Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
by Harold Koda
from Metropolitan Museum of Art
During the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, fashion and furniture in France were not designed simply to be beautiful—they were also intended to arouse, attract, and seduce. This alluring book considers the interplay of French clothing and interior design in the eighteenth century and features full-color photographs from the acclaimed Metropolitan Museum exhibition.
Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
from Metropolitan Museum of Art
This beautiful catalogue provides a comprehensive history of pietre dure, a virtuoso form of hardstone carving that reached an artistic peak in Italy in the 16th century and subsequently spread throughout Europe.
The demanding practice of pietre dure, first used in ancient times, enjoyed a spectacular revival in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. By artistic cutting, semiprecious stones—agate, lapis lazuli, chalcedony, and other colorful hardstones—were fashioned into extravagantly designed luxury objects such as table tops, wall panels, cabinets, and ornate display vessels. Both as objects of desire and as diplomatic gifts, these precious creations captivated the affluent societies of Europe. Art of the Royal Court presents 150 masterpieces of pietre dure, many of which are further embellished with gold and silver mounts or decorated with exotic woods and other coveted materials.
Making the Mummies Dance : Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Thomas Hoving
from Touchstone
A former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals his bold and brash life at its pinnacle: the clandestine deals which secured blockbuster exhibitions for the museum and made him a legend. Photos.
Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964: Nothing Is More Abstract Than Reality
from Skira
This volume showcases 116 masterpieces arranged into the four major themes that characterize Giorgio Morandi’s work: self portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and flowers. The collection represents all the various expressive techniques used by Morandi over the years, including paint, etching, drawing and watercolor.The volume is the catalog of an outstanding exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and by the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. The exhibition will be open in New York from September 16 to December 14, 2008 and in Bologna from January 22 to April 12, 2009.The exhibition and the catalog also contain a number of photographs of Morandi’s studio and quotes from his admirers, as well as the memorable 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi.
Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Danny Danziger
from Viking Adult
A unique oral portrait of the Met, drawing on interviews with everyone from the director to the security guards
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the greatest museums in the world. It is an enormous place that takes up five city blocks and has more than two million square feet of space, filled with treasures everywhere the eye can see. There are exquisite vases, jewelry, tapestry, baseball cards, Egyptian mummies, sculptures, and furniture, and many of the most famous and recognized paintings in the world, from Van Gogh to Rembrandt, Monet, and El Greco.
But this famous institution, which attracts four million visitors a year, is not just about objects. This is a place that is supported and maintained by people, which is what this wonderful book celebrates. In the fifty-two interviews in Museum, we meet some of the people who have given their lives to making the Met the success that it is. We are introduced to curators with endless knowledge who look after the collections; as well as cleaners; florists; police and security staff who maintain and secure the building; plus the philanthropists and millionaires who donate their money for new and wonderful art works, including well-known people like Henry Kravis and Annette de la Renta.
Danziger has a rare touch for getting just the right detail, and these interviews are informative, moving, and compulsively readable. Oral history at its best, Museum will appeal not only to the millions who visit the Met every year, but also to anyone with an interest in museums and art.
Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
from Metropolitan Museum of Art
The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Cézanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, “This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time.”
This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin’s landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist’s early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter’s visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon.
American Quilts & Coverlets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Amelia Peck
from MQ Publications US
American Quilts and Coverlets is the ultimate book on historical Quilts in America. Featuring over 150 outstanding examples and beautifully designed with stunning color illustrations, the book spotlights the Metropolitan Museum of Art's growing collection of our nation's finest and most comprehensive assemblage of traditional American quilts. From wonderful 18th century quilts and extraordinary Amish work to an exceptional 1856 quilt containing hundreds of signatures of important Americans - including seven U.S. presidents, this book gives the reader an even greater understanding and admiration of quilting as Americana. Special features include an illustrated Highlights section and all-new technical appendix by Elena Phipps, the Museum's Senior Conservator in the Department of Textile Conservation. Museum curator and respected authority Amelia Peck contributes new scholarship and an informative and entertaining Introduction.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Prints and Drawings
from Metropolitan Museum of Art
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a great painter. His independent drawings and designs for engravings and etchings, which were carried out by the leading printmakers of his day, have fascinated scholars and the general public alike since they were created. They have recently been the subject of research that has given rise to a reevaluation of the parameters of Bruegel's oeuvre. The new scholarship has been brought to bear on the texts in the present volume. An international group of experts presents essays on the artist's life, his contributions as a draftsman and as a printmaker, his iconography and social and political context, and the posthumous survival of his art. The authors also illuminate Bruegel's genius in discussions of individual prints and drawings. Each of these works is illustrated and many comparative illustrations are also included.
Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications)
by Roger Taylor
from Metropolitan Museum of Art
When photography appeared shortly before 1840, the metal-plate daguerreotype, invented in France, was first to achieve popularity. But the process simultaneously developed in England for capturing an image on a paper negative—from which many positives could be printed—provided the foundation on which photography would build for the next 150 years.
This beautiful book presents more than 120 photographs printed from paper negatives, or calotypes, most never before published. The entire course of the paper negative’s “golden age” is described, from its laborious invention by William Henry Fox Talbot to competition with French photographers and commercial practitioners. Aesthetically ambitious, these richly textured calotypes were created by photographers both eminent and virtually unknown. Also included is an invaluable biographical dictionary of more than 500 British calotypists.
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