NARRATOR: Hello, and welcome to the exhibition “Making The Met.”
I’m Steve Martin and I’ll be your guide on this tour. Today, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art is one of the world’s most renowned museums. It houses collections that
span some 5,000 years of world culture, and it welcomes over seven million visitors per year.
This year, we celebrate the museum’s 150th anniversary.
Here’s Max Hollein.
MAX HOLLEIN: This has given us an occasion not only to
celebrate, but also to reflect on our past, This exhibition offers you a variety of stories,
told through outstanding works of art from our collections and through the voices of
the people who have made a lasting impact on the institution.
NARRATOR: Here’s Andrea Bayer, one of the organizers of the exhibition.
ANDREA BAYER: In this introductory gallery, we have seven remarkable works of art, all of them inspired
by the human figure. Because in this exhibition, we want you to be thinking about people. And
we thought that by having these figures in your mind’s eye, you’ll get
in the spirit that will bring you into this story.
The exhibition is organized around a central axis that we refer to as “The Street”.
Moving from one end to the other is a kind of time travel illustrating life around the
museum from the past 150 years.
NARRATOR: From the very beginning, the Met aimed to
collect works of art across media and from every part of the globe. The objects in this
gallery all were acquired during the museum’s founding decades.
NARRATOR: In 1870, Luigi Palma di Cesnola—the man
who would become the Metropolitan Museum’s first director—was eating breakfast in Cyprus.
The diggers he’d hired had made a thrilling discovery: this ancient stone head.
LUIGI PALMA DI CESNOLA (ACTOR): “…as its massive stony features were revealed
to me by the fitful gleams of the fire-lights, there arose a vision of a people whose master-hands
had ages ago withered and fallen into dust.”
[saùng-gauk plays]
NARRATOR: That’s the sound of this Saùng-Gauk, or Burmese harp.
ANDREA BAYER: It’s one of over 3,600 musical instruments catalogued by the Museum’s first woman curator,
Frances Morris, who also oversaw our extensive collection of textiles.
FRANCES MORRIS (ACTOR): “I have spared no efforts in developing
the collections placed in my care, and have endeavored in every way to carry forward the
desired educational policy of the Museum.”
ANDREA BAYER: Hoping to fulfill its mission as an educational institution, the Museum created study rooms
accessible to all. They still exist today.
NARRATOR: Each of the exceptional works of art in this
gallery made its way to the museum because of the ambitions of individual collectors.
This case contains extraordinary objects of many types and many of them came to the Met
by way of one man—the legendary banker J. Pierpont Morgan.
His wife Frances once chided: FRANCES MORGAN (ACTOR):
“Pierpont will buy anything, from a pyramid to a tooth of Mary Magdalene.”
NARRATOR: Morgan was the most powerful financier of
the Gilded Age, a period when a handful of men controlled the vast majority of American
wealth. As one trustee put it, they eventually helped place the Met at “the forefront of
the world’s treasure houses, with the Louvre and Madrid.”
ANDREA BAYER: Hatshepsut was one of the most famous female
pharaohs. Her co-ruler and successor, Thutmose III, intentionally destroyed all of her likenesses
in an attempt to erase her legacy. The fact that this statue sits here today is a testament
to the perseverance and collaboration of art historians and conservators around the world.
Historically, The Met participated in excavations with local governments throughout the Middle
East, keeping a share of the finds. But today, The Met no longer acquires objects through
active excavation.
In the early twentieth century, The Met made a commitment to collecting American paintings,
sculpture, and decorative arts, in the hopes of educating Americans about their own country.
NARRATOR: This remarkable Mexican basin was used for
washing altar linens. In 1911, the collector Emily de Forest offered it to the museum writing:
EMILY DE FOREST (ACTOR): “It seems to me to form a part of a collection
representing the arts of Mexico which I hope will at some time be represented in the Museum,
as an American Museum.”
NARRATOR: Today, however, the American Wing strives to bring together art from the multiplicity
of cultures that make up the Americas.
ANDREA BAYER: The Met has a complicated history with the modern movements of its time. It took H. O.
and Louisine Havemeyer’s extraordinary bequest in 1929 to bring Degas and the Impressionists
fully into the Museum.
NARRATOR: In turn-of-the-century New York, many museumgoers would have been shocked by a sprawling, realistic
nude like this one. But not Louisine Havemeyer. She was a trailblazing collector, and she’s
largely responsible for the museum’s incredible collection of 19th-century French art.
In 1898, she lobbied her husband Harry to purchase this painting by Gustave Courbet…
LOUISINE HAVEMEYER (ACTOR): “…not to hang it in our gallery lest the
anti-nudists should declare a revolution . . . but just that such a work should not be lost to students."
NARRATOR: And she agreed to lend her beloved painting to the Museum, where it has remained ever since.
NARRATOR: These images of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe were made by Alfred Stieglitz, a major American
photographer and gallerist who played a critical role in promoting modern art in America, especially
at the Met. In 1928, he wrote to a friend:
ALFRED STIEGLITZ (ACTOR): “The Metropolitan Museum has opened its
sacred halls to Photography. My photographs have performed the miracle!”
NARRATOR: His gift of over 400 works provided the nucleus of the Museum’s photography collection.
Stieglitz also championed modern American painters including his wife Georgia O’Keeffe and
paintings by Kandinsky and Demuth.
GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: "War is essentially destruction. They who have dwelt with death will be among the most
ardent worshippers of life and beauty and of the peace in which these can thrive."
NARRATOR: That was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, speaking
at the Met one year after World War II. He thanked the men and women who fought to protect
works of art during and after the war, better known today as the Monuments Men. One of them
was the future Met curator Edith Standen, and this is her uniform.
EDITH STANDEN: "Those were undoubtedly the two most interesting
years of my life, living among the ruins, but what mattered to us was the preservation of these works of art."
NARRATOR: Edith Standen was one of many Met employees to work for either the Monuments Men or The Art Looting
Investigation Unit. Each of these individuals contributed to the monumental post war effort
to locate and return millions of works of stolen art.
NARRATOR: This carpet and the other works in this gallery
illustrate the sea change in collecting and exhibiting global art that occurred around
the time of the Museum’s 100th anniversary.
This “centennial era” was a time of reflection
and reexamination. One result was the expanded Islamic Art galleries.
The goal was to reframe the art of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of the Indian
subcontinent outside of the typical Western lenses of exotica and Orientalism.
PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO: "I think the Metropolitan Museum
has demonstrated that it is not a fixed institution.
But it can evolve, evolve both with the state of scholarship, with the state of the world
in our perception of art."
NARRATOR: During the Centennial Era The Met initiated a major recommitment to the robust artistic
traditions of Asia. The Met hired a Princeton Art Historian named Wen Fong.
WEN FONG: "It was not long ago that the average museum
visitor saw the world of art divided between fine art which referred to European and American
art and archaeology, which encompassed the vanished ancient worlds. Then there was
ethnography, which dealt with the material cultures of non-western peoples."
NARRATOR: This ceremonial body mask was made by the
Asmat people of New Guinea. A sophisticated design like this one might take up to five
months to complete. In 1961, Michael C. Rockefeller
visited the Asmat region and negotiated with local leaders to bring this artwork back.
Finding a permanent home for this collection at The Met fundamentally changed the institution’s
character and moved it ever closer to its goal of becoming a truly encyclopedic museum.
The Met had only rarely purchased contemporary art, so The Met’s new curator Henry Geldzahler
faced an uphill battle. He later recalled an early conversation with his boss...
HENRY GELDZAHLER: “…he called me into his office and he
said, ‘Henry, we don’t expect to be seeing very much of you at the Museum because your
job is contemporary art and we don’t have any.’"
NARRATOR: Ultimately, Geldzahler played a huge role in getting a
sometimes resistant Metropolitan Museum to engage with the world of contemporary art.
NARRATOR: When The Met acquired this “story quilt”
by the contemporary black artist Faith Ringgold, the traditional boundaries between artistic
media were breaking down. This was around the year 1990, and Lowery Stokes Sims was
a curator here at the time.
LOWERY STOKES SIMS: "For me it was a pretty simpleminded mission to really diversify and expand and include
a much larger community of artists within the whole. For people to understand that a
museum is a place where they can find a home and find a voice."
NARRATOR: Ringgold’s story quilt is just one of many important pieces that Sims added to the collection.
And The Met continues to work towards building a collection that reflects contemporary society.
Here’s Museum Director Max Hollein.
MAX HOLLEIN: As you look around in this gallery you will see objects from different cultures, from
different times. And we have to acknowledge that there is not
just this one history of the development of cultures in the world. There are many different
intersecting histories. So in a sense the museum in the future, and certainly the Met
will offer a variety of narratives, stories, all of them relevant.
NARRATOR: "Making The Met" illustrates this new way
of thinking.