Bauhaus • Michael Siebenbrodt & Lutz Schöbe

Caravaggio • Félix Witting & M. L. Patrizi

Hokusai • After Edmond de Goncourt

Toulouse Lautrec in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum has in its collection an exceptional body of art in a range of media by the late-nineteenth-century French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In exhibiting a large portion of these works, the Metropolitan once again invites the visitor—and the reader of this accompanying catalogue—to examine the product of a single fertile, inventive, and tireless mind through the rich veins of material housed at the Museum. The exhibition also gives us the chance to reassess the body of work in terms of recent scholarship. Additionally, since much of Toulouse-Lautrec's work is on paper and can be exhibited for only intermittent and limited periods of time, this show has given us an opportunity to examine these works from the point of view of conservation. Indeed, as it turned out, a number of the works on paper underwent extensive treatment before going on view.

The Museum's collection of art by Toulouse-Lautrec, the result largely of generous donations from private collectors, includes paintings, drawings, and examples of his finest and most important prints. The artist excelled in lithography; a hundred years ago his bold, persistent experimenting gave this medium an entirely new appearance just when the centennial of its invention was being marked in Europe. In fact, with the wealth of examples at the Metropolitan Museum, we now can celebrate the bicentennial of lithography through the works of Toulouse-Lautrec, the artist who virtually reinvented this medium.

Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall An Artists Country Estate

Hosios Loukas׃ Byzantine Art in Greece • Manolis Chatzidakis

The monastery of Osios Loukas was built in the early 11th century to house the relics of the monk, Blessed Luke who was by then a famous local saint. It soon became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in all Greece. Abbots from the ranks of the aristocracy ensured that the construction and decoration of the "katholikin" (main church), befitted the prestige of the community's founder. The grandeur of the building and its sumptuous decoration indicate the patron's wealth and social standing: the sophistication of the iconographic program indicates their profound theological background.

  

Masterworks from the Musee des Beaux Arts Lille • MET

 

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille is home to one of the most impressive art collections in France, aside from the museums of Paris, but it is little known, and its treasures have remained largely unstudied. Originally part of a network of regional museums established in 1801 by Napoleon, through a fortuitous combination of historical circumstances, its geographical location, and the intercession of a handful of devoted patrons and gifted curators over the next century, the Musée des Beaux-Arts has evolved into one of the leading French art museums. Its splendid late-nineteenth-century building is currently undergoing renovation—an event that has provided The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a unique opportunity to borrow a selection of Lille's most important paintings and drawings and to present them to the American public. This volume, which complements that exhibition, is the first scholarly publication in decades to be devoted to the history of the Lille museum and to its collections.

The nearly one hundred works of art included highlight over forty of the museum's celebrated paintings and about fifty examples from its remarkable drawings cabinet. Peter Paul Rubens and other Flemish painters are well represented because Lille was a Flemish city until 1667, when it was recaptured by France—Ruben's great Descent from the Cross was ordered by the Capuchin convent in Lille in 1617. Major French and Spanish paintings were acquired first under Napoleon and then by such outstanding curators as Édouard Reynart, who was Director of the Museum from 1841 to 1879. It was Reynart who encouraged the purchase of Delacroix's newly completed Medea About to Murder Her Children, Jacques-Louis David's Belisarius Begging Alms, and the pair of large canvases by Goya contrasting youth and old age (a detail of one of these, Time, is reproduced on the cover). There is also a special section of local Lille artists, and five sculptural reliefs, one of which is by Donatello. Many of the spectacular drawings in the Musée des Beaux-Arts were assembled by the Lille painter Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Wicar, a pupil of David and Napoleon's agent in Florence, and left to the city in 1834. Not only is the collection rich in examples by Raphael, Pontormo, and other Italian masters, but among the drawings by French artists are six preparatory studies, as well as the oil sketch, for Delacroix's Medea.

Each of the works is discussed in an entry by a specialist at the Metropolitan Museum or the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Every text is accompanied by a full-color reproduction and often by color details or by black-and-white illustrations of comparative objects; many are shown in color for the first time. The book is introduced by a panoramic survey of the evolution of the modern museum by the eminent French cultural historian Marc Fumaroli. This is followed by an essay by Arnauld Brejon de Lavergne, Chief Curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, which explores key developments in the history and formation of its collections. Walter Liedtke, Curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum and author of most of the entries on the Dutch, Flemish, and seventeenth-century French paintings, provides a comprehensive overview of all of the European paintings in the Lille museum. William M. Griswold, Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum and author of the majority of the drawings entries, presents the reader with the full scope of the drawings collection in Lille. Full details of provenance, footnotes, exhibition history, and literature round out each catalogue entry, and, in addition, a List of Exhibitions, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index are included. Although addressed to an educated lay audience, this handsome volume will serve as a standard reference work for art historians and scholars alike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louis Comfort Tiffany at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich Paintings and Drawings from the USSR

In Pursuit of Beauty Americans and the Aesthetic Movement • MET

The pioneering exhibition "In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement" and the accompanying publication demonstrate the continuing commitment of the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing to the study of the arts of the nineteenth century, exemplified by the landmark show Nineteenth-Century America (1970) and reaffirmed in such permanent installations as the Nineteenth-Century Arts Gallery, the Greek Revival Parlor, the John Henry Belter Rococo Revival Parlor, and the Renaissance Revival Parlor. This project is the first comprehensive study of a phenomenon that not only dominated the American arts of the 1870s and 1880s, but also helped set the course of such later developments in the United States as the Arts and Crafts movement, the indigenous interpretation of Art Nouveau, and even the rise of modernism. In fact, the early history of the Metropolitan—its founding, its sponsorship of a school of industrial design, and its display of decorative works—is inextricably tied to the Aesthetic movement and its educational goals.

"In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement" comprised some 175 objects including furniture, metalwork, stained glass, ceramics, textiles, wallpaper, painting, and sculpture. Some of these had rarely been displayed; others, although familiar, were being shown in new and even startling contexts. The exhibition and catalogue are arranged thematically to illustrate both the major styles of a visually rich movement and the ideas that generated its diversity.