Traversing an art history timeline in Met's new Greco-Roman galleries
With the opening of the gleaming new galleries for ancient Greek and Roman art, the Metropolitan Museum has definitively established itself as a wonder of the modern world. This is the contemporary museum at its best: a place for pleasure and scholarship, where ravishing products of the past can be studied and savored.
The centerpiece of the new galleries is a soaring, glass-covered court with a fountain gurgling at its center. Torsos and heads perch on gray basalt plinths, all beautifully arrayed around the patterned marble floors. The space is meant to evoke a Roman courtyard without slavishly imitating one, and the effect is simultaneously austere and deluxe, more pared-down modernist than authentically ancient...
The galleries resurrect a plan for the space that dates back to 1912, when the architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White extended the museum southward. Edward Robinson, then director of the museum (and the first trained classicist ever to work for the Met), determined that the new wing would gather the entire collection of Greek and Roman art under one section of the museum's already immense roof. The idea was to narrate the evolution of antique art from Etruscan through Greek to the end of Roman, and for many years, this chronological approach largely prevailed.
But Robinson's plan, which was never fully put into practice, was essentially scrapped in 1948...
Read entire article at Ariella Budick, Newsday
The centerpiece of the new galleries is a soaring, glass-covered court with a fountain gurgling at its center. Torsos and heads perch on gray basalt plinths, all beautifully arrayed around the patterned marble floors. The space is meant to evoke a Roman courtyard without slavishly imitating one, and the effect is simultaneously austere and deluxe, more pared-down modernist than authentically ancient...
The galleries resurrect a plan for the space that dates back to 1912, when the architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White extended the museum southward. Edward Robinson, then director of the museum (and the first trained classicist ever to work for the Met), determined that the new wing would gather the entire collection of Greek and Roman art under one section of the museum's already immense roof. The idea was to narrate the evolution of antique art from Etruscan through Greek to the end of Roman, and for many years, this chronological approach largely prevailed.
But Robinson's plan, which was never fully put into practice, was essentially scrapped in 1948...
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Classical treasures, bathed in a new light (Michael Kimmelman, New York Times)