate.”

— The Abrons Art Center, part of the Henry Street Settlement, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has an intriguing take on the Armory Show debuting on February 17, 2013, the exact anniversary of the original show. Called ‘DECENTER: An Exhibit on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show‘, the show will explore the question: “What is the legacy of Cubism in the hundred years since the Armory Show’s radical display of modern European and American art, and especially, how has this become relevant again in our digital age? The show will exhibit a core group of artworks in the gallery, and also feature a corresponding internet component of digital works in an online gallery. ”

— The Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ, is also opening its exhibit “The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913” on the exact date of the original — February 17. “The Montclair Art Museum collaborated with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art on a gallery that will be devoted to rare and unique primary documents pertaining to the Armory Show. These include personal letters, floor plans, sales records, admission tickets, catalogues, buttons, and invitations, as well as reproductions of the original installation.”

— The Art Institute in Chicago will be celebrating the show in March with a lecture focusing on some of Chicago’s private collectors and will undoubted have more information on Chicago’s reception of the exhibition. More information here.

— And of course there’s an annual exhibition called The Armory Show which traces its roots back to the original show. Naturally they’ll be having a centennial celebration as well, from March 7-10, 2013, located at Piers 92 & 94 in Manhattan. More info here.

Categories
Museums

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it was smaller

I’m working on a very art-themed podcast which should be ready for release this Friday.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be a supporting player in this week’s show, so please enjoy these early photos of the original building, opened in 1880 and designed by Calvert Vaux (to better accentuate his park) and Jacob Wray Mould, of Belvedere Castle fame.

The building was considered out-of-fashion almost as soon as it was finished, and within a couple decades Richard Morris Hunt had created the museum’s more expansive Beaux-Arts facade and wings. What you see here is the old building, next to the new facade, before it was fully consumed by additions.

The postcard and the photo below it gives you a good idea of where the new additions sat in relation to the old building. And this is before the wings were added.

The top four images are courtesy New York Public Library. The last is courtesy Library of Congress.

New York and “Night Vision: Photography After Dark”

Albert Langdon Coburn sees mystery on ‘Broadway at Night’

While you rush to join the thousands of museumgoers checking out the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fantastic Alexander McQueen exhibition ‘Savage Beauty’ — now in its last few weeks — may I recommend you check out a small room near the back of that long hallway where you’ll be standing in line? This small gallery contains a treasure of a show — a collection of illuminating nighttime photographs, “Night Vision: Photography After Dark.”

Naturally, images of New York City feature prominently in this compact and sophisticated little exhibit. After all, what city looks better at night than ours? (The films ‘Midnight In Paris’ and ‘Lost In Translation’ might form the basis of a rebuttal to that previous statement.)

The show surveys both subject and technique through a variety of periods, although the earliest days of night photography are most prominently featured. And, honestly, they’re the most engaging, capturing a distant past through a once gauzy, imperfect medium.

The curators have not made obvious choices. Of their New York portraits, they lead with a dazzling Sid Grossman image of the San Gennarro festival from 1948. It’s not the bright signs that catch your attention, but a boy caught in the glow, the dizzying brightness whipping around him. There’s a Times Square marquee here, of course, but it’s in a soft blur (William Klein’s 1954 ‘Man on Ladder Working on Theater Marquee, at Night’).

This is nighttime as reflected through faces and bodies — a man passed out on the beach in Coney Island, well-to-do gentlemen at the opera, a menacing loner on a park bench. Then you also have your images more classically noir-ish (Weegee’s infamous ‘human head’ photo) and gaslit (Alvin Langdon Coburn’s impossibly beautiful image of ‘Broadway at Night’, pictured above).

The show runs for the rest of the summer, until September 8th.  Visit the Met’s website for more information.

Bringing news of King Tut (and his curse) to New York


Howard Carter with his very favorite king (courtesy Life Images)

Years after the Steve Martin novelty hit, King Tut mania returns to New York City. The heavily hyped Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs finally opened last week at the Discovery Times Square Exposition, promising rooms of priceless artifacts from the tomb of the young Egyptian king.

British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the tomb of King Tut in February 1923 and spent the year investigating the treasures within, even as legend of the ‘curse of King Tut’s tomb’, fueled by the mysterious death of Carter’s financier Lord Carnarvon, electrified the press.

A disagreement with the Egyptian government in 1924 grounded work on the excavation. So in the interim, Carter decided to take news of his discoveries on the road — and started in New York City.

Arriving on the ocean liner Berengaria in April, Carter took to a round of lectures throughout the city. Carter was caught off guard by his reception, finding himself “celebrated and adulated like a star.” And although his proper British diction and inexperience at public speaking turned off a few naysayers, his tales, helpfully illustrated in photos by Met photographer Harry Burton, ultimately helped spark the interest in his discoveries and in Egyptian culture.

He began with with a couple invitation-only discussions at the Waldorf-Astoria for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an unflagging collaborator with Carter for many years. In fact, the Met’s assistant curator Arthur Mace worked with Carter at the dig and would allegedly fall victim to the curse in 1928.

Carter then presented to a larger audience in a series of four lectures at Carnegie Hall, the first on April 25, 1924. In a venue better known for dynamic musical performances, Carter was still able to pack in over 2,500 people and a madly fascinated press.

According to the Times: “Step by step, he led them to the point where the cover was lifted off the great stone sarcophagus containing the mummy of the Egyptian monarch interred 3,300 years ago.”

For a week in April, dusty Howard Carter became one of the most toasted men in New York City. He spent his days in the city traveling to other venues to share his work — one at the Museum of Natural History, two separate functions at the Brooklyn Academy of Art, and more appearances at Carnegie. At night, he was feted at private dinners.

He carried that enthusiasm with him throughout the country, hitting stops in New Haven, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Chicago. He even swung by the White House to have tea with President Calvin Coolidge. (The picture at right is Carter taken at one of these locations, May 1924, courtesy LOC)

Carter left New York for England on the Mauretania in July 1924 and eventually resumed work on the tomb. He took with him Met Museum photographer Harry Burton, who documented further exploration of the dig, providing the most startling and iconic images of the world’s most famous mummy.

The Met would continue to involve itself with the discoveries, and in the 1970s organized its best-known tour of the United States, which culminated in the Met’s own hallways in the winter of 1979.

As for the ‘curse’ of King Tut, you might be interested in reading a 1978 article in New York Magazine about the Met’s 1979 show and the allegations — by no less than their former director Thomas Hoving — that the Met might have used Carter’s appearance as a ‘cover’ to obtain stolen art from the tomb.

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Going medieval at the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park

PODCAST The Cloisters, home of the Metropolitan Museum’s repository for medieval treasures, was a labor of love for many lovers of great European art. In this podcast, I highlight three of the most important men in its history — a passionate sculptor, a generous multimillionaire and a jet-setting curator. Equally as fascinating is the upper Manhattan park that houses the museum, Fort Tryon Park, a site of a Revolutionary War fort of the same name and the exploits of the war’s most heroic women.

Download this show it for FREE on iTunes or other podcasting services. Or listen to the show here:


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Fort Tryon circa 1858, after the war, before the millionaire mansions. (Courtesy NYPL)

The lavish home of Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, one of many spectacular homes bought up by Rockefeller to contruct Fort Tryon Park.


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